The Brent Spar campaign, detailed in The Turning of the Spar,4was a real strategy with critical paths at all the above three levels. It came some decades into a long-running Greenpeace campaign5 against ocean dumping. More recently, Greenpeace has focused on space junk, sea-disposal of the Mir space station, and carbon dioxide emissions, but it began with sea-dumping of nuclear waste.6
The focus on stopping the dumping of radioactive waste at sea was not because this was the worst or biggest part of marine pollution. You
Figure 4.4 A hypothetical anti-smoking campaign
Smoking free future
Ban smoking in public places Significant objective level – ‘campaign’ or major
intervention – can be planned for – strategy planning Mission level – why the organization exists
A Z
Ban smoking in UK Council offices Project management level – can be managed –
e.g. get message X to audience Y, then persuade Z of V …
can’t sensibly compare, say, nutrients, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), sewage or radiation. The topic was selected because it could be done, and because it was the least acceptable, most awful7treatment of the sea, and particularly reckless.
Greenpeace eventually got nuclear waste dumping ended, and moved to stop the dumping of industrial wastes at sea, securing a ban by the Oslo Commission in 19908 and worldwide under the London Convention in 1993. After that, it stopped the less obvious problem of incineration (such as toxic solvents) at sea, and won a prohibition on the dumping of nuclear submarines in 1989, and sewage sludge dumping in European waters in the 1990s,9 while POPs were progressively restricted. These fell under the Oslo and Paris Commission regulating the disposal of wastes in the North East Atlantic (OSPAR) convention. Greenpeace political director Remi Parmentier10saw it as the progressive elimination of the philosophy of
‘out of sight, out of mind’. At the largest political scale, Greenpeace sought to use the North East Atlantic, and OSPAR to set a precedent for how the seas ought to be treated worldwide.
In 1994, campaigners were told that the oil industry was about to test-drive a loophole that oil lobbyists had secured within OSPAR, which allowed sea disposal of obsolete offshore installations. This was despite the 1958 Geneva Convention ‘Law of the Sea’, which said that any offshore installations being abandoned should be entirely removed, and a political commitment to do so made when the North Sea fields were first developed.
As the oldest installation in the oldest field in the North Sea,11the Spar was a test case for the legal and industrial processes that would be used to dump much of the rest of the oil industry’s major waste problem.
So at the next scale down, stopping governments and the oil industry from taking the Brent Spar on a test-drive through the loophole became the objective of the campaign. Greenpeace determined that if political lobbying failed, it would use non-violent direct action to try and force the issue.
Industry sources said Shell planned to tow the Spar from its mid-sea moorings near the border of Norwegian–UK waters, to a deep-water Atlantic dump site west of Scotland, in the summer of 1995. The
‘weather window’ would open around May and close again by October.
Accordingly, the Greenpeace strategy was to occupy the Spar, on the assumption that if people were on it, then it could not be sunk.
Greenpeace had been invited to participate in preparatory meetings for a North Sea Ministers Conference.12There it raised the
anomaly of the oil industry exemption, and the Brent Spar.13In autumn 1994 it published a detailed policy paper by Simon Reddy, No Grounds for Dumping, making a call for oil installations not to be dumped.
Greenpeace expected it to be ignored, and it was.
At international meetings, the Spar case met no interest from any government. As late as March 1995, at an OSPAR meeting, UK civil servant Alan Simcock announced that he did not feel the need to answer questions from Greenpeace as it wasn’t a nation state. In February 1995, Greenpeace objected to the granting of the dumping licence, again expecting to be ignored by the UK government, which it was. Inside Shell, the head of public affairs circulated a self-congratulatory memo on how a potentially difficult exercise had been successfully negotiated. Later she recovered all but one of the memos and presumably shredded them.
At the end of April 1995, Greenpeace occupied the Spar,14under the bemused gaze of oil workers on nearby platforms.
E D C
B F
A
A Z
Clean seas No waste dumping in NE Atlantic – OSPAR region radwaste
Solid
waste Oil installations 95
Brent Spar Example
hazchems within a generation
Notes: At the highest strategy level, oil installations were the third of three campaigns, starting in the 1970s with radioactive waste dumping. The political strategy framework for the campaign to stop dumping of oil installations was the ‘OSPAR’ convention. The long term aim of the entire sequence of campaigns was to help achieve clean seas
Figure 4.5 Evolution of Greenpeace anti-dumping strategy
Greenpeace’s favoured alternative was to scrap the Spar at the Norwegian fjord where it had been assembled. That had been the original plan15of Shell/Esso, the owners, and that was what eventually happened.
The Greenpeace plan was to use the occupied Spar as a platform for pirate radio, with which to broadcast to Europe about environmental issues during the North Sea Ministers Conference in Esjberg. By making the source dramatic, they hoped to make the message much more interesting. The radio station never came about, but the dramatization worked better than anyone expected.
The occupation escalated into a major physical, legal and political confrontation, culminating in the removal of dozens of protestors over a period of several days. Then Shell blew the anchor chains and tried to start towing the Spar towards its dumping ground, just as the North Sea Ministers Conference was about to begin. By this time, German church groups had spontaneously started a boycott of Shell petrol, soon supported by many newspapers, radio stations and millions of consumers all over Europe. Many governments called on Shell to
Figure 4.6 Original critical path project plan for Brent Spar
Greenpeace re-boarded the Spar, were removed and re-boarded it.
From 30 April to 20 June the campaign involved more or less continuous, very visual direct actions, backed up by political lobbying, media furore and consumer boycott. One UK newspaper described it as the ‘mother of all environmental battles’.
In terms of a critical path, the Spar campaign was planned as a series of events, working around three key points in time: when towing could begin, when it had to end by, and in between, the political meeting of North Sea ministers.