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When Kumi Naidoo was approached to be head of Greenpeace in 2009 he was 19 days into a hunger strike, in an effort to draw attention to the plight of millions of Zimbabweans facing severe food shortages. The head of a South African community group, he was in pain, on liquids, and getting weaker by the hour. It was not the best time to think about moving to Amsterdam to run the world’s most recognised environmental organisation. But it took a threat from his 16-year-old daughter to persuade him to go for the job. “She said, ‘Dad, I won’t talk to you ever again if you do not consider it.’ Ten days later, still on liquids, I relented,” says Naidoo. “Yes, the head of Greenpeace needed a kick from his daughter. She is my fiercest critic.” Naidoo is now at the end of his six-year stint as head of Greenpeace and is preparing to head home to his native South Africa. His tenure has brought a very different focus to the group that had traditionally paid little attention to broader, cross-cutting issues such as human rights, health, development, peace and security. “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving. If we warm it up to the point where we cannot exist we’ll be gone, the planet will still be here,” he says. “It will be bruised and scarred by humanity’s crimes on it but actually once human beings become extinct, the forests will recover, the oceans will replenish. This struggle is fundamentally about whether humanity can fashion a way of mutually coexisting with nature and protecting our children and their children’s future.” When Naidoo took the job he was known not as an environmentalist but as a child, and enemy, of apartheid. Brought up in a township in Durban, he was expelled from school as a teenager and threw himself into the anti-apartheid movement. Several years later, accused of violating the state of emergency through his civil disobedience, he was forced to leave South Africa and sought refuge in a scholarship at the University of Oxford. As the first outsider and African to take the top job at Greenpeace, his appointment took on a symbolic resonance. He was seen as a man who could save the organisation from itself, build bridges and shape the international NGO into a people-focused, people-powered movement, rather than a heroic stalwart fighting on behalf of others. “The one thing that we wanted to shift is the idea that Greenpeace is going to save the world, that our activists – brave and courageous as we are – will come in, do an action, enrage public opinion and then changes will happen,” he says, “Today we want to campaign together with people, break the idea that people can outsource their conscience to us.” He says the green movement could learn a lot from the struggle against apartheid. “One of the great mistakes of the environment movement was to frame the climate debate as one about environment. “I was two weeks into the job in 2009 when the Copenhagen climate summit took place. I picked up the communique. I said, ‘This is a death warrant for most vulnerable people in the world. So why is there a lack of urgency – or is it because of the colour of the people who are facing the impacts?’ Why we won the battle against apartheid is because we built the broadest possible alliances. “We have to give a voice to people on the frontline. I do not believe that people like us of privilege should be given the greatest voice. We have to put our struggle on a war footing. Change became possible in South Africa when people believed change was possible. Today more and more people believe we can make the transition [to a carbon-free economy]. We haven’t reached that tipping point yet.” But becoming a people-focused movement has required some apologies. Greenpeace had become the bitter enemy of indigenous peoples in the Arctic for its unconditional stand against whaling – a small-scale but vital industry in Greenland – and its campaign against seal hunting in Canada. The group has since offered apologies to indigenous peoples and drawn a distinction between commercial whaling and that practised by the Inuit. In recent years, Greenpeace has kept its target firmly fixed on the Arctic, building a campaign that has attracted the support of 7 million people worldwide, including celebrities from the model Kate Moss to the actor Judi Dench. In September, it celebrated the its most significant victory to date when Shell abandoned drilling operations in the region, at a cost of $4bn (£2.7bn) to the oil company. The campaign has not been without sacrifice. In 2013, the Russian coastguard boarded Greenpeace’s ship in the Arctic and arrested its crew at gunpoint. The group of activists who were held in jail for two months became known as the Arctic 30, with the fight for their freedom set to be dramatised on the big screen by Lord Puttnam. Naidoo does not regret the decision to push ahead with the campaign in Russia, although on this occasion he stayed behind. “I made a judgment call that it was probably going to be OK, but obviously the politics in Russia had shifted by then. I didn’t think the Russian state would respond. As a famous American grandmother once said, if you’re going to make an omelette you’re going to have to break some eggs … The sacrifice they [the activists] made contributed to the whole world knowing the Arctic has to be protected.” Naidoo is to now bring together the two great struggles of his lifetime. He is determined to take the clean energy fight to South Africa, where the government is pushing ahead with an $85bn plan to replace its coal economy with a new generation of nuclear plants. Naidoo has described the challenge as one of the most pressing since the end of apartheid. Greenpeace has had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance.
