High Profile
Active Service
You grew up in Durban, South Africa, in a lower-middle-class
Indian household with a picture of Gandhi on the wall. What was
your childhood like?
The township was actually more working-class. My dad was very
actively involved in the community, and the football and cricket
associations and a sort of residents’ association all met in a
little garage he had built. Later, when my brother and I got
involved, it was the centre of the resistance in the
community.
Were you fully integrated into the black community?
One of the things Steve Biko taught us was: Don’t look at the
divisions the state has imposed. So, by the age of 15 I embraced
the notion of blackness. [My ancestors] had come to South Africa as
indentured labourers, who quite often were treated worse than
slaves.
You have said that the ANC ‘was a religion in those days’. Was
there any actual religion in your upbringing?
My mum was a Hindu, but I grew up in a multireligious
community which celebrated Christmas, Diwali and Eid. I remember
telling her that a teacher I liked a lot was trying to convert us
to Christianity – he would say, ‘My God doesn’t ask you to
slaughter chickens’ – and she told me: ‘All religions are the same.
The most important thing is to see God in the eyes of every human
being you meet.’ (I often quote the things she taught us, like ‘It
is much better to try and fail than to fail to try.’)
Sadly, she committed suicide when I was 15 and I had a crisis
because of the way she died and how traumatic it was – and then
there was a national student uprising, two weeks later. I had
already been moved by the death of Steve Biko [in 1977] and all of
these things were very formative for me.
I would describe myself today as being deeply spiritual but
not aligned to any organised religion. My starting-point is that if
you don’t respect the manifestations of God – people, and all
living things on this planet – it doesn’t actually serve you all
that well to go and spend hours in a [place of worship] once a
week. But I’ve been able to draw on the best of different
religious traditions, and I think I am quite influenced by a lot
of their teachings in terms of respect for people, and compassion
and care for the weak and the poor, the responsibilities and
rights that we have and so on.
Whatever the different religions may agree on, the US medieval
historian Lynn White famously suggested that Christianity ‘bears a
huge burden of guilt’ for our current ecological crisis.1 On the
other hand, many people locate the roots of the green movement in
an Eastern spirituality that regards the whole world as sacred and
doesn’t especially privilege the human race…
I think that has a measure of truth – Eastern spirituality
does have a more active consciousness of [the natural world] – but
I would say that historically, and even contemporarily, the
communities that have the most respectful coexistence with nature
are, in fact, indig-enous communities that have largely been
obliterated by colonialism. There is that saying from North
America’s indigenous community: ‘After the last tree is cut, the
last river poisoned, the last fish dead, humanity will discover
that you cannot eat money.’
It’s not even what today we consider a religious sentiment. In
Ecuador, Bolivia, the rights of Pachamama – Mother Earth – are
enshrined in the constitution.
Your own background is in promoting human rights, and human
flourishing. Was there a kind of culture shock for you in joining
Greenpeace, an organisation that in many quarters is still most
strongly associated with hugging trees and ‘saving the
whale’?
This is the question I’ve been asked most. In fact, when I
first started at Greenpeace, people said: ‘Are you leaving the
poverty movement for the environment movement?’ But in all the work
I’ve been doing over the last 10 years in human-rights and
anti-poverty activism, it has been crystal clear to me that the
struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avert
catastrophic climate change have to be seen as two sides of the
same coin. Basically, it is the poor that suffer most as a result
of environmental degradation, who are left very, very vulnerable
when their natural assets are destroyed – and it is also the
condition of poverty that, in certain contexts, can actually drive
environmental destruction. Look at the Congo Basin forest, for
example, the second-largest rainforest in the world: if people do
not have safe, clean solar energy (which is actually easy to
provide if there is political will), they’re going to cut trees
down for firewood and so on.
One of the mistakes of Western environmentalism, for me, was not
to involve this dimension much more. It is wrong to see
environmental activism as something you worry about only when you
have a roof over your head and food in your stomach and your
children’s basic needs are being met. In the past when we talked
about defending forests, for example – primarily to protect
biodiversity – the image that was created was: these people like
animals and trees and that’s their primary driver. But today we
have come to realise that the forests are the lungs of the planet,
right? And the oceans – one billion people worldwide depend on
protein from the sea, so when even Newsweek is telling us our
oceans could be dead within four decades, we need to get much, much
more serious about addressing the problem.2
The reality is that our political leaders and business leaders,
and much broader than them, are suffering from a terrible case of
what psychologists would call ‘cognitive dissonance’. You know, all
the facts are there – that we are arriving at certain ‘planetary
boundaries’ on the nitrogen cycle, on oceans, on climate… Climate
science is very clear: emissions [of greenhouse gases] need to peak
by 2015 and then start coming down if we are going to avert
catastrophic climate change; but our politicians have just said:
OK, we’ll make a deal by 2020. They are in denial about how serious
the problem is.
I remember in 2008 Barack Obama talking about ‘the fierce
urgency of now’ –
And ‘a planet in peril’!
– and, shortly after, his Environment Secretary, Steven Chu,
suggested that one simple but effective measure would be to make
all our roofs and pavements as light in colour as possible, to
reflect more sunlight. I thought: ‘Brilliant! Why not? If we really
are in peril, let’s do it!’
Absolutely!
But nothing has been done. And it seems to me that this only
feeds the suspicion of the general public that actually this whole
global-warming business is nothing more than hot air.
And that’s understandable. And the sad reality is that
climate impacts are not something that is going to confront us in
the future, they are confronting us now. The problem, however, is
that the people who live in the over-consumptive parts of the
world, whose countries historically have contributed most to the
problem, are not the ones who are in the front line, because they
are from generally colder climates, right?
Look at Africa, which (even including South Africa, which
because of its dependence on coal is the 14th-biggest emitter in
the world) is the continent that emits least: Kofi Annan’s
foundation now says that 400,000 lives are lost annually as a
direct result of climate impacts, in the Horn of Africa, in
Darfur… Darfur will be recorded, I believe, as the first resource
war that was induced by climate impacts. Water scarcity is one
driver – Lake Chad, which was one of the largest inland seas in the
world, has shrunk (according to Ban Ki-moon) to the size of ‘a
small pond’. Another is land scarcity, because from Senegal to
Sudan the desert is marching southward at the rate of one mile a
year.
Look at what the military people are saying, right? When I’m
speaking in the United States these days, I start by saying: ‘You
know, I’ve been waiting all my life to start a sentence like this:
I strongly support the CIA and the Pentagon when they say that the
biggest threat to peace, security and stability in the future will
come not from terrorism or from conventional threats but from the
impacts of climate change.’ Food security is already an issue –
there are 14 states in the US at the moment that have a deep,
climate-induced drought.
In a recent article in Rolling Stone, the
environmentalist Bill McKibben identified the oil industry as ‘the
enemy’ of humankind. He wrote: ‘We have five times as much oil and
coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to
burn [and yet] Exxon plans to spend $37 billion a year through [to]
2016 … searching for yet more.’3 Do you think it is helpful to
speak in terms of ‘the enemy’?
In some respects, I think it is. These companies have engaged in
some of the worst environmental crimes – which have impacted not
only the environment, by the way, but people’s lives. Shell has the
temerity to take us to court because we have been trying to say:
Stop drilling in the Arctic, it’s crazy! Thankfully, the judgments
have gone largely in our favour – the Dutch judge said that if
Shell insists on engaging in such risky activities, it must know
that a lot of people are going to disagree.
Recently, the Dutch courts accepted a case based on four farmers
in the Niger Delta whose agricultural possibilities were wiped out
as a result of oil that was spilt from Shell’s operations on their
land. And of course we know about the collusion of Shell in the
murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoniland leaders. I mean, let’s
be very clear: these guys have engaged in criminal activity with
the collusion of very powerful governments and a corrupt elite
within Africa. They apply one set of standards in the countries
they come from and operate with another set of standards in remote
places, and particularly in countries where governance is weak and
there are very high levels of corruption.
I am torn by this question about whether we should talk of them
as ‘the enemy’, though. At Greenpeace, we don’t want to put these
energy companies out of business. We are saying: We want you to
use your technical competence, your global reach and so forth to
become providers of clean energy.
And let’s be blunt about it: for heaven’s sake, why is it
sensible to try to eke out the last drop of oil even [by] the most
dangerous methods, as in Canada’s tar sands, or from the most
environmentally sensitive places, like the Arctic? The Arctic may
seem very remote to most of us but it serves as an air conditioner
for our planet and – you know in the US they say, ‘What happens in
Vegas stays in Vegas’? Unfortunately, what happens in the Arctic
does not stay in the Arctic, right? In Greenland particularly, the
glaciers melting will lead to a sea-level rise if we do not change
our course soon and decisively.
When you look at the oil industry (or, indeed, the people
behind apartheid), do you see things in terms of good and evil –
and if so, where do you think evil is located? Is it in
institutions and systems, or in human nature itself?
I have my entire life resisted the idea that human nature is
intrinsically bad, that people are selfish and so on. I really do
believe that it is systems and contexts that shape what we become.
But I do think that as a human family we have lost our way
desperately. We have come to worship money and status and things in
a way that is completely unhelpful from a spiritual, an
environmental, a social and a political standpoint.
The bottom line is that we have to reduce our levels of
consumption drastically. We have to rethink what constitutes
happiness, right? There’s a really interesting book by Benjamin
Barber called Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize
adults, and swallow citizens whole:4 the way we make choices about
what we spend money on, how we spend our time and so forth is not
something that just happens today – these choices are very
consciously manufactured (to borrow a term from Noam Chomsky). And
there’s enough history to show that people can be quite modest in
what they have materially but live very happy lives – in fact,
happier lives, quite often, than people who are excessively
affluent.
Even so, the green movement is accused of being
anti-democratic because most people want all the mod cons, they
want to be able to fly to Prague for the weekend, they want to wear
a T-shirt in winter – but the greens want to put a stop to all
that. Has it been uncomfortable for you, given your political
background, to be seeking in many ways to resist the will of the
great mass of people – even if it is for their own sake?
First, I don’t think right now it is accurate to say that
there is a consensus in the world that we should continue to
consume at the level we are consuming. Everywhere I go – even in
developed countries, even in the UK – young people are concerned.
And they should be, because they are going to pay the price for the
absence of any sense of intergenerational solidarity in the adult
leadership of today.
And every global challenge that humanity has faced, the leaders
who stepped forward to articulate a different vision could have
been dismissed as anti-democratic. Do you think Nelson Mandela had
the majority of the people behind him when he took the leadership
that he did, given the state’s repression, its control of the
media, its co-option of people from the black commu-nity into
government jobs and so on? Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
Rosa Parks – when they stood up and articulated a non-conventional
view, they were vilified by many in their own communities, not
just by the enemy.
I mean, I would argue that the majority of people in the UK were
opposed to the war in Iraq and so you can’t blame the British
people [for that], you have to blame their leadership. You can say,
‘Well, the people voted for them,’ but we know it is much more
complicated than that… Your media are now being exposed for vicious
manipulation. You have one man whose media empire can affect not
just politics but almost what is reality – look at Hillsborough!
I’m going off at a tangent, but my point is that the problem we
have is that the truth of what is happening is actually heavily
misrepresented.
Your first degree was in law but at some point, I believe, you
flirted with the idea of joining the ANC’s military wing. What was
your thinking in those days about the different forms of resistance
available?
Well, Gandhi’s influence was quite big, and we strongly
believed in the virtue of satyagraha,5 civil disobedience and so
on. But it was obvious that the only language the apartheid state
understood was that of violence, right, and so there were always
discussions about the role of armed struggle. In the end, I opted
not to get involved in that, but I understood why it was
necessary.
Looking back now, what lessons do you think you learnt in
those years that are applicable now to the fight to prevent
catastrophic climate change?
I would say, three key lessons. When you are facing a very
powerful enemy, you have to bring together the broadest possible
coalition of voices and energies if you are going to counterbalance
its power.
The second thing I’ve learnt is that the struggle for justice is
not a popularity contest. People who stand up for causes suffer a
lot of public revulsion at the time, even if history later judges
them differently.
The third thing is that no big struggle is won without
sacrifice. Movements for justice only move forward when decent men
and women are prepared to go to prison if necessary, or even to
put their lives on the line – that spirit is critically important.
I saw a lot of sacrifice by ordinary people standing up for justice
during the anti-apartheid struggle, and I’m afraid to say that the
scale of that sacrifice needs to be multiplied a thousand times
over if we are to get the kind of global momentum we need to avert
catastrophic climate change.
One of the principles of satyagraha, I think, is
patience, but in the fight against climate change patience is not a
virtue, is it? The website onehundredmonths.org has
already counted down halfway to what it says may be ‘our climate’s
tipping point, the point of no return’. Is there some point at
which the fight has to become more drastic – even violent?
I think the movement has been exceptionally patient…
But you do believe that time is running out?
Time is not simply running out, it is fast running out; and
the temptation to react violently is very high right now, [in the
face] of our leaders’ denialism and so on. But I think that
violence is self-defeating and would actually play into the hands
of the very people we are seeking to… And when you use violence to
advance a struggle, sadly you lose a lot of who and what you
are.
Instead, we need to look at how you intensify tried-and-tested
methods of peaceful civil disobedience (as we saw from our brothers
and sisters in the Arab world recently – in the face of
dictatorships funded and supported by the West). And how do we
innovate and come up with new methods of struggle – online
activism, for instance, has generated new ways of thinking and so
on.
We also need to become more strategic in who we put pressure on.
So, for example, we need to put more pressure on financial
institutions, because for every environmental crime committed by
an energy company or a company that’s driving deforestation or
ocean destruction, some financial institution is providing a loan.
So, if we can switch off the flow of capital at source…
You told the Guardian last year that Greenpeace was
‘moving to a war footing’. What exactly did you mean by that?
Every week, if you look at it globally, at least one
environmental activist gets killed, right? Many major sacrifices
are being made, especially at the grassroots level, in Peru, in
Ecuador, in Guatemala and so on. I think the more professionalised
movements need to show more courage and more willingness to
sacrifice, and so we are going to be intensifying our own efforts,
including being open to the possibility of harsher forms of
repression being visited upon us by those that are driving social
and environmental crime.
You yourself have done a number of bold things, from going on
a 21-day hunger strike6 to climbing onto oil rigs in the Arctic.7
Are these more than just publicity stunts?
A lot of the things that I’ve done in my life have been more
about – ‘bearing witness’ is the term I would use. We have a moral
obligation to bear witness to injustice, wherever it is happening.
Some of the most awful en-vironmental crime happens in remote
places like the Arctic, or deep in the Amazon, and Greenpeace seeks
to get out there and draw attention to what is happening.
We make no apologies about the fact that we are good at getting
our message across.
Bear in mind that just one of our adversaries, Shell, has a
marketing budget that is more than Greenpeace’s entire global
budget, right? And understand, also, that control is not exercised
today solely through repressive state apparatus but also, more and
more powerfully, through the media environment, the schooling
system and so on. And where the ideological state apparatus is so
heavily stacked against decent, progressive values, we don’t have
any choice but to be willing to put our lives on the line.
Another aspect of satyagraha is that Gandhi insisted
‘ever upon truth’. Environmentalists – and indeed the IPCC – are
often accused of exaggeration. Is it practical, in a global culture
of spin and counterspin, to aim to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth?
Absolutely. You know, Greenpeace is an organisation that
takes its lead from the science – not just our own internal
scientists but the leading authorities, whether it’s the
International Maritime Organization on issues relating to oceans,
right, or the IPCC with regard to climate change. I think it’s
important that we recognise that we can’t change the science –
which is what our governments try to do.
Now, let me be very clear about the IPCC. The reality is that,
for a very complicated scientific body, the IPCC has been right
substantially; but when it has been wrong, it has more often
underestimated how serious the situation is than overestimated it –
but whenever it does so, the media are very silent about it. The
only exaggeration that stands out was the date for the melting of
the Himalayan glaciers.8
You know, it reminds me of the HIV/Aids denialism when the
science was crystal clear but my government in South Africa sadly
lost a lot of time giving credence to a handful of
dissidents…
In 2000, Peter Melchett told Third Way: ‘If
Greenpeace wants to change things … we have to follow the power.’9
Where in the world today do you think decisive power is
located?
In most places, government is still pretty powerful – and
global corporations have grown hugely in presence, influence and
power over the last 30 years, so they, too, are very much where our
focus needs to be. But, for me, ultimately whether you have the
power to influence those who hold power in government and business
is totally determined by what I think is the most important
expression of power, the power of the street, right?
Good activism is about creating an environment in which the
voices of the most powerless and the most affected can be heard by
those who hold formal power.
You have been engaged in so many different struggles over the
years, and sometimes the odds against you must seem overwhelming.
Where do you get your strength and your sense of hope from? And
what do you do with the exasperation and anger I imagine you feel
when you see the inaction of our leaders?
Well, I’ll tell you an anecdote. When I was 22 years old and
I was fleeing from South Africa into exile, my best friend at the
time, a guy called Lenny Naidu, asked me: ‘What is the biggest
contribution you can make to the cause of humanity?’ I said:
‘Giving your life?’ He said: ‘It’s not giving your life but giving
the rest of your life.’ Two years later, I heard that he and three
young women from my home city had been brutally murdered by the
apartheid regime – there were so many bullets in their bodies,
their parents couldn’t recognise them.
A lot of close friends and comrades from my old life back home
made the ultimate sacrifice, and I draw a lot of inspiration from
people who have given their lives. But what Lenny was saying was
that the biggest contribution any of us can make is to maintain a
lifetime of struggle if necessary and stick with it until the
injustice has been eradicated or the challenge has been met.
