AMSTERDAM â Kumi Naidoo launched his life of activism as a teenager in South Africa's anti-apartheid movement.
From that historical battle he has gone to lead what many consider the world's leading exemplar of confrontational activism: Greenpeace International.
He now travels the Earth, campaigning for planetary emergencies such as global warming, environmental degradation and threatened species.
"Greenpeace is an organization that has real guts," says Naidoo, 49, speaking to USA TODAY at Greenpeace's headquarters on the outskirts of the Dutch capital in early March. "But we are also very aware that while we may win individual battles, our reading on the levels of urgency that exist on climate, oceans, forests and other areas suggests that we are losing the broader war."
Founded in Vancouver in 1972, the environmental group is often associated with elaborate acts of non-violent sabotage involving Japanese whaling ships or baby seal hunters. Some of its methods are controversial, and in 1985 French secret agents went so far as to bomb the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior at its dock to stop its crew from a planned attempt to disrupt a French nuclear test in the South Pacific.
Its backers say Greenpeace casts attention on problems that governments and corporations ignore or refuse to take responsibility for, such as the dangers of overusing the world's natural resources. Its critics say it goes overboard, opposing innovations such as genetically modified crops that they argue improve life for millions of people.
Naidoo says Greenpeace is essential to today's world.
"We are living in a world where many of the challenges we face can't be addressed by governments alone," he said in February during a lecture at the Oxford Martin School, a research center attached to Oxford University, in front of a mixed crowd of academics, students and fellow activists.
While talking, Naidoo projected four images onto a screen: Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi.
"History judges those who engage in peaceful, non-violent direct action," he added.
Six months ago, 30 of Greenpeace's campaigners spent two months in Russian custody on charges of piracy for attempting to climb an oil rig owned by gas giant Gazprom.
"It was old school Greenpeace tactics, but then they worked to make it into a big international issue," says Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has written on climate-related topics.
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The oil-rig incident was in the same vein as Greenpeace's undertakings that still see its campaigners regularly scale fences to unfurl a banner over, say, a Swedish nuclear reactor, or use a zip line to erect a giant poster at the headquarters of Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati to protest the company's use of a palm oil supplier Greenpeace says is linked to tropical forest destruction in Indonesia.
Procter & Gamble called the attack unfair, saying it uses little palm oil in products and is a member of Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. But it did promise to take additional unilateral steps to ensure its suppliers are not destroying tropical forests.
Greenpeace says it continually reflects on whether such high-profile theatrics are as effective today as they were in the early days of Greenpeace. Naidoo told USA TODAY in Oxford that "actions represent just a small part of what we do." He says that more time is spent on identifying, documenting and proving areas of extreme concern. Actions represent around 20% of Greenpeace activity.
"We were very edgy for decades," says Pascal Husting, Greenpeace's international program director. "It's absolutely obvious now that there are many more forms of activism out there, much of it less structured than we are, getting by probably with far fewer resources than we have, but that probably have similar impacts that we have," he says.
Husting says that while Greenpeace has become more efficient in business terms it may have "lost some of the mystery" that people have historically projected onto it. However he is adamant that as an organization it has not wavered from the guiding principle that "the optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought."
Greenpeace is also no longer a small group of anti-war protesters in a ramshackle fishing boat protesting nuclear weapons testing. It is a worldwide non-governmental organization with 3.5 million members that employs 3,000 people and has annual global revenues of over $300 million.
"Is activism changing? Yes, but it's changing in the right direction," Naidoo insists. "The biggest change is actually in the false dichotomy enshrined in the thinking around the world that to address the climate and other problems you have to be against development.
"How business engages with civil society is in some ways no different from a conventional relationship," Naidoo says. "Sometimes I
hear the CEOs of companies say they are entering into a partnership with Greenpeace because they had a one-hour meeting with us, but for me that meeting was a one-night stand â less than a one-night stand."
Naidoo has shared stages with statesmen such as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has assailed rock musician and anti-poverty activist Bob Geldof and the World Bank for not demanding that more of the money of wealthier nations be given over to impoverished African nations.
But those figures have also pushed back against Greenpeace for demanding ever more wealth transfers from the West, and opposing scientific advances in agriculture that use genetics to create new strains of grains and vegetables that can grow in harsh climates and reduce starvation. Greenpeace says such methods "exacerbate food insecurity by degrading soils, polluting water and fueling climate change."
"Greenpeace has become institutionalized and professionalized," says Mary Kaldor, a professor of global governance at the London School of Economics.
She says that it and organizations like it are now able to talk the same language as politicians, which is a break from the past.
"But that just shows the environment is more important than it was before and that at least part of its agenda is being widely accepted,' Kaldor says.
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