Greenpeace's account of its mission to board and occupy an enormous oil-drilling rig in the middle of the Pacific evoked a familiar image of daring environmental activists confronting determined opposition from a corporate titan. The six people who used ropes and harnesses last week to scale the Royal Dutch Shell rig from inflatable rafts dodged "jets of water from high-powered hoses aimed at them by the rig's crew." There was only one problem: The encounter involved no hoses. In fact, as a later clarification from Greenpeace made clear, the activists met no resistance at all.
It was a small but telling slip-up for Greenpeace, which has been mired in an internal debate over how far to go to capture the public's attention at a time when its traditional stunts often seem familiar. Many corporate targets are now savvy enough to avoid the confrontations that hand Greenpeace camera-ready scenes to generate publicity and support. "It's no longer maybe the mind-blowing tactics that it was in the '70s or '80s to go out and take some pictures," says Laura Kenyon, a Greenpeace campaigner who participated in the latest effort to shadow the Artic-bound Shell rig across the Pacific. "People now expect things from Greenpeace."
It seems scaling a moving oil rig in the middle of an ocean isn't enough to guarantee attention. The activists managed to spend almost a week aboard Shell's Polar Pioneer before departing over the weekend. In that time Kenyon's colleagues set up camp, unfurled a "Save the Arctic" banner, and shot videos of themselves. Shell made no physical attempt to dislodge the Greenpeace team—some crew members could be seen waving to them. Shell sought a restraining order to keep the activists away, and a federal judge in Alaska granted the measure on April 11.