Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand - History

History

Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand was founded in 1974, two years after the original Greenpeace, to protect the natural environment.

Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand emerged from an amalgam of 1960’s and 1970’s NZ peace groups and activists, who had for a decade been actively promoting their opposition to the Vietnam War and nuclear testing. In particular, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (NZ) who were nationally campaigning against French nuclear testing in French Polynesia since 1961, culminating in a 80,238 signed petition presented to the New Zealand Government in 1962 demanding they take punitive action against the French to enforce a nuclear test ban in the pacific. Other groups in the peace collective included the NZ Peace Media, NZ Friends of the Earth, the Auckland Peace Squadron and Project Jonah.

There were two key developments in the New Zealand peace movement in 1974. The first was the official formation of the Greenpeace Foundation of New Zealand in April through the union of a collective of peace groups and their supporters. The second was the decision to send the yacht Fri on an epic voyage around the Pacific carrying the peace message to all nuclear weapons states. Fri’s Pacific Peace Odyssey, a 25,000 mile adventure across the Pacific and Indian Oceans was partially financed and co-ordinated by Greenpeace New Zealand and would last till 1977.

Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand gained national prominence in the 1970s and 1980s for its action against nuclear testing in French Polynesia, and acquired huge public sympathy after the French bombing of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985. The long campaign against whaling championed by Greenpeace is an issue which has had the full support of the New Zealand Government since the mid 1980s.