No matter how often Greenpeace is invited to sit down with scientists, commercial fishermen, and even other ENGO’s like WWF, the world’s leading conservation organization, Greenpeace always finds a reason to decline the invitation.

Yet it has plenty of time to rally its members to harass tuna companies.

In one recent harassment ploy, Greenpeace directed its supporters to deluge American tuna companies with more than a hundred thousand similarly worded e-mail messages accusing them of “ripping up the sea,” among other things.

The tuna companies saw an opportunity for dialogue with these concerned supporters. If Greenpeace wouldn’t accept the tuna industry’s invitation to participate in an upcoming global meeting about tuna sustainability as they have done previously, perhaps they’d feel different if they knew their supporters wanted them to be part of the global dialogue and solution.

So the tuna companies appealed to the same Greenpeace supporters who wrote to their companies about their sustainability concerns and asked them to contact Greenpeace’s leadership about participating in the global conservation community at the next meeting of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) in Guam. More »

For years, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) has been calling out Greenpeace’s deceptive campaigns and unilateral sustainability claims that lack scientific data and support and our concerns go unaddressed. But expose the massive fundraising machine and PR tools behind the organization, including a brand new $33 million dollar yacht disguised as a boat tour, and you get an op-ed from Greenpeace’s top U.S. oceans campaigner in the Tampa Tribune a mere 3 days later.

Greenpeace describes its fundraising flotilla as one “designed so teams of scientists can work on board alongside Greenpeace staff, as well as the media,” but where are the research projects, the science-based studies or the peer reviewed research? Since its prized Rainbow Warrior set sail, it’s been hosting publicity events, throwing parties for donors, and leading tours meant only to find new donors. The decks have been full of chafing dishes and bartenders not Petri dishes and microbiologists, and that revelation makes Greenpeace very uncomfortable. Even its own fan base on Facebook has flooded its posts promoting the Rainbow Warrior tours with comments like “I’ m really disappointed about the wasted time for the Rainbow Warrior III – she is built to be a Warrior not a cruise ship!!!,” and “I would love the ship, I donated for, doing the job for the oceans…”

And even when Greenpeace hauls in its big guns to defend (read hide) its fundraising mission, Greenpeace regurgitates the same half truths and scientific distortions they know will fill their deep coffers. In its weak Tampa Tribune defense, the group claims its donations don’t come from the government or corporations but “wholly from individual supporters,” when it knows full well, nearly half of its contributions come from giant foundation grants. Perhaps it’s the fact that its charitable status has already been revoked three times in two countries that has put the fundraising giant in such a tizzy. Or perhaps it’s just worried it will have to answer some real questions at the next port of call.

By GAVIN GIBBONS | from The Tampa Tribune
February 24, 2012

It’s being sold to the public as the “greenest thing afloat,” and when Rainbow Warrior III docks at the Port of St. Petersburg this weekend, green is exactly what it will be after.

from The Huffington Post

In a recent Huffington Post column, Greenpeace Board Member Jeffrey Hollander writes, “Canned tuna is not a product generally synonymous with innovation.” This is rich coming from an organization that has been using the same pressure tactics, often based on hyperbole and outright lies, for the past 40 years.

In fact, the people who put nutritious and affordable tuna in America’s lunch bags and on dinner tables have been improving the way tuna is found, caught, and kept viable for generations to come. That unheralded success has taken many years of continuous innovation and effort that will surely continue.

Consider the challenge. You are on a small boat in an ocean twice the size of Canada. In that ocean you are looking for only two species of tuna (skipjack and albacore) that roam for thousands of miles. How do you find and catch those fish and little else?

Random nets strewn about would catch everything. A fishing pole in the open ocean would catch next to nothing. Experience teaches us that migratory fish like tuna are attracted to floating objects like tree branches or logs in what is an otherwise featureless aquatic wilderness. These floating objects are known by the technical term Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), and they make fishing for tuna more efficient. Remarkably, innovations like FADs help keep bycatch — fish caught other than tuna — to less than 5 percent of the total catch.

But no one fishing method is perfect by itself. That’s why tuna fishermen use a variety of gear. As the methods improve, the mix of gear changes. This has been true for years. And as anyone who has dropped a line in the water knows, there is no one method that is 100-percent free of bycatch.

Greenpeace’s Jeffrey Hollander also says that it is becoming harder “to hide from the reality of what is happening to our oceans.”

That’s true… and that’s good news.

What’s happening in our oceans is that fish populations once thought to be on the brink are coming back. And those still facing challenges have sustainability oversight in place. Albacore and skipjack tuna stocks are healthy and thriving. And because of FADs, tuna bycatch rates have never been lower, which means tuna fishermen can better avoid catching other species of fish or sea turtles.

The bad news is that tuna brands and retailers in the U.K. have been bullied by Greenpeace into commitments that look good on paper but do little to improve actual tuna sustainablity. In fact, Greenpeace’s “solutions” will impact the health of people dissuaded from eating tuna and may have vastly more damaging consequences for ocean ecosystems.

Greenpeace’s says it wants tuna to be caught only with a fishing pole and line, or with no FADs — in other words, with no modern fishing techniques. Think about how that might work in practice. You’d need a lot more boats covering a lot more ocean in search of tuna that could be almost anywhere. That means more engines burning more fuel for more time, enough bait to decimate stocks of bait fish, and a massive new carbon footprint.

If, in reality, this approach is such a bad idea, why does Greenpeace talk about it incessantly? The reason is simple: Greenpeace needs something to talk about.

To raise the huge amounts of money it needs to support a global anti-business organization with its ships, helicopters, blimps, plushy costumes, and media centers, Greenpeace needs a cause to get donors excited — not excited enough to do independent research, but just enough to write a check and move on. That’s why Greenpeace is always talking about whales, and tuna, and tigers, and pandas — what media experts call “charismatic megafauna.”

Notice how they don’t talk about dolphins anymore. Why? Because innovations in tuna fishing like FADs made canned tuna dolphin-free decades ago.

No, the best problem for Greenpeace to attack is one that features an attractive animal and an impossible solution. That way they can raise money for years to come and never actually solve the rhetorical “crisis” they created.

Followed to their logical ends, Greenpeace’s solutions would put companies out of business, and perhaps that’s the goal. But it’s not a sustainable one for Greenpeace, because without the big bad companies to rail against, supporters won’t write checks. So, look for Greenpeace to continue its full-blooded fundraising effort via a half-hearted sustainability campaign.

Gavin Gibbons is the director of media relations for the National Fisheries Institute, the nation’s largest seafood trade association. As NFI’s spokesman, he has been featured in everything from the Washington Post to USA Today and has been the voice of fisheries issues on CNN, NPR, and the Fox Business Network. He is also a featured blogger for AboutSeafood.com andSeafoodSource.com.

from The Daily Caller
February 22, 2012

By Gavin Gibbons

On the surface it is easy to regard campaigns by the global environmental activist group Greenpeace as amusingly irreverent or, as PR Week, the trade magazine for public relations professionals, described one such recent attack against the toymaker Mattel, “compelling.” But if any news outlets would ever take a hard, scrutinizing look inside Greenpeace’s media relations tactics, they’d find a method rife with irresponsible harassment, inaccurate claims, and wildly unrealistic demands.

It turns out, for instance, that the broadside against Mattel was based entirely on Greenpeace’s misrepresentation of lab results that the activists claimed “show that packaging used by leading toy brands regularly contains Indonesian rainforest fibre.” But following that Greenpeace declaration and the fawning media coverage that resulted, the very lab that Greenpeace had enlisted denounced them as frauds. “We have not and are unable to identify country of origin of the samples,” the CEO of Integrated Paper Services, Bruce R. Shafer, said publicly. “We are unable to comment on the credibility of the statements Greenpeace has made regarding country of origin.”

The company that sourced the paper materials to Mattel, Asia Pulp & Paper, went even further, pointing out that some 95 percent of the packaging materials came from recycled paper and that the remaining 5 percent is sourced from environmentally certified forests around the world. So, not only was the paper environmentally upstanding, Greenpeace’s PR effort was, as AP&P put it, “completely unsubstantiated and false.”

A similar sort of attack by Greenpeace is currently underway against America’s most well-known canned tuna brands, each members of our trade association. Greenpeace is demanding, bizarrely, that all tuna be caught one at a time with a fishing pole. Seriously. Greenpeace has no answer for what this would cost consumers or the fuel, boats, and labor needed to pursue this antiquated method, one that could never hope to meet global demand.

And although Greenpeace insists it wants a “serious dialogue” on tuna sustainability, here are just some of the outlandish tactics they have been using:

● Posting online videos of violent and sexualized caricatures of the tuna companies’ cartoon mascots, all of which can be readily viewed by children.

● Manipulating unwitting people on street corners to place harassing, scripted phone calls to company switchboards.

● Dressing up a staffer in a plushy shark costume to accost parents and children in supermarket parking lots to tell them that “Nemo” may be killed.

● Encouraging their Facebook followers to place scripted robocalls to tuna companies, many of which include accusations of “rape,” “thievery,” “piracy” and assorted other threats.

Apparently that’s what passes for clever PR thinking at Greenpeace these days. But these are hardly exceptions. Recent campaigns of theirs against other companies have depicted popular children’s characters decapitating a tiger with a chainsaw, shooting a caged polar bear in the head, or having costumed children blown up from space by a “Volkswagen Death Star.”

But the tuna companies are taking a stand on principle. Along with conservationists like WWF and established governing bodies, we are taking part in the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation to protect the long-term viability of the world’s fisheries. Greenpeace, unsurprisingly, has refused a seat at the table.

That’s likely because causing immediate — and well-publicized — commercial harm to the companies they target is their real objective. That’s what gets them media attention, which translates into financial donations. Presumably it also strikes anxiety into future targets of Greenpeace bullying which, like the toymakers, are more likely to cave quickly than confront the accusations, no matter how patently false.

In the same issue in which Greenpeace’s destructive Mattel campaign was praised, PR Week editor Steve Barrett urges that “engagement, trust, and authenticity” ought to be core values, especially in “cause-related” activities. Readers might wonder when the magazine, or any other enterprising journalist for that matter, will apply those standards of examination to Greenpeace for a change.

But when we pointed out to Barrett that Greenpeace falsified lab results in the attack on Mattel — according to the very lab Greenpeace had hired — thereby deceiving the public (and, by extension, his own readers), Barrett was untroubled. “You can’t hide the fact that it got bucket loads of coverage — i.e., objective achieved for GP,” he wrote to us. “We don’t take moral/ethical/political stances … on the PR activities of campaigning groups.”

I somehow doubt the companies being fraudulently targeted would agree. But here’s another important public relations principle that we would encourage our fellow communicators to consider: Don’t let anyone stand between you and your customers with a threat.

For our part, we intend to speak directly to consumers about the ways in which self-interested, radical activist groups are co-opting the press in order to mislead the public about one of the most environmentally sound sources of protein and essential nutrients on the market. So far, it’s been going well. The feedback we’ve received from ordinary consumers indicates they are keenly aware how Greenpeace distorts the record and they know better than to listen to people who lurk in parking lots ranting at people. That anecdotal analysis is backed by a core piece of research: We know of no measurement showing that Greenpeace has the slightest impact on seafood sales.

Gavin Gibbons is the director of media relations for the National Fisheries Institute.

For the second time in less than a year, Greenpeace has been called out for exploiting an environmental charity façade, and more and more countries are seeing it for what it truly is, an international fundraising corporation.

First, Greenpeace was stripped of its charity status in New Zealand because the High Court deemed the global campaigning juggernaut overtly political after overwhelming evidence showed that its activities were clearly agenda-driven and politically motivated fundraising stunts.

Now, it has just been released that federal security services in Canada classified Greenpeace as a “multi-issue extremist” group. Greenpeace’s uncompromising and violent tendencies have become so radical that the Canadian government has determined it “pose[s] a threat to Canadians.”

Greenpeace Canada executive director Bruce Cox tried to defend the fundraisers by likening their actions to that of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

But when exactly did Mahatma Gandhi vandalize corporate offices, or when was it that Martin Luther King violated international maritime laws? Or when did either advocate dressing up as plush, Nemo-hunting sharks?

Gandhi and King led by example and dedicated their lives to overcoming social injustices. They did not manufacture crises, solicit people on the street to donate part of the pay checks, or waste millions of dollars so they could orchestrate outlandish and useless stunts. Greenpeace only dictates what it wants and bullies companies into submission. Not exactly the shining example of an international peacemaker.

Sorry Greenpeace, but the jig is up. And no one is falling for it anymore.

Greenpeace recently announced a U.S. supermarket chain it has ranked highly in its retailer rankings previously adopted a seafood sourcing policy that the activist group approves of. The new policy is solely based on how skipjack or light canned tuna is caught without the use of fish aggregating devices (FADs). FADs are a traditional fishing method that uses a float to attract tuna. Fishermen using FADs in the open ocean generally are able to harvest the tuna they are looking for 95% of the time.

Hoping to catch random schools of fish without a FAD does not significantly improve the health of tuna populations or the sustainability of ocean ecosystems. In fact it uses more fossil fuel and makes tuna supplies less reliable and consistent for retailers and their customers not to mention adds significantly to the cost of a can. But it does allow Greenpeace to claim to donors that its harassment tactics are having an effect and to keep giving.

And that’s the problem. Greenpeace’s demands are not based on the latest scientific research but rather what issues will ring the register and bring in donations.

Two weeks previously, one of Europe’s largest canned seafood companies announced a far more ambitious sustainability policy with a commitment to “100% sustainable tuna by 2017.” Yet Greenpeace attacked this commitment and questioned their motives. What is the difference?

Without a scientific basis or even a commonly understood definition of “sustainability” all fishing policies meant to appease Greenpeace are likely to be subjective and ever changing. They may or may not satisfy the pressure group depending on how well their fundraising campaigns are doing that day.

What should a retailer do? Let data lead the way. Science-based organizations such as the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) are quietly doing the hard work of improving outcomes of tuna and ocean ecosystems while Greenpeace is busy drafting and issuing press releases. All the major American canned tuna companies work with ISSF to improve sustainability. Not surprisingly, all of them are also under attack from Greenpeace.

When in doubt, it’s always wise put your trust in science and objectivity over emotional rhetoric and publicity stunts.

Greenpeace has been leaving dozens of harassing phone messages at tuna companies as part of their anti-tuna campaign. They frequently forget to hang up the phone and these recordings are a glimpse into the world of Greenpeace campaigner. This begs the question, If Greenpeace has so many committed members, why do they need to recruit people on the street to make calls for them.

Is it activism or panhandling?

By Mary Anne Hansan
The Washington Times
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), everyone will breathe a little easier in the new year, apparently, as the agency begins enforcing tougher emission standards on coal-fired power plants. It was a cause celebre for the Sierra Club and its inside-the-Beltway campaign “Beyond Coal,” which exposed Washingtonians to endless ads of coughing babies and tuna-fish sandwiches.

What’s the connection between power plants and tuna-fish sandwiches? There is none.

So what gives?

A tuna-fish sandwich is iconic – it evokes memories of brown-bag lunches, picnics and late-night snacks. In a word: wholesome. Which is why, perhaps, activists were quick to conflate it with “coal on whole wheat.” A Sierra Club executive told a reporter recently, “Mercury pollution from coal-fired plants affects us every day, from the can of tuna fish we eat to the air we breathe.”

It was a catchy quote, but entirely untrue.

For far too long, environmental groups have been given free rein to say whatever they want because we assume they have our – and our planet’s – best interests at heart. But increasingly, as in this case, their assertions fly in the face of sound scientific evidence, with reporters recording each one without question. So much for the old journalist creed: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

This is a very dangerous trend. The Sierra Club got a free pass when it plastered commuter rail cars and websites with advertisements designed to scare pregnant women into thinking a womb is a “reservoir of mercury” delivered simply by eating tuna. That’s patently false. Even worse, it hurts the very people it purports to protect: pregnant women and children. Study after study shows that babies need the nutrients in seafood for optimal development in utero.

Yet no one questioned the Sierra Club’s tactics, let alone exposed its ulterior motive – not the media, the EPA or even the Department of Health and Human Services, which issued the following recommendation in its latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans: “Eat atleast 8 and up to 12 ounces of seafood every week during pregnancy and breastfeeding.”

No one pointed to well-publicized research led by the National Institutes of Health, which concluded that children whose mothers eat no fish during pregnancy are 29 percent more likely to have abnormally low IQs.

No one looked to specialists with the Harvard School of Public Health, either, or its study that calculated that 84,000 people die each year because they don’t get enough of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish. Another found eating seafood once or twice a week could reduce the risk of coronary disease by 36 percent and the overall risk of death by 17 percent, concluding, “Seafood is likely the single most important food one can consume for good health.”

Clearly, no one spoke with experts at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), who found “confusion may have scared people out of eating something that is beneficial for them. People should not be scared about eating seafood.”

But the Sierra Club scared people with its lobbying campaign – inventing a narrative in its favor regardless of the consequences.

Let’s stop assuming that the environmental lobby always has our best interests at heart and start using our heads. The facts are clear and easy to find:

• Tuna is commercially fished from oceans – not rivers and lakes susceptible to industrial pollutants.

• All commercially caught fish contain trace amounts of organic mercury released from underwater vents and volcanoes – a natural phenomenon that has continued uninterrupted for millions of years.

• Trace amounts of mercury in the commercial seafood we eat are nearly identical to levels recorded over the past 100 years.

• Pregnant women aren’t eating nearly enough seafood. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average pregnant woman eats less than 2 ounces of fish per week – a paltry amount for her and her developing child.

When it comes to reading about human nutrition in the mainstream press, ask yourself why more and more quoted sources represent environmental organizations that are not registered dieticians, physicians or credentialed authors of peer-reviewed research. We would never take our car to a restaurant and ask the chef to rebuild the transmission, and yet by some strange voodoo, environmental activists are allowed to decide what is and is not healthy for us.

As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Good public policy should stand on its own merits, and there are far better ways to lobby for a cause than to jeopardize the health and well-being of pregnant women and children.

Mary Anne Hansan is vice president of the National Fisheries Institute.

In case you missed it this morning the LA Times featured a story about Greenpeace and its San Francisco warehouse filled with childish costumes and gear used to harass companies as part of various Greenpeace stunts. It’s a good look at just how much goes into the group’s fundraising.

The space is described as being half a football field long and packed with props; “For an organization that wants us all to live more lightly on Mother Earth, Greenpeace sure has a lot of stuff.”

Throughout the article the reporter describes banners, balloons, airships and a fleet of vehicles that are “jam-packed” into the storehouse and Greenpeace gleefully takes readers on a tour. But in a 1,300 word article the group only mentions the word science once. The activists appear too taken with their own ability to produce “spectacle” and “aw” to care much about substance. It’s a classic case of Greenpeace putting its fundraising style above actual substance.

Amongst the frivolity of costumed crusaders and inane street theater there is one comment that illustrates just how seriously out of touch with mainstream thinking Greenpeace is. The group calls tuna fishermen “terrorists.” Let’s stop for a moment and consider the comparison. Greenpeace believes the men and women who work the water fishing for tuna are akin to the evil network of operatives who murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians on September 11.

So out of touch is Greenpeace its leadership allows a comparison like that to stand without correction.

Sad.