Tim Wade's Blog

Happy Earth Day! We are celebrating Earth Day with the release of a new video – ‘Inspiring Action‘ – which we would like to share with you as part of our thanks for your continuing support of Greenpeace. When you’ve finished watching the video we are also hoping that you’ll be inspired and help us to share its message of action on behalf of our environment by taking some online action yourself … and helping us recruit 3 million people to become climate activists. Yes, you read it correctly. 3 million. It’s a big number because the Earth needs big action this year. Here’s what you can do: First: Enjoy the video. Click on the YouTube logo at the end to rate it and leave a comment! Second: Share it with your friends and family Third: Take action for the climate this Earth Day by signing our online petition: ask our world leaders to take personal responsibility for the future of the climate and attend the UN Climate summit at the end of the year. But not just attend, they need to ensure a good deal for the climate. Here’s to a future that’s green and peaceful. Together we can make it happen. All of us, Greenpeace International http://www.greenpeace.org/climate http://www.twitter.com/Greenpeace_Intl http://www.greenpeace.org/facebook Greenpeace International

Share on Facebook

Starting this month GreenPeace’s new weblog Nuclear Reaction will be cataloguing the day by day failings of the nuclear industry. If you want to meet the politicians and their apologists with the 10,000-year radioactive legacies? See through their false promises? Maybe find out how easy it is to build a ‘quick and dirty’ reprocessing plant capable of turning black market nuclear waste into a bomb’s worth of plutonium every day?

Share on Facebook

Two Greenpeace activists who exposed a whale meat embezzlement fraud in Japan — Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki — have been themselves arrested — for allegedly stealing the whale meat that they turned over to police as evidence.

Demand the Japanese government free the activists
This is the backlash. We’ve uncovered a scandal involving powerful forces in the Japanese government that benefit from whaling, and it’s not surprising they are striking back.

What is surprising is that these activists, who are innocent of any crime, would be arrested for returning whale meat that was stolen from Japanese taxpayers. Theirs are, to date, the only arrests that have been made in the Tokyo public prosecutor’s investigation into the embezzlement we documented of millions of yen worth of whale meat.

This was not a police action — it was an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for whaling — and the kind of harassment of whistleblowers that a modern democracy should not allow. Our first news that an arrest was imminent came from Japanese television stations. Someone leaked the information to ensure images of Greenpeace activists in handcuffs appeared on news reports in Japan.

More than 40 police officer raided our offices and the homes of the activists, and spent 10 hours seizing cell phones, documents, and computers, despite the fact that we had documented every step of how we obtained the whale meat, turned the full dossier over with the evidence, and made ourselves available to police to help with the investigation at any time. A simple phone call could have brought Junichi and Toru to the police station. Instead, the government made a public spectacle of shutting Greenpeace down.

Don’t let Japan shut down the truth. Demand the release of Junichi and Toru and demand an end to the whaling programme in Japan. The corruption of a few bureaucrats who profit from whaling should not be an excuse for harassing those who have exposed it. The domestic and international shame which this scandal is bringing on the Japanese agencies responsible for whaling is just one more reason that Japan should stop its sham scientific whaling programme in the Southern Ocean forever.

Please, take action now and pass this message along to your friends. Let’s get Junichi and Toru back with their families, and demand the real criminals go to jail.

Share on Facebook

Surely you can’t import illegally logged timber and sell it in Europe, right? Wrong.

There’s an important EU vote on July 23rd, which should close this illegal logging loophole. The European Commission has ignored the need for a new law for almost five years. Even now European Commission President José Manuel Barroso is being lobbied by companies who profit from illegal timber to reject legislation.

We need European Commissioners to vote “YES” to stop illegal logging on July 23rd.

Share on Facebook