It’s hard to take Greenpeace seriously. They claim to want a productive dialogue with tuna companies about their “urgent concerns.” But at the same time they harass those companies with dozens of phone calls from activists at all hours of the day and night.

No doubt there is a dog-eared playbook that Greenpeace campaigners are using: “Step one. Call for dialogue. Step two, apply pressure to target companies by flooding their switchboard with phone calls.” The trouble is, nobody has switchboards anymore. The calls just go straight to voicemail where they just sit collecting digital dust.

Greenpeace’s steadfast refusal to update its 70s-era tactics illustrates how out of touch and unserious the organization has become.

The callers themselves know the exercise is pointless. Listen to this Greenpeace activist read from the script and then the instructions that accompany it without realizing the difference. These are the people companies are supposed to talk to about the hard science of sustainability?

If Greenpeace can’t take itself seriously, why should anyone else?

Greenpeace recently posted another shock and gore video meant to illustrate its commitment to tuna sustainability. The anti-seafood activists claim they are deeply concerned about tuna bycatch, that is, the fish you unintentionally catch when you are fishing for tuna. Greenpeace appears to believe the mere existence of bycatch is proof that modern fishing methods are unacceptable. This is an absurd and ultimately uninformed stance.

Bycatch is and has always has been a natural part of fishing. Since the beginning of time anyone who has ever put a hook and line in the water knows that it’s an inexact science that has seen quantum leaps in improvement

Greenpeace fails to mention modern techniques have increased efficiency and reduced the bycatch associated with tuna fishing year after year. Today, tuna bycatch is on average about 5% of the total catch. So, for example, tuna fishermen catch the skipjack they are fishing for 95% of the time.

Moreover, the tuna community is working hard to improve already remarkable bycatch rates like that. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has brought together scientists, commercial fishermen, seafood supply chain experts, biodiversity advocates to develop new and more effective ways to ensure tuna sustainability. (Read ISSF’s take on bycatch here.)

What’s Greenpeace’s reaction to all this improvement? They have steadfastly refused to participate in or support ISSF research. Instead, they claim to have all the answers already in hand. Their sustainability solution? Ban modern techniques and transition back to catching each tuna individually by hand. That’s hardly a realistic idea given that worldwide demand for tuna exceeds 200 million cases each year.

What’s one to make of the disconnect between Greenpeace’s supposed concern about sustainability and its obstinate rejection of science-based approaches? It’s simple. Greenpeace is not serious about improving the ways we get our seafood. It’s doubtful they give a hoot about tuna or turtles or anything lacking the opposable thumbs necessary to write a check.

Greenpeace is in the business of creating a crisis where none exists so they can solicit donations from well-meaning people who truly are concerned about things like sustainability and the environment.

Greenpeace USA’s letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal suggests the U.S. and global tuna processors are not aligned on sustainability goals and takes credit for European processors’ commitment to reduce bycatch using FAD free, pole and line or any other sourcing method that has bycatch rates comparable to purse seine fishing on free swimming schools.

The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has said that through the work it is leading to reduce bycatch in tuna purse seine fisheries, the amount of discarded bycatch in purse seine fisheries on floating objects will be reduced by 50% by 2015.

What Greenpeace doesn’t tell you is that most of these commitments, whether made by individual companies or by ISSF, are virtually identical including the timing for achieving them.

The fact remains Greenpeace devotes zero dollars to tuna sustainability research or bycatch mitigation efforts. Greenpeace continues to reject offers to actually participate in sustainability work as part of the ISSF’s Environmental Stakeholder Committee. And Greenpeace continues to raise money for itself off its contrived plight of the tuna campaign. These are all points publically made in the Wall Street Journal Op Ed published on November 8th.

Greenpeace has not only lost its way as an organization, it has lost its ability to see past the choir to whom it so often preaches, before passing the hat to raise a few more bucks. In its letter, Greenpeace insists its tuna campaign is addressing a growing popular concern. Reading the comments string that follows its letter and the comment string that follows the Op Ed of November 8th reveals not only no such popular concern but sound and directed criticism of Greenpeace.

Greenpeace vs. the Tuna Sandwich
The attack on canned tuna isn’t about science. It’s about fund raising.
By CHRIS LISCHEWSKI, SHUE WING CHAN and IN-SOO CHO

Over the past few years, Greenpeace has launched numerous crusades targeting our companies for what we do—fish for tuna. Each of its campaigns is more baffling than the one before.

In their latest campaign against tuna, Greenpeace activists have dressed up as bloodthirsty sharks to ask why a company would kill Disney’s Nemo, and they’ve produced a video featuring one of our brand icons being stabbed in the eye.
This might be attention-grabbing. But it’s not exactly constructive dialogue and it isn’t intellectually serious. No one comes away any more knowledgeable about tuna and sustainable fishing.

Unfortunately, this attack on canned tuna isn’t about science. It’s about fund raising, and Greenpeace has discovered a recipe for success: Target something that’s easily recognizable (like tuna), make some scary claims in the media, parade around in funny costumes—and start raking in the donations. It’s a recipe that Greenpeace has perfected over the past two decades.

But Greenpeace isn’t helping to conserve the world’s tuna stocks. In fact, the campaign against tuna fishing is doing just the opposite. It has become a sideshow that is trying to sabotage a serious sustainability partnership between dedicated conservationists and the fishing community. More »

Greenpeace carries on endlessly about bycatch, the marine life that is also caught when tuna fishing, but in truth simply does nothing about it. Let’s be clear, Greenpeace literally does nothing to study, improve or participate in efforts to limit bycatch. And worse, they impede efforts by making a sideshow of the bycatch issue and blatantly refuse to participate in environmental stakeholder efforts to affect meaningful change.

Tuna companies from around the globe have invested millions of dollars in bycatch mitigation programs and research through the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF). ISSF has already launched the first two of several planned at sea projects which will help identify and develop better practices and new fishing technologies to lessen the impact on marine ecosystems from purse seine fishing on FADs. They have also already hosted by catch mitigation workshops with boat captains and scientists in Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas.

Tuna companies and responsible environmental groups are investing time, money and expertise to reduce an already low 5% bycatch of non-tuna species in purse seine fisheries around the world. In fact, in the western and central Pacific Ocean, where the majority of the world’s tuna is caught, the bycatch rates are even lower at 0.3% for purse seine fishing on schools and 1.7% for purse seine fishing on FADs.)

What’s Greenpeace doing? Spending their donor’s money to produce violent, sexually explicit cartoons that lampoon America’s favorite tuna brands in order…you guessed it: Fundraise.

Greenpeace is out of touch with the millions of families trying to stretch a dollar at the grocery store to buy healthy, affordable food for their family. Instead, Greenpeace is more focused on their struggle to pay for its brand new $32 million yacht … with its helipad … and flat screen TVs (probably so they can watch their cartoons on the high-seas in high-def)..

Which strategy for bycatch reduction would you invest in?

Did you know that Greenpeace signed an Accountability Charter that promises its agents will not be involved in “illegal or unethical practices?”

Did you also know that Greenpeace’s U.S. chief, Phil Radford, started his tenure with the organization by threatening businesses, saying “you can either dance with corporations or dance on them”?

Did you know that his predecessor John Passacantando told the Pittsburg Post Gazette in 2003 that “there are many organizations out there that value credibility, but I want Greenpeace first and foremost to be a credible threat”?

Promising to dance on corporations and promoting its ability to threaten people into compliance doesn’t sound very ethical and in some circumstances doesn’t even sound very legal. It sounds like a blueprint for organized bullying.

Greenpeace. Bullies.

Whether it’s teaching history, good nutrition or stranger danger, cartoon characters and cuddly toys have long been a staple for delivering important messages to children. School House Rock introduced kids to Bill (on Capitol Hill) and explained that Hankerin’ for a Hunk of Cheese, while McGruff helped them navigate which adults they could trust.

Unfortunately, the Crime Dog didn’t produce a video that warned kids to steer clear of Greenpeace and its growing library of inappropriate, violent imagery geared specifically towards children. Portraying Barbie as a chainsaw wielding serial killer, stabbing Charlie the Tuna in the eye with a trident or having Star Wars characters mock execute polar bears is Greenpeace’s way of making sure the most impressionable audiences get its message.

How about this message: Grow up, act like adults, and stop targeting and exploiting children.

Yesterday, Greenpeace sent out yet another canned tuna campaign fundraising appeal. Keep in mind Greenpeace is a massive, multi-national, environmental activism company that has an annual budget of $300 million and thousands of employees. But still it pleads poverty with its own membership.

In a roughly 11 paragraph email Greenpeace pleads for cash no fewer than five times:

• “Please, rush us your most generous contribution today…”
• “we need to raise much-needed resources to support the campaign…”
• “Please make a donation today…”
• “Help us by… rushing us your most generous contribution today.”
•  “One of the easiest things you can do to help after you make your contribution is forward this email to your friends.”

And how much of those generous contributions are used to fund science that’s focused on tuna sustainability?

That’d be zero.

Greenpeace’s canned tuna distortion campaign continues unabated with increasingly frantic and desperate appeals that suggest its campaign might be bringing in the requisite number of robo-signatures but not the green it’s intended to produce.

Today the distortion engine is revved up and sees Greenpeace claiming that it’s tried to start a “constructive dialogue” with tuna companies and been rebuffed. This is more than it’s usual shading and twisting, it’s an outright, bold-faced lie. Greenpeace has been offered a seat at the table with the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, along with all the other responsible international environmental groups, and has simply refused to join that dialogue.

Greenpeace also claims that the New York Times has opined that it would be easy to support a tuna boycott. What? A food blogger reprints Greenpeace talking points and Greenpeace claims that’s a New York Times endorsement? Not to put too fine a point on it but… how stupid do they think people are? If a New York Times opinion blogger said Mickey Mouse would be a good chief executive would Greenpeace suggest the Old Grey Lady had endorsed a cartoon character for the presidency?

The fact is Greenpeace is used to lying and getting away with it, while using those deceptions to raise cash. Perhaps this campaign isn’t bringing in the bucks and frustrations are running high so they’ve charged up the ole deceit-o-meter.

Watch this space for more on Greenpeace’s funding and falsehoods.