Tips for Greenpeace

Tips for Greenpeace

When a organization publicly apologizes for its misdeeds and promises to change its strategy, it wins our respect. Greenpeace did it, The Jakarta Post, Oct. 31, 1995. Although not considering the debate over, I think Greenpeace's management is worthy of some advice.

* A step in the right direction would be to lower profiles of campaigns and appeal more to reason than to emotion. Remember, you are dealing with an informed public opinion.

* Try to show what can be done right and stop concentrating on what is being done wrong.

* Broaden your focus, hire an economist and let him tell us how much a tree is worth standing and compare it to how much it is worth cut. You need new ideas. Mr. Howard Odun, the pioneer of the embodied energy in tropical belt's products, might have something useful to say.

* Stop alienating corporations that gave environmentalists respectability. Corporations that embodied environmentalism in their strategies may rethink their greenness: It will cost Shell US$48 million to woo German customers back to its gas stations. That is what Shell will pay a German car racer to join a Shell- sponsored racing team for the next two years.

* Stop regarding developing countries as backwaters that do nothing for the environment. Did environmentalists ever publish how much Brazil spends to protect the five species of marine turtles? What about a picture of the fine-tuned implosion of an old building in Sao Paulo to preserve surrounding trees? We cannot afford the ideal; we are doing what is possible.

* If you must cut costs, consider selling those dinghies.

OSVALDO COELHO

Bandung, West Java