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