No matter how often Greenpeace is invited to sit down with scientists, commercial fishermen, and even other ENGO’s like WWF, the world’s leading conservation organization, Greenpeace always finds a reason to decline the invitation.
Yet it has plenty of time to rally its members to harass tuna companies.
In one recent harassment ploy, Greenpeace directed its supporters to deluge American tuna companies with more than a hundred thousand similarly worded e-mail messages accusing them of “ripping up the sea,” among other things.
The tuna companies saw an opportunity for dialogue with these concerned supporters. If Greenpeace wouldn’t accept the tuna industry’s invitation to participate in an upcoming global meeting about tuna sustainability as they have done previously, perhaps they’d feel different if they knew their supporters wanted them to be part of the global dialogue and solution.
So the tuna companies appealed to the same Greenpeace supporters who wrote to their companies about their sustainability concerns and asked them to contact Greenpeace’s leadership about participating in the global conservation community at the next meeting of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) in Guam.
Apparently, more than one Greenpeace member thought that was a sensible request and e-mailed Casson Trenor, Greenpeace’s U.S. point person for its tuna sustainability initiative with the invitation.
But instead of embracing the invitation, Greenpeace got angry and refused. Embarrassingly, Casson Trenor resentfully tweeted, “tricking well-meaning people into spamming my inbox won’t help the oceans.”
This is astounding for two reasons. First of all, those “spammers” were Trenor’s own supporters, the very same people he had earlier played their emotions and directed to deluge the tuna companies with their sustainability concerns. And second, the e-mails in question were simply inviting Greenpeace to take a seat with the global environmental community and join in the serious tuna sustainability work already ongoing.
While Casson and his people sort out all its conflicting words and actions, people who are serious about tuna sustainability and not just fundraising are saving a place for Greenpeace at the ISSF meeting in Guam.
