Greenpeace: A history of confrontation

Several Greenpeace activists are being held in police custody in Murmansk for attempting to climb aboard a Russian oil rig in the Artic. The Russian authorities have accused them and more than 20 other protesters of 'organized piracy.' Greenpeace has been fighting the oil industry worldwide for many years - often with success.

On April 30,1995, nearly 30 Greenpeace activists climbed aboard the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea. The Shell oil company was planning to sink the decommissioned rig to dispose of it. The protest prevented it. In 1998, all the countries bordering the North Sea then agreed to only dispose oil rigs on land. But the roots of Greenpeace go back to the anti-nuclear movement.

In 1970/71 when the United States wanted to conduct nuclear tests on the Alaskan island of Amchitka, a protest movement evolved to oppose the plan. The activists called themselves "Greenpeace" and tried to penetrate the test zone in a ship with the same name. The attempt failed, but the name stuck, and Greenpeace became the best known environmental organization in the world.

Repeatedly, Greenpeace activists in the past have put life and limb at risk. During a protest in the South Pacific in 1973 against French nuclear tests on Mururoa Atoll, their ship, the Vega, was rammed by a French warship - and was followed by a fist fight with French soldiers. But, other Greenpeace actions were not so tame.

Protests against nuclear testing continued in the 1980s. In 1985, the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, was supposed to leave New Zealand for a protest on Mururoa Atoll. To prevent that from happening, a French secret agent blew a hole in the ship and sank it in Auckland harbor. The Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira drowned in that incident on July 10, 1985.

Since the 1970s, Greenpeace fought against the brutal clubbing of baby seals. Using spray paint, they made the seal skins worthless for the hunters. Greenpeace now views the seal hunt differently. The group supports hunters in Greenland, who kill individual adult animals of species that are not endangered. A total hunting ban threatened the livelihoods of seal hunters.

One of the biggest successes of Greenpeace was the end of commercial whaling after the implementation of an international moratorium in 1986. Countries that continue to ignore the ban - Iceland, Norway and Japan - are still the focus of perilous Greenpeace protests, like this one across the bow of a Japanese whaling ship.

In Britain, Greenpeace achieved a legal breathrough in 2008. For the first time, a court accepted climate protection as a legitimate reason for protests against climate damaging installations. In this particular case, Greenpeace was fighting against a coal-fired power plant in Kingsnorth. All the protesters were acquitted.

Greenpeace also made history in Germany. The occupation of a smokestack on the property of the Boehringer Chemical Company in Hamburg on June 25, 1981, was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. The factory manufactured insecticides and herbicides that contained highly toxic dioxins. Following the protest, guidelines were tightened in Germany and the factory had to close.

A major ongoing issue with environmental activists is nuclear energy. Greenpeace has repeatedly warned of the risks of this technology, like here at the Unterweser nuclear power facility in Nordenham, Lower Saxony, in 2009. In the wake of Germany's move toward renewable energies after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the Unterweser plant was shut down in 2011.

Greenpeace has conducted numerous protests against the transport of nuclear waste in so-called Castor containers to the Gorleben storage facility in Lower Saxony. Whether climate change, energy transition, or animal rights, there is still plenty to do around the world, says Greenpeace spokesman, Michael Hopf. But, the successes are both affirmation and motivation for continued protests..