By Anne Casey
Since the beginning of the year, Greenpeace activities have taken on a new direction for the organisation. The Cities and Coasts Campaign was launched with the Rainbow Warrior Solutions Tour, which began in Perth in January. Focusing on clean water, fresh air and healthy land, the campaign aims to show that cities can be made sustainable and oceans and rivers restored.
Greenpeace cities and coasts campaigner Karla Bell sees the effort as "juxtaposing problems and solutions. That's where we differ from the past. The first 20 years we were really just highlighting a range of problems which we hoped government and industry would resolve.
"But we came to the conclusion that they don't know what to do. They know what the problem is, but it seems we've had to play a leadership role too in terms of where the solutions are coming from."
The campaign arose out of Greenpeace's previous campaign around public transport. "The major issue here was that it wasn't a simple thing to just be anti-car, because the alternative public transport wasn't available.
"The big issue really is the Roads and Traffic Authority. They have a huge budget compared to rail, and it's really up to the government to shift its focus and reallocate resources. They dream up bridges and freeways and tollways, but there's no accurate assessment of the impact of this approach."
Bell sees this question of city form as essential. "The kind of city that we have is very much an American-style city which has come about during the postwar period — very sprawled out, very car dependent. This meant that when we started to look at solutions to transport, we had to look at the whole ecological sustainable development way of looking at cities.
"This required looking at solutions not only to transport, but energy, waste, water and also biodiversity — maintenance of plants and animals."
Hence the campaign promotes public transport strategies which both reduce global warming and air pollution and equitably meet people's needs.
"Transport is the most important aspect of a city — it's the backbone. We need public transport, heavy rail and light rail systems, around which urban development occurs. This means developing urban villages around transport corridors. This is happening to some extent in Sydney, but only medium and high rise densities are being considered; they're not actually looking at creating a social environment.
"These small villages would have the infrastructure of schools, hospitals and educational facilities. They would use energy-efficient solar systems and would look at waste water recycling. So, through urban redevelopment would come the opportunity to incorporate all of the solutions that the Cities and Coasts Campaign is promoting. It's very much an urban campaign about solutions to urban issues of water and air pollution and waste."
These are some of the principles incorporated into Greenpeace's jointly winning design of the Olympic Village for the Sydney 2000 Olympics bid. Greenpeace sees this as an opportunity to build a green housing development to its own specifications and thus have a showpiece example of the changes it is talking about.
There is disagreement with this approach from many who are opposed to the Olympic bid. Says Bell, "Greenpeace is not actually endorsing the bid. We're endorsing the environmental guidelines developed in conjunction with the bid.
"It wouldn't matter if it was Expo or a large corporation or government department; we need somebody who's prepared to put these ideas into practice. It just so happens that it's the Sydney Olympic bid who said yes, we'll give it a go."
While there are no other corporations willing to
develop such a huge project along these principles, the relationship remains. Bell describes this relationship as "very pragmatic."
Cleaner air is another priority of the campaign. Most cities in Australia experience smog. Sydney, our largest city with a population of 3.5 million (expected to reach 4.5 million within 10 years), is the worst off.
Sydney collects smog in a geographic basin similar to Los Angeles, and air quality has deteriorated significantly in the 1960s and '70s. Sydney's air pollution is now two-thirds as bad as Los Angeles and parallels New York for severe peak ozone concentrations. Brisbane, the fastest growing Australian city, is set to equal Sydney for poor air quality within five years.
As well as urban issues, the campaign takes up our coastal regions and aims for the introduction of effective coastal protection to stop the pollution and exploitation of the sea.
Plastic and other marine litter kills an estimated 2 million sea birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals, including rare and endangered species, every year. Plastic is the main offender because it is so durable.
Marine wildlife becomes entangled in the rubbish or swallows it, often resulting in slow and painful deaths. Plastic bags can be mistaken for jellyfish by endangered sea turtles, and the turtles die from starvation with only plastic in their stomachs.
"We want to protect marine species and keep the quality of water as best we can. The biggest impact on the coastal environment is due to land-based sources of pollution — sewerage treatment plants, ocean outfalls, urban run-off, plastics that get into waterways, oils and chemicals. A lot of managing the coastal environment is about development, which is why Greenpeace has gone through transport and energy and now we're moving on to water and waste."
The Cities and Coasts Campaign encourages green buying power through the development and use of green
products and services. This links in with the general push Greenpeace has been making into the area of green brokering.
"Green brokering", says Bell, "is really about making industry and government able to adopt certain technologies through the work that we've been doing — getting them in touch with, and promoting certain types of, technologies as being the ones that they should be running on."
One such technology is the fridge, Greenfreeze, developed in east Germany, which does not use ozone-
destroying chemicals like CFCs and HCFCs.
In 1992 Greenpeace Germany discovered that the eastern German company DKK, which had been making the fridges for 50 years, was about to go out of business. Greenpeace could see the potential and brought together the company and scientists to save the Greenfreeze prototype.
Since then DKK has been saved from liquidation, and a group of British, German and Kuwaiti investors formed a new company. As a result, all the other major European manufacturers now produce a propane-butane fridge.
"We are looking at the cutting edge technologies in all of the areas of energy, waste, water and transport which can achieve the Greenpeace goals. These are very stringent goals — we always aim for zero emission or total phase out of, say, ozone-
depleting substances.
"In order to achieve those goals, we have to encourage technologies which are moving in those directions to come on line. So it means having creative partnerships. We don't endorse products or companies but we endorse generic solutions like solar energy and promote useful technologies."
The campaign is likely to go international, since the same problems are being experienced in cities and coastal regions around the world. Greenpeace sees the solutions as similarly generic.
Says Bell, "Now that Clinton has said he will sign
the Biodiversity Treaty, which will stabilise greenhouse emissions by the year 2000, paper targets are becoming real targets. The next wave of technologies will all be environmentally friendly. We have an opportunity, through such ventures as the Olympics, to get these technologies up and running.
"It's all about jobs — a lot of these technologies are more labour intensive. It's about all new technologies which the younger generation will have to learn. The government's got to get serious about recognising that there's all these employment opportunities and that we don't have a lot of time. We could have a foot in the door."