Option: Traduction Juridique et Technique (JET)
EXAMEN D’ENTRéE EN DEUXIèME ANNéE – JUIN 2009
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Sharon Begley
The two sides of Greenpeace
NEWSWEEK / Published Apr 25, 2009 / From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009
The Greenpeace that the public knows has never met an environmental villain that it didn't want to make really, really miserable. So in the group's ongoing campaign to get Kimberly-Clark to stop using wood fiber from virgin forests for Kleenex and other paper products, activists have used a bus shaped like a box of Kleenex to block the entrance to one of the company's paper mills. Shadowing a marketing tour for the company's Cottonelle toilet paper, they have unfurled banners declaring the sites a "forest crime scene." But in 2007 the attacks got personal. As CEO Thomas Falk began a speech to an executive-education program at his alma mater, the Wisconsin School of Business, two Greenpeace activists switched his PowerPoint for theirs. Instead of a primer on Kimberly-Clark's success, the audience saw photos of the Canadian boreal forests that supply the company's wood, with before (lush trees) and after (a clear-cut moonscape) shots followed by a smiling Falk declaring, "It's all business as usual." After panicked organizers ordered everyone out ("There are activists in the building!"), the attendees trooped into a cafeteria where Greenpeace had placed menus for such delicacies as "songbird stir-fry," noting that half the songbird species in North America migrate to the boreal forests that supply Kimberly-Clark.
The Greenpeace the public doesn't know operates somewhat differently. A decade ago it formed a partnership with a German company to manufacture refrigerators that don't use chemicals called HFCs as their coolant (HFCs are greenhouse gases, now responsible for 17 percent of man-made global warming but on track to contribute as much as carbon dioxide). Greenpeace first got China's largest refrigerator-maker to produce Greenfreeze fridges, then one in Japan, then major Western manufacturers such as Whirlpool and Miele, with the result that 300 million Greenfreeze fridges are in homes worldwide. No sit-ins, no banners, no PowerPoint sabotage was required; just business deals. "If Greenpeace is going to ring the siren saying there is an [environmental] emergency," says Amy Larkin, who directs the group's Solutions campaign of working with businesses, "we better bring the ambulance. I'm proud of my colleagues who are climbing companies' smokestacks to unfurl banners, but we need every kind of action."