Not a literal wall of course, on the floating sea ice of the
Arctic Ocean, but a legal wall, an international prohibition which
will prevent the countries surrounding the Arctic from claiming the
top of the world for themselves, in order to exploit the mineral
riches which lie under its seabed.
It's a novel notion because throughout human history – until now
– the Pole's very inaccessibility has been its protection. But the
melting of the Arctic ice, as the global climate warms, is opening
up the great frozen wilderness, the world's most untouched
ecosystem; indeed, this week a new record minimum for the ice is
likely to be reached, surpassing even the record low of September
2007, which was such a plunge downwards it astonished polar
scientists.
The average September minimum extent of the ice, from 1979 to
2000, was just over seven million square kilometres; this week it
is likely to reach a new low of about 4.2 million km2, a 40 per
cent drop in a decade. Vast areas of the Arctic are ice-free this
week; the long-fabled Northwest Passage is open, and this week you
can sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific without going through the
Panama Canal or round Cape Horn.
It means that climate change is having its most unmistakable
effect so far on the fabric of the Earth. Yet it also means that
gluttonous eyes are being cast on the Arctic for what it holds, not
least its 160bn barrels of oil, both by the "supermajor" oil
companies such as Shell and Exxon Mobil, and the countries by which
the Arctic Ocean is surrounded – Canada, Russia, the US, Norway and
Denmark (via Greenland).
They are looking to extend their territorial waters and
consequent sovereignty of the seabed out to 90 degrees North: four
years ago the Russians planted a flag on the North Pole seabed, and
last month Denmark signalled it would make a formal territorial
claim to it by 2014 at the latest.
"And what we want do," says John Sauven, who is executive
director of Greenpeace UK, "is say that this area, which is
currently not national territory, this area of sea ice around the
North Pole, should be a 'global commons', collectively owned by
humanity under the auspices of the United Nations.
"It has huge symbolic importance as a pristine ecosystem. Yet
the oil companies and the surrounding nations are saying, this
might be at the ends of the earth, but we're just going to go in
and carve it up.
"The Arctic sums up the complete and utter madness, the
bankruptcy of their strategy. They will go to these extreme lengths
to dig up the last bit of fossil fuels because they cannot be
bothered to deal with energy efficiency and find alternatives, and
they're prepared to suffer all the consequences, the impacts on
wildlife and the fact that you can't do anything about them. It's
insanity."
So now Greenpeace, Mr Sauven says, is planning a global campaign
to make the North Pole off-limits. Internalionalised. No
development. No oil drilling. No territorial claims.
Coming from any other body this might seem hopelessly optimistic
or idealistic, it might seem to be entirely pie-in-the sky; yet
coming from Greenpeace, the environment group which perhaps more
than any other has made a difference across the world, it sounds
rational – and even achievable.
The organisation is 40 this week. It was on 15 September 1971
that a group of American and Canadian anti-nuclear activists set
sail in an old fishing boat from Vancouver on Canada's Pacific
seaboard for Amchitka, one of the Aleutian Islands off the coast of
Alaska,where the US was planning to hold a massive underground
atomic weapons test.
They called themselves the Don't Make A Wave Committee (as they
feared that a nuclear explosion in a geologically unstable region
might set off an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami), and the boat
in which they sailed, originally called the Phyllis Cormack, had
been rechristened Greenpeace for the voyage, to reflect the
environmental and pacifist background of the committee members.
They didn't get to Amchitka – they were halted and turned back
by the US coastguard – but their expedition captured the
imagination of North America, and prompted the transformation of
the Don't Make A Wave Committee into the Greenpeace Foundation,
which grew into what it is today: the most visible, the most active
and the most headline-making of all the world's green pressure
groups.
Consider: in the 40 years since that first voyage, Greenpeace
has helped to end French as well as US nuclear testing in the
Pacific; it has helped to end commercial whaling; it has helped to
end the practice of dumping toxic waste at sea; it has helped to
bring about the phase-out of CFCs, industrial chemicals which were
destroying the ozone layer; it has helped to prevent the
establishment of a GM crops industry in Europe; and it has helped
to save threatened forests across the world, from the Great Bear
temperate rainforest in north-west Canada, to the tropical
rainforests of Indonesia and the Amazon itself.
It has done so by its own form of protest, by being present
(often at considerable personal risk) at the sharp end of all these
situations, and making the world aware: it is the idea of "bearing
witness", from the Quaker background of some its founders. It makes
for unforgettable images: young people in an inflatable, trying to
get between a whale and the whaler trying to harpoon it; activists
draping banners from the top of a 300ft power station chimney.
"Yes, the most important thing about us is that we are an
action-led organisation," says Mr Sauven, 57, who might best be
described as a lanky thinker (he's 6ft 3 and a former publishing
executive who came for a temporary job 20 years ago, and stayed).
"This isn't about round tables, it's not about writing reports,
it's not about endless policy discussions and so on and so forth,
it's about people who are actually prepared to stand up for what
they believe in."
Yet for all the spectacular actions, perhaps the key to
Greenpeace's success and to its widespread public acceptance has
been another element of its Quaker heritage: it is resolutely
non-violent. If Greenpeace protesters are struck, they do not
strike back. "Absolutely, we don't hit back," Mr Sauven says.
"Everybody who's involved is trained in non-violent direct action
and it's a founding principle, it's our core value. I think the use
of violence is always very divisive, and I think that it also makes
reconciliation at the end of the day very hard."
We are talking in the warehouse-cum-workshop of Greenpeace UK in
north London, a wondrous cavern full of exotic kit, boats and ropes
and wet suits and dry suits and also a polar bear – a full-sized,
frighteningly life-like replica (named Paula Bear) which two people
can get into, like a pantomime horse.
Paula was used in a demonstration this summer outside the
Edinburgh headquarters of Cairn Energy, the company which is
leading the way in Arctic oil drilling, and she perfectly
symbolises Greenpeace's growing concern with protecting the Far
North.
"The Arctic is an iconic part of the global commons, rather like
the Amazon for the rainforest," Mr Sauven says. "Is it just to be a
grab by these huge corporations to extract the resources, which
will have a calamitous impact on the world?
"I think we have to draw a line in the sand."
A life in brief
* John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK since 2008,
was born in Ealing, west London, on 6 September 1954. Educated at
St Benedict's School, Ealing; University of Cardiff (BSc Econ)
* Worked in publishing and for human rights organisations
(including editing CND magazine, Sanity). Joined Greenpeace
temporarily in 1991 while waiting for a place at teacher training
college.
* Rainforest campaigner, 1995: major campaigns included helping
to save the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada from commercial
logging, and stopping the deforestation of the Amazon by companies
planting soya beans.
* Lives in Crouch End, north London, and is married to Janet
Conbery, a campaigner at the charity Action Aid. He has two sons,
aged 15 and 19.
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