Greenpeace Foundation is an environmental organization based in Hawaii. It was officially founded in 1976 as an independent offshoot of the Canadian Greenpeace Foundation and was the first Greenpeace in the United States. When the original Vancouver-based Greenpeace Foundation later evolved to Greenpeace International the Hawaii-based Greenpeace Foundation declined to join them, and remains an unaffiliated organisation. The greenpeace movement grew out of the "peace" and "environmental" movements in the early '70's. Back then, it looked quite likely that the planet was going to be subjected to a nuclear war, and the Canadian "Don't Make a Wave" committee formed to protest US atmospheric nuclear testing at Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands, and later the French atmospheric testing at Mururoa in French Polynesia. The phrase "green peace" was used as a slogan to describe the ideals of those activists, who envisioned a healthy (green) and peaceful (peace) planet as a Good Thing. By about 1973, the phrase had been shortened to a word, Greenpeace, and an organization called "Greenpeace Foundation" was established in Vancouver, Canada. It was this ragtag group of idealists and visionaries who first did an at-sea protest of whaling in 1975, and conducted the high-profile campaign against the clubbing of baby harp seals off Newfoundland beginning in 1976.
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)