Photo post: Greenpeace rains on Stelmach's parade

Read about it here and here. The best part: Stelmach was in the middle of an anti-Greenpeace speech. Even if you don't agree with non-violent direct action, you have to admit that this is a pretty impressive feat. Kudos.

Photo via Facebook

Update: In case you didn't have a $450 ticket to the show. Greenpeace has uploaded some video on Youtube for your viewing pleasure.

Comments

[jk]

This is just great. I liked what they did during the election, but sometimes I found it a bit confrontational. This is beautiful because it's so cheeky.

I was talking with someone who was there, and he said that as security was hauling one of the Greenpeacers up to the maintenance gangway from which he had descended, he pulled a second banner (saying the the same thing) out from one of his pouches and secured it to some lighting support structure. It then took security an additional hour of fiddling with a long stick to get that banner down.

[Trevor]

Really, the only thing that stunt accomplished was getting themselves arrested.

[ch]

Greenpeace is a household name because of stunts like that. I would say that's quite the accomplishment.

[Aaron]

Man, I sure hope that banner and rope wasn't made from an ethylene-type product. If they accomplished these feats with hemp rope, then I might buy into the culture jamming.

[paul]

"Even if you don't agree with non-violent direct action, you have to admit that this is a pretty impressive feat".

Uh huh. So maybe you would like to have some self-righteous prick following you around during the course of your day as Hudema did during the provincial election. Worked so well since... wait a minute, huge PC landslide? Maybe time for new strategy.

As "jk" alluded, the election stuff was quite confrontational, and had more than a hint of menace. And it turned more than a few people off. So GP's new tack is to... break into a private function. And it is a serious security breach for the Convention Centre. Someone had to have left the door open, as you simply do not walk in with a large - expensive, commercially produced - banner under your arm.

Which begets the question: a banner today, a gun tomorrow? This is much more serious than a simple prank.

[Jewel]

Huzzah!

Greenpeace are mostly straight up crazies but this made my day.

[ch]

"A banner today, a gun tomorrow?", "menace", "serious security breach"

OOOKAY, I think we might be overstating things a bit. It's pretty presumptuous to assume that the people involved in this particular Greenpeace stunt would resort to violence.

Greenpeace's strategies are remarkably effective at drawing media attention to ecological disasters, adding credibility to more mainstream organizations, inserting new ideas into the ecopolitical discourse and simply providing the more rational of us with a good laugh every now and then.

"Maybe time for a new strategy?"

I think it's ridiculous to judge the success of the entire Greenpeace organization by their failure to convince the Alberta government to adopt a framework of sustainable development or even get Albertans not to vote PC in the middle of a boom. A more accurate standard might be their ability to get pigs to fly. Their tactics, strategies and politics are much bigger than this province, and whether we like to admit it or not, it's not the perceptions of our government or even Albertans that really matter here. Their audience is international.

[Rob Butz]

Paul's comment is simply fear-mongering over public participation. A protestor is much more likely to be hurt or killed at "interventions" like these than the targets of protest. Yet critics defending the feelings of the premier, the corporation, or the status quo never cease their habit of saying "what if one of these kooks had a gun?" If you're distant enough from protest that you can't tell the difference between protestors and assassins, well then, I wonder about your qualifications to comment on protest to begin with.

All the same— as much as I defend Greenpeace in this action (and did in a letter to the Edmonton Journal), I wonder if their strategy of "always appealing to outside audiences" — the way many mainstream environmental campaigns do, effectively dividing local and international audiences — plays too easily into the rhetoric of outsiders trying to bring down the average Albertan, so that every action might in its own weird way confirm Stelmach's rhetoric.