The Story of a Billion Acts of Courage

Greenpeace was built to be expendable.

Our greatest day will be the day we shut our doors. The day we achieve the objective in our name: a green and peaceful future. A future where we share more, create more, and connect more: with one another and the natural world. A world where our work is our gift; where empathy and education have replaced bullets and bombs, and where we celebrate diversity in all its forms.

It’s a more courageous world, a more joyous world, a place where the awesome power of human ingenuity is unleashed to make our world fit for the future: with clean energy, healthy food, thriving forests, and bountiful oceans. A world where the things we make don’t poison the water we drink, and the retreat of sea ice doesn’t set oil companies circling the arctic like vultures. A world where we can dare to imagine our grandchildren and their grandchildren thanking us for what we’ve passed on.

The warnings the environmental movement raised about humanity’s peril were once considered radical. It took courage to stand by them. Today, they’re a constant drum beat. What’s courageous today is optimism. Hope. Action. The refusal to accept the prospect of extinction as anything but humanity’s challenge to rise to its finest hour. To collectively transform a future of adversity into one of brilliant opportunity.

We believe that each and every single one of us holds a fragment of the story of how our future was transformed.

That better world is already struggling to be born. Tweets are terrifying tyrants. Artists no longer need corporate or government permission to reach mass audiences. Movements are springing up at the speed of thought. Global communities are connecting and joining together in ways that could scarcely have been imagined a decade ago. Even as our governments wage war, we are crossing battle lines to share our stories, human to human, and proclaiming peace, knowing that security comes from celebrating our differences — not fearing them.

The struggle for a better world means challenging some of the most powerful forces on the planet. These forces seek to maintain the status quo with stories that tell us change is impossible, stories that leave us demoralised, apathetic, cynical. The greatest threat to their monopoly on power are a billion stories of audacious optimism, a billion acts of courage.

Greenpeace is just a word. The people behind it are our power. And by people we mean you.

Want to take down a giant? We'll find you a slingshot. Got an idea? We'll give you a way to pitch it, or the resources to run it, or a communications rocket to launch it around the world. Want to band together with others? We'll give you online and offline space to meet and plan, provide you with tips and tricks, training, and share our 40 years of experience in creating change.

We pledge to champion transparency, and be transparent ourselves. In the struggle for peace, we reject violence. To better expose the corrupting influence of corporate money on politics, we refuse corporate donations. We promise to use our ships, our lawyers, our scientists, our political and corporate strategists, our reputation and the donations of millions of people around the world to deliver transformational change, and to enable and amplify acts of courage for a better future.

Big change seems impossible when you start, and inevitable when you’re done. That’s because courage is contagious, and expands the definition of what’s possible. Courageous acts ripple out, inspiring another and another, rewriting the story of the future in ways that look impossible to the past.

Let’s write some impossible together.

We dare you.

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