Poor Coke. Their PR team must be having a hard time of late – but to be honest, they brought it on themselves. Australians were utterly astonished when the fizzy drinks giant took the Northern Territory Government to court over a recycling scheme called ‘Cash for Containers’. This scheme has been running successfully in South [...]

Originally posted on ABC Environment, 11 April 2013 Does Coca-cola have a secret agenda against seabirds? David Ritter writes to the company to find out. Mr Terry Davis Managing Director Coca-Cola Amatil North Sydney Dear Mr Davis – may I call you Terry? This is Australia, after all. Okay, so I know what you are [...]

By Jennifer Lavers, Monash University Seabirds: the poster children for ocean health. Fishers use them to identify fishing hot spots. Environmental and marine scientists use them as indicators of the condition of the ocean environment due to their ability to cover vast areas. But in Australia, one such species – the Flesh-footed Shearwater – is [...]

Q: When is a fishing boat not a fishing boat? A: When it’s actually a floating factory. No, it’s not a good joke. It’s not much of a joke at all. When most of us hear ‘fishing boat’, we think about something iconic, brave, cheery, bobbing around on the seas – perhaps looking a bit [...]

Blogpost by Duncan Williams – December 5, 2012 Philippines is a great country. “It’s more fun in the Philippines” is an aptly coined slogan for its tourism campaign. Greenpeace put that slogan to the test this morning with an impromptu activity delivering a message to delegates attending the Ninth Annual Session of the Western and [...]

Once upon a time in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand there was a great tradition. Hopeful anglers would gather to face off in the annual Whakatane Tuna Tournament.  I say ‘once upon a time’ because the Whakatane Tuna Tournament no longer exists. Last year, not a single tuna was caught. The President of [...]

The staff at Greenpeace feel incredibly lucky to receive letters from people expressing their support of the work we do. Sometimes we receive drawings and poems, sometimes a note of congratulations, sometimes a suggestion. All letters are special – even the ones that tell us where they disagree with our activities. But some of the [...]

Blog by Farah Obaidullah, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace International, currently on board the Esperanza. The sun has just set on my first day back on board the Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza. It’s been six years since I last sailed on the Esperanza for our Pacific fisheries campaign and I am glad to see how much [...]

Original Blog post by Karli Thomas Greenpeace has long been concerned about the bycatch caused by the use of Fish Aggregating Devices, or FADs, with purse seine nets. This fishing method is a deadly combination of a floating object, left adrift for weeks or months, and a huge encircling net that takes everything in the [...]

This Op-Ed first appeared in The Australian 24 Sept 2012 In banning supertrawlers from our waters for two years, the Australian Government has sent a strong message to the bloated and subsidised European fishing industry. Fishing in Europe is governed by the EU’s law on fishing, known as the Common Fisheries Policy.  It has been [...]

Blogpost by Sevu Nasalasala, Greenpeace Volunteer – September 14, 2012 Usually you volunteer because you are a firm believer in the cause, but in my case, I volunteered for Greenpeace out of curiosity.  I had no idea what Greenpeace does, but when I got involved, it became an insatiable want to contribute and to help. [...]

How it all happened: It all starts back in West Africa, where super trawlers had destroyed fisheries and left locals without jobs. 13 March 2012: Greenpeace highlights the plunder of super trawlers in West Africa. March 2012: The Government of Senegal bans all foreign trawlers following outrage from fishermen that all their fish had gone. [...]

Originally posted on ABC Environment Greenpeace CEO David Ritter considers whether environmental activists have talked too much about targets and quotas instead of real people’s lives. Earlier this week I swapped Facebook messages with an old mate with whom I used to go fishing, in the days when we were both teenagers at school in [...]

We Australians love a local link. When big news happens around the world, instinctively the first thing we check is whether an Aussie was involved. But, this time around, the story is coming to us in the form of the imminent arrival of the 142 metre long Margiris super trawler. The Margiris is the second [...]

Blogpost by Duncan Williams The Director of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), Dr Transform Aqorau encouraged its membership to change their mindset about being wealthy custodians of a billion dollar resource and to pursue alternative models of development rather than rely on access arrangements with donors. The PNA group is responsible for the [...]

Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York and is author of Ocean of Life: How our Seas are Changing Imagine a world, not very far in the future, where families shun the idea of a seaside holiday because the sea is too unpleasant to visit, perhaps even dangerous. The beach [...]

Blogpost by Junichi Sato, Executive Director of Greenpeace Japan Whale conservation has lost out to the fading, but still defiant pro-whaling forces, at this year’s International Whaling Commission (IWC) annual meeting. The meeting in Panama City had initially offered the world hope that the IWC would actually help to save whales, not whalers, after the [...]

Blogpost by Karli Thomas, 01/02/2012 Australia is about to have one of the world’s biggest fishing vessels – from a fleet that has a track record of obliterating fish stocks around the world – enter its shores. Rather than being afraid of the damage it will cause, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority has doubled the [...]

Blogpost by Veronica Frank, Greenpeace International – May 21, 2012 For many people the Antarctic is little more than a far-away frozen region, literally at the edge of the world; with sterile glaciers, icebergs and colonies of not-so ‘Happy Feet’ penguins, buffeted for much of their lives in the extreme Antarctic wind. The ice-covered waters [...]

Last week, treasured Australian writer Tim Winton delivered this powerful speech (read the full transcript here) to parliament in Canberra calling for protection of our vital oceans. While oceans give us life, we plunder them of fish and choke them with pollution. To cure our oceans crisis we need to create large areas of marine [...]