GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Make Trouble and Change the World, with Steve Warshal
We sit down with Greenpeace veteran Steve Warshal to hear how bold actions, smart science, and sharp strategy turn radical ideas into real‑world results. Steve takes us inside the environment movement’s highs and lows, the cramped rooms where direct actions were weighed, and the quiet moments where patient resilience mattered more than headlines.
We talk about why legislation is the true endgame, how corporate “fear and greed” can be harnessed for climate progress, and what happened when Greenpeace launched a business‑facing newsletter that reframed sustainability as competitive advantage. Along the way, we revisit campaigns against CFCs, the Brent Spar showdown with Shell, PVC phase‑outs that centred human health, and the long road to a global oceans treaty.
Listen in for amazing insights from someone who has been there for some of the most iconic campaign moments of the last 40 years.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Goodgeist. A podcast series on sustainability. Hosted by Damla Eusler and Steve Connor. Brought to you by the DNS Network.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, hello everyone. You are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability, which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damler from Mira Agency Istanbul and This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester.
SPEAKER_02:This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated, and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
SPEAKER_01:So in this episode, we're going to talk with Steve Warshell, a lifelong environmental campaigner and a member of the Greenpeace Board and one of the driving forces behind Greenpeace business.
SPEAKER_02:So Steve created conferences and newsletters for Greenpeace for decades, which campaign on some of the biggest issues of our time, including for a ban on CFCs, tackle ozone depletion, probably to this day, and we'll get into this, Steve, I'm sure, one of the world's greatest campaign successes. And from the latest onwards, he had created seven annual Greenpeace business conferences and also held a series of business lectures at the RSA on green issues. So really amazing track recording. And in addition to all of that, Steve has also chaired the Greenpeace Environmental Trust since the late 80s. So Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Dammer and myself.
SPEAKER_03:It's a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_01:So, Steve, that's quite the resume there. And I think we may need more than 25 minutes. No, I don't think, I believe we will need 25 more than 25 minutes to hear about your work. But to kick things off, tell us about how you came to be such a passionate environmental campaigner. Where did your your journey start it?
SPEAKER_03:Okay, well, I'll start by saying here's my first admission. I've never really seen myself as a passionate environmentalist, more of a troublemaker. I grew up in Seattle during the civil rights anti-Vietnam era and always enjoyed challenging authority. We moved to London in the 70s, where I met Peter Melchit, who became chair and ED of Greenpeace UK. He asked me to join the board as someone who had more practical business experience on communicating with corporations, government, and questioning their methods and operations. That's how it all started.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. I wish we had a time machine so we could be there, Steve.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So so that's how it began. Just out of interest though. And what you brought you over to the UK from Seattle? What what brought you across the pond?
SPEAKER_03:Well, let's not talk about the arrest warrants.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my goodness. This will be my favorite episode ever.
SPEAKER_02:Issued to you against you, against others around you.
SPEAKER_03:I'm I'm kidding. We were my wife and I were adventurous. We wanted to get out of Seattle. She was very anti-Nixon, and we had friends here. Let's have an adventure. Oh great. That was in 71, and we're still here.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, amazing. Amazing. Well, so uh tell let's get into the Greenpeace story a little bit. So you joined the Greenpeace board just after the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, which is that this incredibly pivotal moment. So then you saw it grow exponentially and become this household name all over the world. Super inspiring. I think it's fair to say, Steve, it it was one of the first things that inspired me to become an environmentalist. Um, you know, thank God someone's making waves was this like clarion cry. And what was that time like? And can you give any insights as to how you feel Greenpeace captured public imagination so well?
SPEAKER_03:Sure. Well, first of all, let me go back a step. Greenpeace was set up in 71, and our early campaigns were based on the continuing principle of bearing witness for a global audience. So we were alerting the world to, for example, the damage done by nuclear testing in Alaska and the South Pacific, and of course, the atrocities of killing whales worldwide. So those pictures and our new kind of fresh, innovative way of campaigning struck a chord. Well, we went along slowly, slowly, slowly. Then, boom, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. And at that time, the membership and interest in Greenpeace just skyrocketed. But our office in London was tiny. There were maybe three or four people. You know, it was it was not up at the top level. So as we expanded, and I joined the board, we wanted to ensure that our campaigners were as confident and knowledgeable as the companies and government agencies we were facing. We wanted to be at the head table. We had our campaign campaigners, we had a strong scientific unit. And as our membership increased, consumer strength became an additional important part of the campaign arsenal. But we were always focused on corporate wrongdoing, changing their behavior and how we could fight for the most important thing, government legislative implementation. We're not going to go anywhere if government legislation doesn't help us out. There, that's the start.
SPEAKER_01:Well, talking about the 70s and the Nixon and anti-W uh Vietnam anti-war movements and then the ozone depletion and all of that also shows that we can make change in the darkest of hours. Because for the last two years, Steve and I and people like us, we've we do feel the darkness, and we also see the darkness as you know it. But this, those stories are still inspiring today, especially when we think of the urgent need for climate action at the moment. And on the other hand, we are in a very different world, and leaders are dragging their feet when it comes to climate action. So linking those two times together and the movements together, can you tell us the similarities and the differences and how to make change happen?
SPEAKER_03:Well, um, first of all, I remember in the 80s, we had two of our campaigners, one was a Dutch campaigner. They were being sent to jail for doing some action, trespassing in some way. And that was a huge, my God, this has never happened. But it did happen, and it survived, it made us stronger. And as I say later, you know, you just have to be more creative in how we how we go about our campaigns. And in 2013, we were bearing witness in Russia against uh Gazprom. Russia threw 30 of our campaigners in jail. So, you know, this is not something that is new, but I look at it as waves, waves in the ocean. You're on a high, we've been on a high for since the 70s, the environmental movement. And all of a sudden, bam, we've got a dip. Don't take it as the last the last step. Keep on trucking.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Well, uh, before we pick on that, I mean, i I think um it's amazing how often I reflect on how really important change takes time, doesn't it, Dave? And I think for those of us who are campaigners for really big changes, patience is a really critical part of our arsenal, our resilience. But before we go back into that, and I want to we're gonna talk about optimism in a moment and Greenpeace business, because it'd be lovely to talk about that. But just from what you just said then, could we just get a little insight into the debates that were had at Greenpeace around that time? You know, people being thrown in jail because of actions against Gazprom and direct action, sort of and and how what kind give us a glimpse. What was the conversation like in that tiny packed office as you're deciding where to take action, what responsibility to take? It must have been so fascinating.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you know, some of the some of the first of all, the Gazprom thing was in 2013, so that so that one was way back. But but you know, at the time in the 80s and 90s, we were allowed to do kind of whatever we wanted and get away with it. You could climb Nelson's column and get front page news. You know, you could do a lot and and be considered innovative. We chased BP, which I'll go into, and Shell and thought we were getting them on side as a total energy distributing producing company. And they said, yes, yes, yes, sounds like the right thing. Didn't we? You know, it's always you're just trying to make a difference, and quite often a step, two steps forward, wham, a step back. You can never expect. We we did a uh a newsletter in the 90s, in the late 80s. Thatcher wanted to uh privatize the nuclear industry, which we're totally against. So we started writing to the city saying, look, this is one of the worst investments you could ever consider. So we hammered, hammered, hammer. Finally, they said, Hey, Thatcher, we're not doing it. And we said, hey, we've won forever. No, no, no. Here they are back again. And you've got the issues of AI and cryptocurrency who need more electricity. So watch this space. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I will pick up and download them back to you, but I will pick up on the BP story and and the rhetoric John Brown was so vocal at the time, wasn't he, about taking BP in a different direction. But let's turn to Greenpeace business, Steve. And it's a fascinating p period of Greenpeace's history because it worked with companies, but also against them. I think that's so fascinating. So by that I mean there was a strong focus on campaigning, prosecutions, boycott calls, but you also had a strong message around solutions and achieving a competitive edge if you took environmental issues seriously. So it was a really interesting, fascinating development of Greenpeace. It was nuanced, it was a really careful balancing act. So tell us more about how you pulled that off.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, well, look, working against corporations, shareholders, and government inertia, as we all know, that's a challenge. What we wanted to do is not just say in our campaigns, don't do this, stop doing that. You know, we so I had had experience in the business newsletter world and wanted to create this thing called Greenpeace business. First of all, it's a total juxtaposition. Greenpeace and the word business. They didn't work normally, but we said this is what we want to do. And it was an insider newsletter to show why our plans and our strategies and our ideas would benefit companies, it would improve their profitability, provide that competitive edge, strengthen employee allegiance, you know, all this corporate talk. And really, our solutions-oriented approach, which we were working on, and it was written in more business than campaigning language, it focused on what I think are the two major corporate motivators fear and greed. That's how it got started.
SPEAKER_01:So this also shows us about the importance of framing the talk and framing the campaign with the words, with your audience. As we discussed, so are there any campaigns that you think that nailed it? And oh, these are my stars for the campaigns.
SPEAKER_03:Sure. Well, I've got four or five little things that have happened that I'll try to go through. First of all, I remember when we were campaigning to protect the ozone layer. This is the CFC world. And we had we started our first meeting with ICI, who are the major manufacturers of CFCs in 1986. And we did all our, you know, all our work, all our research, et cetera. And we sat down and said, here are real practical alternatives to CFCs. And they looked at us, totally rejected it. And, you know, it wasn't the first time that Greenpeace had been accused. Not knowing what we're talking about, being naive, not understanding business. Well, eventually, ICI and other companies followed our lead, and the Montreal Protocol was adapted, adopted in 1987. But that, but that wasn't all of it. We then had to, our German office created something called Green Freeze, which was a CFC, no, I think it was HFC, one of the other things, HFC free refrigerator, and showed the world, look, here's another example. This was about seven or eight years later. This is another example of how you can you can protect the ozone layer. And finally, a lot of other companies joined us and said, hey, you're smart, you know what you're doing, it'll make money for us, blah, blah, blah, win, win, win. So there it was. So that that was a big thing, and it actually is dropping a little. But let me go on to a few other things. Renewable energy. I know people are saying it's not enough now, but when we started, it was nothing, it was a big zero. So it, you know, I think it it's moved us up a level. And if you remember talking about BP, at one stage they heralded their oil company as beyond petroleum. And they set up a renewal energy operation. And Shell did as well. But look, as we know, it didn't last long. And it's a perfect example of why we got to keep the pressure up. You know, what you're reading now is they are more fossil fuels are being created every day. So Okay, that's uh now protecting the seas. So in the late 80s, we had our first successful prosecution against a company in the north of England, Albright and Wilson, for polluting the Irish Sea. They were doing the standard, dumping all their sludge just into the river off of a pipe. So we worked hard and we finally got that victory. And in 1995, the Brent Spar campaign stopped Shell from dumping old oil rigs into the sea. So those are, you know, two big things to protect the sea. And fast forwarding just last month, there's a new global oceans treaty that's now been ratified by at least 60 countries, so that can go into effect. But at one level, I look at it and say, it's taken 20 years to get this thing going. But on the positive side, never give up. Never give up. You can move on. Forest destruction. We had these wonderful, this wonderful campaign in the early 90s against Macmillan Blowdell, one of the big timber giants in Canada, to stop them from destroying the ancient rainforests in British Columbia. And looking back, Time magazine gave Greenpeace their Environment Campaign of the Year Award in '99 for our work in that great bear rainforest. But for all that work and all of them, they were a recalcitrant company. They didn't want to play ball with us ever. We're still fighting in the Amazon. PVC campaign. That was another good one. We eliminated some toxic chemicals that affected human health and sperm count. That was a big thing at the time. And uh so now it's banned in toys, Nike banned it in their trainers and myriad of other products. And finally, looking back, we were campaigning to create this world park in Antarctica, which has now banned mining and oil drilling indefinitely. So, you know, I know we're in trouble now and we're looking at the dark side, but these are small but significant bits of progress that have jumped jumped our level. So we're we're much better off than we were 40 years ago, but but still stuff to do. So let me s just summarize this. We still need these vital ingredients for all these campaigns. Solutions-oriented approach, consumer interest and strength, which could impact their corporate profits, and again, government legislation. And what what we've learned on these campaigns, just asking entrenched corporates to do the right thing never works.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I know. Well, you said right at the outset, Steve, it's the you the big campaign was always for legislation and not just a little bit of greenwashing on the side. But before we I I think we're Damlin might ask a question in a moment about sort of that stock take of where we are now and and and where we're where we sit as the environmental movement today. But before we get into that, just one quick reflection from you. The I know you you started this podcast by saying you you weren't, or you didn't consider yourself a passionate environmental campaigner, but just somebody who wanted to make trouble. Which is great. But emotionally, what would you, having been through all those campaigns and seen successes that no doubt sustained your optimism or belief that change could happen and and kept the momentum going, it must have been quite a roller coaster at Green Beast to see on this one we've been defeated, but on this one we've had a success. And how emotionally, as a campaigner, do you I guess you have to sort of put away those successes so that they can sustain you through the times when you're making less traction. Would that be true?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes, yes. I mean, you know, you can't you can't get upset if a company tells you to get lost. I mean, and and you know, we go after, you know, huge vested interests. The oil industry. We're looking at the meat industry as well now, and uh, you know, plastic producers, you know, that they have they have a lot more at risk. And yes, we can easily tell a company, look, put in a new thing and you won't have to use CFCs in your product. Alter the product a little bit. But if if we're asking people like the oil companies now to shut down their business and and uh the and all the stuff their shareholders need, it's just a long, long, hard thing. And you can't you can't be upset. You just have to find the little niche, the little angle that is gonna make them uncomfortable and do something for our interests.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, and so Samla, I've got one more do you mind? I know I'm the I'm hocking, I feel like I'm hugging the podcast this week. I'm really sorry. But Steve, just another quick personal thing. You started by saying that you know you bumped into this guy called Peter Melchit, and you must have encountered some amazing characters along the way through this General Greenpeace and all the campaigners you've met, and the environmentalists, and the authors, and the experts on things. Is there a complete you must have this cast of characters, all of whom are completely passionate about taking action?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, well, uh in the conferences that we ran, I was trying to get people from all over the world who had good things to say. One was a guy, Bill McDonough, who's uh who was uh more of an architect than anything else, and he helped Ford Motor Company become a little more environmentally aware by putting gardens above their factories. And there was a guy, Amory Lovins from Denver, Colorado, who had really good things to say. You know, you know, so you know, there's a lot of brilliant minds, but uh at the same time, we tried to invite people. We invited John Brown, we invited uh the head of Monsanto when we were having a battle on GM products, and uh, you know, it's they're they're willing to come to us and talk. That's are they are they gonna move? Are they gonna lie down? Not necessarily. And uh now we've we've got a big thing going on with Unilever, who we've had off and on battles with over the years, about their little, you know, the little plastic sachets, they make more than anybody, apparently. And at one level, we're doing demonstrations against them, we're talking against them, and then we turn around and sit down with their corporate executives as well, and figure out how we can move forward. So there's always a glimmer, there's always a glimmer of hope. Has to be. Has to be.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. I really don't want to say anything after that. So just final question, Steve. Our network is ironically called Do Not Smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place, or person always makes you smile?
SPEAKER_03:I love that question. Smile, let me think. Okay. What about what about hitting a great forehand that win that that's a winning point on the tennis courts?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Wait, I'm not done. What about my wife's acerbic quips? I always like what she has to say. And actually, I've got a third one. My grandchildren. Engaging and exuberant, and they're the ones who give me hope for our future.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that is the perfect note to end on, Steve. Hope for the future, via your grandchildren, and a perfectly executed forehand on the tennis court. Meanwhile, in the background, your wife is giving the cerbic quit. It's a perfect scenario. I love it. Oh, well, listen, Steve, it's been such a treat to speak to you. And I should say a big thank you to our colleague at Simpraxis in Greece, Alex, who suggested we we have a chat with you. Because once upon a time, he was in Greenpeace and he thought you'd be great to chat to. So thanks to Alex as well. But thank you most of all to you, Steve. It's been a great chat.
SPEAKER_03:And wonderful talking with you as well.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Goodgeist podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile Network of Agencies.
SPEAKER_02:And make sure you listen to future episodes where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, Damler, Steve, see you soon.
SPEAKER_00:Bye. Goodgeist. A podcast series on sustainability, hosted by Damla Eusluer and Steve Connor. Brought to you by the DNS Network.
