Greenpeace: How to Change the World
Jerry Rothwell: The environmental movement goes back centuries – a perpetual struggle to be part of and interdependent with nature, rather than in dominion over it. In the film it’s said that the modern movement was in some ways begun by Greenpeace’s actions in the 1970s against nuclear testing, whale hunting and the Canadian seal cull. Bob Hunter who was the organisations president in its early years and is the central character in the film, argued that the first task was to understand that wild nature doesn’t just exist for humankind – and that this required a shift in consciousness. He saw the campaigns to save the whales as symbol for that. At times he would say the battle was won, ‘it’s now just a two hundred year mop-up operation’. I’m not as optimistic as that, as I think we still haven’t really appreciated the extent to which climate change requires us our social and economic structures to change.
OMTIMES: There has been a birth of many militant environmental organizations throughout the world that adopt as their praxis a violent type of compassion. Do you believe they are the future of the Environmental movement?
Jerry Rothwell: I don’t know that there are that many environmental organisations adopting violent methods. To answer I think I’d have to know what you mean by violence. Sea Shepherd for example is aggressive in its pursuit of illegal fishing operations, but I’m not sure I’d call that violence, more what a global environmental police force ought to be doing anyway. As far as I know they’ve never injured anyone. My own view is that violence begets violence, and that non-violence against other human beings is an absolute principle in environmental actions. I think it’s a contradiction to try and achieve peace and environmental justice through violence. I don’t believe activists should separate means and ends (for example justifying violence by compassion) – that’s usually something done by tyrannies.
