Meet the new head of Greenpeace

BOSTON — From battling apartheid to directing campaigns against climate change, Kumi Naidoo has dedicated his life to activism. Naidoo, 44, became the new international executive director of Greenpeace in November and immediately started agitating for strong measures to be agreed upon at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Growing up in apartheid-ruled South Africa, Naidoo led student protests against the racist regime. He was arrested numerous times for civil disobedience against apartheid in the 1980s. Naidoo was also an exceptional student and won a Rhodes scholarship in 1987 to study at Oxford University where he earned a doctorate in political sociology.

After the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, Naidoo returned to South Africa and continued his anti-apartheid activism. From 1998 until 2008, he was the general secretary of Civicus, an alliance for citizen participation around the world.

Naidoo worked on the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 that gained support from several celebrities and won widespread international coverage. Naidoo also campaigned against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and last year went on a hunger strike to dramatize the suffering of Zimbabweans.

After several years in the anti-poverty movement, Naidoo says that he sees that the struggles against poverty and combating climate change are inseparable.

In an interview with GlobalPost Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum, Naidoo describes his journey from anti-apartheid activist to environmental campaigner and spells out what Greenpeace hopes will be achieved at the ongoing Copenhagen conference on climate change.

GlobalPost: How did you make the link between anti-apartheid activism and environmental activism?

Naidoo: Starting out as an anti-apartheid activist 30 years ago and recently becoming part of an organization that focuses on environmental activism and climate justice seems completely natural to me as both issues are linked to human rights. Climate change will affect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people first. Having served as the chair for the Global Campaign for Climate Action for the past year, I am happy to have the opportunity to join Greenpeace as its international executive director. Greenpeace is one of the most important organizations when it comes to dealing with climate change.

GlobalPost: What does Greenpeace want to see at the Copenhagen conference on climate change?

Naidoo: The world needs world leaders to attend the U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen to agree a FAB treaty: a Fair, Ambitious and Binding "treaty." Not a "deal" or "agreement" but a "treaty" that will set us on the path to averting catastrophic climate change.

We need to see world leaders act with courage and conviction, to set aside their petty differences and the shallow short-term self interest. They need to come together and forge a deal that is in everyone’s best interest.

GlobalPost: What do you think are the three most pressing environmental issues right now?

Naidoo: Climate change, climate change and climate change.

Without a doubt if the world does not move to avert catastrophic climate change, its impacts will be felt throughout the planet. It will result in mass starvation, mass migration and mass extinctions. It will make poverty permanent in the developing world as it will hit the world’s poorest hardest and fastest. It will threaten the rain forests, change the composition of our oceans and increase desertification.

There are some 6.5 billion people on the planet and climate change will affect each and every one of them.

GlobalPost: What do you want to achieve at Greenpeace? And how will you do that?

Naidoo: I’d like to build on Greenpeace’s incredible history, its reputation for independence, its courage for tackling environmental crimes on the frontlines and its imaginative and creative campaigning.

I’d like to see it continue to expand in the global south as it has successfully done in recent years throughout Asia and now into Africa.

More and more I believe campaigning is about working with people rather than for them. Greenpeace has recognized that, especially in its pioneering online activism, using "cyber-activists" to join it in pressuring campaigns and governments to change. Check us out at the Greenpeace website.

This year Greenpeace has been part of the Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA), of which I am currently chair. It is an unprecedented alliance of civil society groups, faith-based groups and trade unions drawn together in the common cause of demanding a fair, ambitious and binding treaty to save the climate.

I’d like to help Greenpeace become more inclusive and work more with other organizations on the issue of climate justice. In the end we cannot change climate science, we must change the politics, and to do that our politicians need to hear from people everywhere that they want change not climate change.

Editor’s note: Here’s how Greenpeace introduced the world to its new director.