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This of course guaranteed sympathetic media for us, with blanket coverage of our protests, including our slogan rebranding BHP as Australia’s “Big Horrible Polluter”! This incident became the classic case study at PR conferences over the next decade in how not to respond to environmental protests.
    While our intentions were honorable and the company’s behavior clearly wrong, not to mention illegal, I often grimace in hindsight at the delight I took in confronting corporate leaders on national television and humiliating them with the evidence of their “corporate vandalism.” Many of these were decent people caught by surprise with rapidly changing public expectations.
    While most companies’ responses were incredibly naive, one corporate CEO, Dr. Michael Deeley from the chemical giant ICI, called one day and asked if he could come and chat with me (I was by this stage CEO of Greenpeace Australia). It was a surprising move, and I immediately agreed. ICI was a key target of ours, as their Sydney chemical plant was an appalling example of poor environmental practices.
    It was a fascinating meeting and started to shift my attitudes to the corporate sector and more broadly to the role of the market. It was a private meeting, and we were both candid about our situations. Deeley explained that while Greenpeace’s campaigns were an issue for him, the much larger challenge was getting his organization to change its attitude toward environmental issues and to give them more priority. He talked about the old guard’s attitude and the complexities of modernizing an old organizational culture.
    He was clearly a decent man, and while it didn’t stop us from campaigning hard against ICI over the years that followed, it certainly gave me an important insight into corporate behavior. It also made me think deeply about the dangerous psychology of “demonizing the enemy” as we had been doing to great effect. I understood he was coming to see me to avoid this, in his company’s self-interest, but I started to doubt the ethics of what we were doing as well. I thought perhaps we needed to focus more on attacking the behavior and less on attacking the morality of the people behind it.
    While I was still at Greenpeace Australia in 1992, one of the most important historical environmental conferences was held, the Rio Earth Summit. This conference came at a new high point in global political awareness of these issues and was attended by 108 heads of state, including George H. W. Bush. This conference started the process of global climate agreements with the adoption by consensus of a treaty agreeing to prevent dangerous climate change—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
    I have attended many such international meetings, including the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Kyoto in 1997, which led to the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Summit +5 in New York, also in 1997. These events are better understood as “festivals of debate” rather than meetings, with thousands of lobby groups of all persuasions battling for media and political attention on their particular agendas.
    They are also important examples of our immature global governance structures. They are generally great gatherings of the elite of environmental decision making, with business, NGOs, and government representatives getting together to lament the lack of progress—like a great collective confessional!
    When I attended the Earth Summit +5 review in New York in 1997, a special UN General Assembly meeting, world leaders got up one after the other and gave speeches on how appalling it was that so little progress had been made in the five years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It was a strange thing to witness, as the most powerful people in the world gathered but then behaved as if they were observers of the process and had little power to influence it. Five years later in 2002, the whole