Rick Hind

Greenpeace ambushes logging boats off the coast of California. Greenpeace chains itself to environmentally unfriendly cargo. Greenpeace hoists contraband banners onto oil tankers. Greenpeace infiltrates toxic waters with warnings to nearby citizens. Greenpeace spars with Norweigan whaling ships in the North Sea.

Greenpeace does not compromise or surrender. Yet, somehow, this militant 27-year-old environmental organization manages to bring Goliaths like Nike, the International Whaling Commission, and Lego to their knees.

Legislative director Rick Hind says the premise and process are simple: Remain reasonable, open-minded, and helpful, but never, ever sacrifice your principles. Read on to find out how one of the world's most impassioned organizations finesses its adversaries, yet never grants a concession that will undermine its message, mentality, or mission.

How do you define conflict and conflict resolution at Greenpeace?

Greenpeace doesn't have classic conflict resolutions. It's more like a political resolution, where Congress agrees on compromises every day after negotiating severe differences. And usually the most successful point is after the first negotiation, when people realize, "Hey, they weren't so bad after all." The trick is not to get greedy.

In some ways, it's more difficult to negotiate about environmental issues, because we are talking about principles as well as timing and costs. If someone says, "Okay, it's going to take me five years to change because I can't recover my capital investment in less than five years." We can understand that, but some companies make up those numbers, so we have to check out everything. As Ronald Reagan used to say in regard to the Russians, "Trust but verify."

Where do you encounter the most conflict in your work?

We are in a lot of conflict situations with the PVC manufacturers, like Dow Chemical, who make the building blocks or basic chemical ingredients for this kind of plastic. The big users of plastics, such as toy companies, sportswear companies, or manufacturers of building products, don't need to use PVC -- they just don't know that yet.

So we're making strides with these people. For example, Nike was looking at a whole array of more sustainable environmental materials for all of their products and discovered that they should phase out PVC use not just for shoes, but for their buildings as well. They announced last year that they will phase out the use of PVC in their sportswear materials, like shoes, and then they will open a new headquarters in Europe that will be PVC free. Most PVCs are used in building materials like siding, window frames, plumbing, vinyl flooring, vinyl wallpaper. And all of those have safer substitutes. So a company like Nike was very motivated by those life cycle issues.

A company like Lego, probably the second largest toy maker in the world, was motivated by safety -- what children put in their mouths. PVC contains a lot of toxic additives that other plastics don't have in the same large quantities. So we are moving from conflict with the manufacturer to cooperation or negotiation with plastic users who want to keep using plastic. And Greenpeace isn't necessarily against that. We're trying to guide them to look at the alternatives.

Greenpeace's own credit card is made of a wheat-based polymer. And we think that the future of plastic is to use sustainable natural materials. In fact, that's the origin of plastic, some of the earliest flooring was linoleum, made from linseed oil. Cellophane is made from cellulose, wood fiber. So there's alternatives out there that are not petroleum, or chlorine-based that new technology is pursuing. Even big companies like Dow are seriously pursuing vegetable-based plastic.

We've learned, and this is true in many areas within the environmental movement, that change occurs more rapidly through marketplace movement than through regulation. We are also recognizing that not only do companies want to be green, they also want to save money.

What tactics do you use to introduce companies to these new ideas so they are not put on the defensive, so they will take a look at their procedures and possibly change them?

The first thing we try to do is start out reasonable. In the case of the toy industry, for example, we first met with the whole toy industry before we made a public campaign out of vinyl toys. The toy industry trade association was the only place we were given an opportunity to meet with them, so we were talking with the toy manufacturers association instead of individual companies.

And two meetings -- one in New York, one in London -- resulted in foot dragging and stone walling. So that's when we began our own testing of toys and publicizing of toy additives, like lead. At that point, after that publicity began to occur two years in a row, we began to see companies, individually, who were interested in talking with us privately. So we pursued that.