Review of Greenpeace Standpoint on seals, whales and kangaroos

Greenpeace Wobblies

Taking stands is easy, but making them consistent is slightly more challenging. Dressing them decently in presentable arguments is more difficult still. Here, Harpoon presents a few classic wobblies from Greenpeace which can only lead to a painful conclusion ... We all know that Greenpeace does not want you to buy your whale burgers at McDonalds ...

Greenpeace is opposed to all commercial whaling world-wide under whatever name and under all circumstances.” (Peter Melchett, executive director of Greenpeace UK, in a letter to the High North Alliance, May 25, 1995)

And neither does Greenpeace want seal burgers on the McDonalds menu ...

“Greenpeace is opposed to the killing of any seal done primarily for sale to national and international meat (animal and human food), fur, leather, oil or other markets. Greenpeace is not opposed to the killing of seals done primarily for survival, i.e. that the meat is consumed and the pelt utilised by the family group or community.” (Greenpeace policy statement, 1993)

And yet it accepts the world’s largest commercial seal hunt:

“Whatever the motivation may have been for the original seal campaign, we have no reason to work on this issue today. Seals in Newfoundland are not endangered.” (Greenpeacer Kevin Jardine in Canada’s Evening Telegram, Mar. 25, 1995)

How can this be? Has Greenpeace suddenly developed an interest in ecology? Well, seal ecology maybe, but how about the kangaroos? Greenpeace doesn’t say much about kangaroos these days, but the last we heard their standpoint was a hodge-podge of ecology and religion:

“The kangaroo campaign springs from animal welfare concerns ... Greenpeace ... announces its opposition to the commercial trade of kangaroo products on ecological and moral grounds ... on a purely moral basis we find it nauseating”. (Article submitted by Greenpeace Denmark to the newspaper Informationen, 1986)

Hmmm. Could a review be in order? If you ask Greenpeace these days for its standpoint on the annual cull of millions of kangaroos, it will say it has no standpoint. Instead, it weakly replies: “We don’t have a campaign”. Greenpeace, of all organisations, knows that it is as possible to have a standpoint without a campaign as to have a campaign without a standpoint.

At least we can rest assured that Greenpeace will not let indigenous peoples down. As the following position on seal hunting by the Inuit shows, it will even allow them to make money:

“I will state categorically in front of Danish TV that Greenpeace is not against subsistence sealing even if the skins are sold on the market.” (Greenpeacer Allan Picaver at a public meeting in Niagornat, Greenland; Aug. 31, 1986)

But when this promise was put to the test, Greenpeace failed to come through. When Danish athletes were recruited as part of a marketing campaign for seal goods, Greenpeace US told them bluntly:

“... we do not support the Danish Olympic team wearing sealskins coats.” (Letter to the Danish embassy in the US, Feb. 1992)

Ouch!!!