Greenpeace, please grow up!

At 25, the environmental pressure group is beginning to realise that its noisy anti-industry campaigns could be misguided, that it is the customer, as much as the capitalist, who is actually failing the environmen t. By Richard D North

Twenty-five years after the founding of Greenpeace as a direct action group, its contemporary campaigners proclaim they are into solutions and dialogue - or are they?

Yesterday, more than 100 of the country's leading firms sent senior people to a conference organised by Greenpeace. The event was held in a Marriott hotel off Oxford Street, and with tickets at pounds 440.60 a throw, the executives from such traditional adversaries of Greenpeace as Shell, ICI and Dow Chemical were responding to an invitation that the organisers hoped - and implied - they couldn't refuse.

Greenpeace has always been brilliant at being rugged, but also at being chic and glamorous. Courage and charisma have been its hallmarks. It is now adding a degree of corporate savvy, in a Branson or a Roddick sort of way. "Forewarned is forearmed," said the flyer, as flyers for management conferences will. But Greenpeace's silky come-on had an element of blackmail - greenmail, anyway - about it.

Privately, several delegates said they had not really come in the hope of learning what bits of the corporate world Greenpeace would attack next. (although they were told that the oil industry's planned development off Shetland would be a target). From the floor, delegates obviously wanting the promised dialogue repeatedly asked whether Greenpeace really would discuss the details of its objections to various industries. They were parried with an ease that has 25 years experience behind it.

And yet, something quite big is happening to the organisation. And the industry types gathered to hear it from the horses's mouth.

The genesis of the new Greenpeace is quite recent. In the early Nineties, the group commissioned Philip Gould, image-maker to new Labour, to assess what a radical campaign group should look like as it approached its quarter century (and, they might have added, after half a century at least of vigorous action by officialdom to clean up the environment). Beware, wrote Gould, that your extremism will condemn you to the fringes of the national debate, while any move from radicalism risks alienating your core supporters.

The message was that Greenpeace could not usefully rely solely on nay- saying. The public wanted solutions. Greenpeace in Germany had already encouraged a formerly East German plant to offer fridges in which the notoriously ozone-damaging CFCs were replaced by relatively benign hydrocarbon gases, such as butane and propane. It is largely forgotten that CFCs were designed as a non-explosive alternative to inflammable hydrocarbons, just as it is forgotten that domestic fridges need never vent their CFCs. Nor does it much matter: hydrocarbon fridges can be made to work very well and have since begun to catch on with the rest of the industry.

Greenpeace feels able to claim much of the credit of shaming mainstream manufacturers. British fridge manufacturers happily concede that Greenpeace was useful in encouraging the switch, though in private they note that since CFCs were about to be banned, as were some of the alternatives, the result would have been the same with or without the Greenpeace initiative.

It is one of the odd features of Greenpeace's relationship with businesses that firms, at least for now, allow the campaigners their triumphalism, while executives queue up to munch humble pie. The executives appear to hope that extending a flow of mostly unreciprocated courtesies to their old adversary may somehow civilise the campaigners.

They should beware, however. Chris Rose, the campaigns director, probably the most intelligent hands-on environmentalist in the country, has for a year or so been talking about "enforced solutions". The group could be positive, but remain vigorous. As the flyer for yesterday's conference rhetorically asked, "Why does Greenpeace believe that solutions campaigning can be more confrontational than blocking your pipeline or disrupting your AGM"?

The answer, Rose said yesterday, is that industry fears losing its markets even more than having its pipes blocked. Greenpeace believes that it can still be seen to be the repository of forceful virtue, bouncing clumsy industry out of its self-seeking complacency. It can, it hopes, remain - or at least seem - radical. For years, industry and politicians wasted energy in pursuing the idea that this must be a left-wing group. That wasn't it at all: Greenpeace is committed to the chivalric defence of nature in the face of industrial rape. Its extraordinary appeal depends on its knightly courage and even innocence.

But it also depends on being highly selective of facts, as well as of targets. For years, most scientists involved with environmental issues, and the overwhelming majority of legislators and businesses, thought Greenpeace's handling of evidence was at least cavalier. Greenpeace merely responded: "They would, wouldn't they?"

The group now faces a more severe test. One of the founding fathers of British environmentalism is Richard Sandbrook, who was crucial to the formation of Friends of the Earth in England 25 years ago. Moving on, in 1975, to develop the ideas of Barbara Ward, an Economist writer, Sandbrook became director of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which tries to work out how human development needs can be fulfilled alongside environmental well-being.

Until now deliberately low-key, and prone to a sort of green political correctness, the IIED has recently completed the first all-embracing assessment of the paper industry - from forest to waste bin. It is a ground-breaking piece of work of considerable importance because it asserts that many deeply-held green ideas are plain wrong.

The study was paid for by the paper industry, but the IIED had far more to lose by being proved shallow or misinformed than it did by losing a corporate client. So the report carries conviction when it endorses plantation forestry; when it insists that no one has made a convincing case against the use of chlorine in paper bleaching; and when it claims that recycling paper often will not be the best environmental option, while municipal incineration with energy recovery may well be. The clear implication is that the matter-of-fact thinking of industrialists and their regulators is more or less on track and that much "environmentalism" is misguided.

Friends of the Earth was stung to denounce it. One wonders how long it can allow Sandbrook to be a trustee, granted the horror it has expressed at one of his proudest works. Jonathon Porritt, an occasional realist these days, endorsed the report's approach. Greenpeace - never one to launch itself into debates - has stayed silent.

Sandbrook has no desire to pick a fight with Greenpeace. But he is to be found on the same conference circuit as Rose, where Sandbrook is sometimes engagingly frank about the core of environmentalist absolutism. "We were spoilt baby boomers" he tells audiences. "We went through university believing that one should protest, and then protest some more." If there was one core belief among the environmentalists of the time, he tells businessmen, it was "Bugger the market".

He is great fun, which few environmentalists manage to be. But his message is serious. Poor people in poor countries need paper now, and will need a lot more as they get hold of the right to read and the right to write. Purism doesn't much help them, especially as its main effect is to raise prices.

There is an intellectual, or at any rate a cultural, point to be made, too. Sandbrook has doubts about Greenpeace's proclaimed desire for dialogue - a declared, if unrealised, aim of yesterday's event. The real world, he suggests, wrestles with such facts as it can garner, and works its trade-offs between the competing desires to get and spend, and to keep nature pristine. Greenpeace's moral triumphalism, and (Sandbook notes wryly) its market niche, depend on an intellectual virginity that a crueller person might risk calling a vacuum.

There is, to be sure, a new wave of thinking that aims to come to rescue of the likes of Greenpeace. At Lancaster University, Robin Grove-White, an erstwhile TV satire writer and director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England in the Eighties, is combining a board membership of Greenpeace with the refinement of a new line of argument which the EU, among others, is funding. Sometimes called Post Normal Science, this suggests that reductionist science (that is, the sort everyone's been doing since man first elevated himself above the apes) is deeply flawed when it comes to the environment.

He told yesterday's conference that "official" science fails to take account of people's deeply felt values; and that failure has led to scientific endorsement for the eating of beef while BSE raged, and the idea of dumping the Brent Spar in the Atlantic. Grove-White is very bright and very serious, and his work may help policy-makers to handle animal rightists, or roads protestors, and their non-negotiable agendas. What's less clear is whether there is anything really wrong with the science which has so successfully made us rich and mostly rather safe.

Meantime, Greenpeace has yet to deal with a very real difficulty at the heart of its campaigning. For years, it has inveighed against industry and been popular as it did so. Now that it is dealing in solutions, it's campaigners will soon have to understand that industry does what its customers want.

Greenpeace Germany last month launched the design for a low-energy car. The car industry said the car was interesting but not revolutionary. Anyone could have knocked one up. It was not a world capitalist conspiracy that kept such a car off the road, but consumer indifference.

In short, Greenpeace's solution option may prove more challenging for the campaigners than for the businessmen it has harrassed and harangued. Supporters may like the group less when it proclaims that it is the customer as much as the capitalist that fails the environment. And Greenpeace may find that one cannot talk about solutions and dialogue without occasionally listening to people who make things.

Greenpeace, at 25, may at last have lost its virginity.