On 24 July 2020, radical climate activists walked up to Greenpeace UK’s elegant 1930s HQ in the heart of Islington and smeared it with pink paint. “What have you done?” they demanded in furious letters stuck to the NGOs glass front door. “It’s time for you to step up or get out of the way.”
Early last month, as members of the Burning Pink campaign stood trial accused of criminal damage for that and a string of other attacks on NGOs, political parties and newspapers – including the Guardian – they called a surprise witness for the defence. It was Will McCallum, the new co-executive director of Greenpeace UK.
The appointment of McCallum and Areeba Hamid in August (they actually started work on 1 October) constituted many firsts for Greenpeace UK: Hamid, 39, is the first woman of colour and first migrant to lead the organisation; McCallum, at 34, is the youngest; between them they constitute its first job share.
They say they are setting out to transform Greenpeace UK and expand its scope; intending to foster a deeper engagement with radical and grassroots protesters, new alliances across the spectrum of social justice movements, and a more combative theory of power.
“We are hoping to build a long-term campaign around climate justice which will look at, essentially, a minority of people whose actions are causing damage … and getting them to pay for it,” Hamid said.
Launched in 1971, Greenpeace is now the ageing Gen-Xer of the climate activist movement. In its youth it was a byword for radical climate action, its activists going toe-to-toe with whaling fleets and French commandos on the high seas. But like many in middle age, it has become more moderate, critics say, swapping high-stakes direct action protests for lobbying politicians, and sitting down with multinationals.
Greenpeace UK, as one of the bigger and more influential of the international federation’s branches, had led much of that change. Former executive director John Sauven, lauded by the Times as a “suave political insider”, met the heads of oil majors and worked with McDonald’s to strike deals over deforestation.
Sauven has defended his work with big business, which is credited with saving a number of great forests. But since 2019, what with Extinction Rebellion (XR), school strikes, and all that has happened since, Greenpeace has appeared to have been outmanoeuvred by a new breed of more agile climate campaigns.
Activists decried what seemed to them an institutional anxiety: that appearing too radical would alienate donors. One accused it and other NGOs of “living in a zombie world of middle-class privilege and denial”.
On the day the Guardian visited Greenpeace, XR had blockaded the private aviation terminal at Luton airport, activists from its vegan splinter group Animal Rebellion had been dragged across the road by irate motorists after blockading Westminster Bridge, and Just Stop Oil supporters had read out a message to the prime minister threatening to escalate their campaign of disruption
McCallum and Hamid, clean, smart-casual and professional, had been meeting a team of activists to discuss messaging for a future action at sea.
They conceded that the ecosystem of environmental protest had changed. With more people taking part in direct action than ever, said Hamid, “people like Greenpeace who used to be the only ones doing it, and were sort of on the fringe, [are] now almost looking sometimes tame in comparison. Which I think is something that we need to think about.”
But “the bar” for Greenpeace was different, she added. “I often describe Greenpeace as a bit of a Swiss army knife of an organisation, which means we’re also doing investigations, which are really groundbreaking; we do lobbying; we have a science unit producing original research; and we do direct action.
“It’s a combination of things. And we’ve always believed that it’s a combination of things that will make us win.”
McCallum pointed out that since he and Hamid had taken over, activists had made a high-profile intervention in the Conservative party conference hall, he had joined disabled protesters in an occupation of parliament, and Greenpeace climbers had just staged a 13-day occupation of a Shell drilling platform being shipped to the North Sea.
They were doing their best to “not bring back, I suppose, (but) continue and evolve” Greenpeace’s history of radical tactics and “add value” to the movement, McCallum said, not just in terms of specific tactics, but also in terms of raising specific issues.
“We’re a global organisation and we’re trying to go to the companies or the issues that maybe other groups can’t reach, be they at sea or at the UN, and constantly trying to think … where does Greenpeace fit into this much healthier ecosystem?”
With a turnover of £25m a year, Greenpeace UK is an impressive fiefdom, one of the country’s most important environmental organisations. Their London offices are arranged over five floors in an elegant 1930s light industrial building, decked out with plants and sustainable wooden furniture. Solar panels cover its flat roof. Plastics are avoided, even as far as possible in its electrics, which are distributed via a custom-built wooden cable trunking system.
One of Hamid and McCallum’s priorities is using Greenpeace’s considerable resources to support grassroots groups, but to do this systematically, as opposed to the “ad hoc” ways in which the organisation had in the past, said McCallum. They have opened up Greenpeace’s warehouse, at the rear of its offices, to groups campaigning on connected issues, which does not have to include the environment but must be aligned with Greenpeace values (although environmental and racial justice groups get priority, according to the Greenpeace website).
“That’s premised on the belief that what they want to do is probably useful for us, and there’s a mutually useful beneficial exchange even if we’re not working on a campaign together,” said McCallum.
For much like the more radical climate activists, Greenpeace is grappling with a wider problem: how to extend its support beyond a niche, often privileged, white and professional class audience. As the urgency around climate and ecological breakdown grows, how can environmentalists harness the power of a mass movement for change?
For Hamid and McCallum, the answer lies in a change of politics. Greenpeace can no longer be a single issue group campaigning solely on the environment, but must engage with a spectrum of social justice issues, from racial equality and migrants’ rights to trade union struggles and fuel poverty.
Hamid said the objective was to build as many alliances as possible, “not define ourselves within just the narrow lens of ‘is this environment-related or climate-related’, and that’s the only time we’ll work on them”.
“It’s about thinking about the big picture, because if you look at our opposition it’s pretty much the same people,” said Hamid.
Part of that work is transforming the narrative around environmental campaigning. When Greenpeace climbers boarded Shell’s oil platform in January, they unfurled a banner demanding the company not just “stop drilling” but “start paying” – a deliberate choice, said Hamid.
Change is hard. “It takes time,” said Hamid. But the power analysis has changed. “And now actually, we’ve reached a point where we will not move unless and until we have tackled the climate justice issue.”
In the longer term, McCallum said, they want to be talking more about hope. Environmental campaigns, McCallum said, had sought to shock and appal people so much they felt compelled to action. “We’ve saturated that.”
“People are not bored, but they’re tired. They’re tired and they want to feel hopeful.”
“So when we’re thinking about climate justice, it’s: ‘Stop drilling, start paying’; putting an end to campaigns that just say stop, and actually looking at what [kind of] world we want to live in.”
