SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton — June 7, 2016 — A major lawsuit against Greenpeace by a Forest Products company has a lot of resonance for the seafood industry, especially regarding whether damages can be awarded if Greenpeace deliberately mis-states facts.
Resolute Forest Products, a Montreal Company that is one of the largest producers of newsprint, pulp, and other paper and wood products in the world, has sued Greenpeace over its multiyear campaign called Resolute: Forest Destroyer.
Our industry members should read the entire case document (here). It lays out a familiar pattern.
- Greenpeace and various Forest Products Companies come to a landmark agreement regarding better forestry practices and measures to reduce impacts on Woodland caribou, whose populations are declining in Quebec and Ontario.
- The cooperation does not support Greenpeace’s fundraising model, which depends on conflict and targeting specific companies to raise donations.
- Greenpeace blows up the existing agreements, and pressures certification organizations to withdraw compliance certificates.
- Greenpeace goes to customers with a campaign of intimidation, saying that if they continue to do business with Resolute, Greenpeace will attack their brand.
Best Buy, Proctor and Gamble, Hearst Newspapers, the European Publisher Axel Springer, Rite-Aid, Home Depot, 3-M, Kimberly Clark and others all were targeted by Greenpeace to stop doing business with Resolute.
Initially Best Buy refused, but its website was hacked on Black Friday (the biggest online shopping day after Thanksgiving) in 2014, and over 50,000 people posted false and misleading product reviews claiming Best Buy supported ‘fueling the destruction of the Canadian Boreal Forest. ”
The next month, Best Buy informed Resolute that they would no longer buy from them.
The total cost in lost business has been well over $100 million from three companies alone: Best Buy, Rite-Aid, and 3M, according to a Greenpeace document.
Resolute charges that Greenpeace fits the definition of a racketeering organization because a number of groups and individuals (Greenpeace International, Greenpeace Canada, Greenpeace Fund, Greenpeace Inc., etc make false statements, threats, and take other actions with the purpose of securing donations under fraudulent purposes.
Resolute says that Greenpeace needs to “emotionalize” issues rather than report facts to generate sufficient donations that its bloated and ineffective operations would not otherwise generate. They give numerous examples, including an accidentally released internal statement calling for the insertion of an “ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID”, in a public report.
Resolute says well over 60% of GP-Inc’s annual revenues go to the six-figure salaries of its executives and the salaries and benefits of its other employees. A whopping 94% of revenue is consumed by salaries and administrative and fundraising expenses, including office expenses, IT, travel, lodging, conferences, and telemarketing expenses.
That is to say, far from an organization that actually does things to improve the environment, Greenpeace is fundamentally a fundraising organization that raises funds to pay its leaders and continue raising more funds.
Resolute argues that because funds raised to ‘save the boreal forests’ are not used for a public purpose, but instead to maintain the enterprise, the use of threats, false statements, and intimidation fit the definitions of the American Racketeering and Corrupt Practices act.
The heart of the case is that Greenpeace’s claims against Resolute are false, and were made for the purpose of generating emotional heat that would result in massive donations.
For example,
“Resolute is not a “destroyer” of the Boreal forest in any possible sense of the word, and cannot in any way be accurately characterized as such. Less than. 5% (. 005) of the Canadian boreal forest is harvested annually, and five times as much is lost due to natural causes including insects, disease, blowdowns, and fire. Due to planting and regeneration efforts, there is zero net loss from logging in the Boreal Forest.
“Resolute has received numerous awards and recognitions for its responsible and sustainable forestry. The claim by Greenpeace — which has never planted a single tree in the Boreal forest — that Resolute — which has planted over a billion trees in the Boreal forest and contributed to no permanent loss of forest acreage — is a “Forest Destroyer” is patently false and unfounded. It is a malicious lie”, claims the suit documents.
Secondly, Greenpeace has accused the company of contributing to climate change by logging. Yet the Scientists at the UN IPCC have said that a “sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustainable yield of timber, fibre, or energy from the forest will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit. ” In other words, younger trees absorb more carbon, while older trees lose carbon to the atmosphere. Resolutes practices are helping the forests remain an effective carbon sink.
Thirdly, Greenpeace’s campaign repeatedly fails to disclose that in 2010 Resolute and other forestry companies agreed with Greenpeace to, in Greenpeace’s own words, a “moratorium . .. protecting virtually all of the habitat of the threatened woodland caribou, ” and Resolute’s operations since that time have remained outside “virtually all of th[at] habitat”.
Fourth Greenpeace has repeatedly manufactured facts and evidence to support the “Resolute: Forest Destroyer” campaign’s lies. For example, it has published staged photos and video falsely purporting to show Resolute logging in prohibited areas and others purporting to show forest areas impacted by Resolute harvesting when the areas depicted were actually impacted by fire or other natural causes.
In addition to the false claims, Resolute says Greenpeace torpedoed the 2010 forestry agreement by falsely claiming that Resolute was logging in areas that were prohibited.
Part of the issue is that there were multiple disputes over Northern Forest issues between the government of Quebec and some of the native bands; and there were also conflicts between government mandated forest practices to conserve caribou, and forest practices preferred by native bands in their own hunting areas. The FSI certificates were withdrawn based on these disputes, not due to Greenpeace’s charges against Resolute. Yet customers were told that Resolute was losing its certifications.
Resolute has asked for a jury trial in Georgia, where it has offices and the headquarters of a number of the companies who have withdrawn purchasing under pressure from Greenpeace are also located.
They hope with the discovery process to be able to show in more depth the corruption of the campaign against them.
In their suit, they site several examples from the seafood industry as well where Greenpeace has made false claims that have been refuted by NOAA and scientific consensus, and yet Greenpeace has pursued those claims to try and halt sales of products. Their retail report card, for example, that grades retailers on whether they reject Alaska pollock or not, is mentioned, as is Greenpeace’s refusal to engage on Tuna with the ISSF.
The recent Bering Sea Canyon fight is very similar to the Forest Destroyer Campaign. Greenpeace tried to claim to customers that unless they refused to buy pollock from a certain part of the Bering Sea, they would be contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem.
When a major scientific effort showed this was totally false, the campaign collapsed because the retailers still retained some faith in NOAA and US government Science. But the issues at stake are very much the same as those with the Northern Forest, so it will be extremely interesting to keep abreast as the suit goes forward.
In Canada, another suit has been filed by Resolute in 2013, and is still making its way towards trial. In Canada, Greenpeace long ago lost its ‘tax-exempt’ status as the Canadian government determined the charity did not serve a public purpose.
The Resolute case seeks to establish that in some areas, the organization acts as a criminal enterprise.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.