Greenpeace East Asia - History

History

Greenpeace East Asia's first China office was opened in Hong Kong in 1997. Early actions included a blockade of a shipment of electronic waste from Australia and a campaign highlighting the dangers of PVC in children's toys.

Before offices were formally opened in Guangzhou and Beijing in 2002, activists from the Hong Kong office ran several campaigns on the Chinese Mainland. These included investigations into electronic waste dumping in Guangdong province and a campaign to stop US-headquartered biotechnology firm Monsanto Company from patenting a Chinese indigenous soy bean variety.

Early mainland-based campaigns focused on food and agriculture and electronic waste. Since then Greenpeace East Asia has broadened its mandate into efforts to urge China's wood products industry to import environmentally sound timber, clean up its polluted rivers and lakes, and highlight the urgency of stopping climate change.

Read more about this topic:  Greenpeace East Asia

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
    —Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    “In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
    —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)