Greenpeace USA

• 1. Introduction

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  Greenpeace USA traces its roots to a group of activists who took to the high seas in the early 1970s to confront whaling ships and nuclear testing programs. What began as a loose network of independent corporations scattered across American cities grew into a formal national organization in 1979 - one that today operates with an annual budget of approximately $40 million and employs over 500 people. But the organization's path from those scrappy origins to its current form was anything but smooth. A trademark dispute with the original Canadian organization nearly tore the movement apart before it had fully taken shape. And the questions that animated its founders - how far should activists go to stop environmental destruction, and what happens when corporations strike back - have never fully been settled. In 2025, a North Dakota jury handed down a $666.8 million damages verdict against Greenpeace entities, a judgment the organization is fighting on appeal as an attack on free speech. How an environmental nonprofit born from Quaker-influenced idealism became the target of one of the largest civil damages awards in activist history is a story worth understanding.

• 2. From Splinters to Structure

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  Greenpeace San Francisco opened in 1975, making it the first organized Greenpeace presence in the United States. Groups in Hawaii, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, and the Great Lakes region followed, each operating as an independent corporation. The fragmentation nearly proved fatal. The Vancouver-based Greenpeace Foundation, the original Quaker-influenced organization, filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco office over trademark rights to the Greenpeace name. The conflict was resolved when an international council was formed with representation from each country, and the council used that structure to pay off the $250,000 in debt owed by the Vancouver office. In late 1979, representatives of the American branches gathered and agreed to form a single national affiliate called Greenpeace USA. Jon Hinck, who had answered a Greenpeace magazine help-wanted ad in November 1978 at age 24, was among those who shaped the new organization. He had started by selling advertising, then moved into reporting for the magazine, covering nuclear waste dumping and toxic herbicides. One early demonstration of his instincts as an activist was posting official-looking pollution warning signs at local lakes near Seattle - which got him hired as campaign director for Greenpeace Seattle. At the national level, Hinck led efforts that produced a ban on oil supertankers in Puget Sound, rejection of the Northern Tier Pipeline, and eventually a U.S. government decision to end nuclear waste disposal at sea. That last achievement was later extended into a total ban on nuclear dumping through the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter. Then, in the late 1980s, a budget crisis prompted a major restructuring that effectively turned the United States into a fundraising base for European campaigns, closing down most of the original American Greenpeace corporations. The sole survivor was the organization incorporated in Hawaii, which has continued operating independently since 1985.

• 3. Corporate Campaigns and the Playbook

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  Phil Radford was 33 years old in 2009 when Greenpeace USA hired him as executive director - the youngest person to hold that post in the organization's American history. He came from Power Shift, a grassroots internet-based community for young people in the climate movement. In a 2014 exit interview, Radford described the specific sequence Greenpeace uses when targeting a corporation: researchers first build a detailed dossier on the company, then approach it privately and request a negotiated agreement. If the company refuses, Greenpeace launches a public pressure campaign focused on the worst offender in an industry, then tries to recruit that same company to support new industry-wide regulations. Radford cited Asia Pulp and Paper as an example of this approach working - Greenpeace played a central role in pressuring the company to stop deforestation in Indonesia, preserving biodiversity and carbon storage. The approach can also involve state and local ballot initiatives when pushing for transformation at a broader scale. Kimberly-Clark, the paper products company behind Kleenex, Scott, Cottonelle, and Huggies, agreed in 2009 to obtain wood fiber from environmentally responsible sources after a five-year campaign. That campaign had targeted the company's clear-cutting in Canada's Boreal Forest - described as the largest forest in the world, larger even than the Brazilian rainforest and critical for carbon storage. Activists had staged sit-ins at Kimberly-Clark's Massachusetts headquarters, blocked a production facility in Connecticut, and published an advertisement in the New York Times suggesting readers were destroying the Boreal Forest every time they used a Kleenex. Less than a week after Greenpeace USA activists rappelled down the outside of Mattel's El Segundo offices and unfurled a banner with Ken breaking up with Barbie over deforestation concerns, the toymaker announced it would investigate whether its packaging materials contributed to rainforest destruction. The corporate campaign model accumulated enough influence that in 2019, both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo withdrew from the Plastics Industry Association, which had been lobbying states to ban plastic bottle restrictions, following pressure from Greenpeace USA.

• 4. Investigations and Sting Operations

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  Greenpeace USA has repeatedly used undercover tactics to expose what it characterizes as corporate and academic manipulation of the climate debate. In 2015, the New York Times reported that professors at Princeton and Pennsylvania State University had accepted money from people they believed to be energy company representatives, agreeing to produce work touting the benefits of coal and carbon emissions. The people approaching them were Greenpeace employees. Lawrence Carter, a Greenpeace employee who participated in the operation, said the goal was to expose the role of industry in funding climate change denial. Six years later, in 2021, Greenpeace's "Project Unearthed" released video of Keith McCoy, Exxon Mobil's senior director for federal relations, describing the company's lobbying strategies. McCoy said on camera that he worked with "shadow groups" to support a carbon tax he never believed would actually be imposed, and that he spoke with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia every week. McCoy told the press he had been deceived by Greenpeace activists posing as job recruiters. The Exxon footage amplified an already-fraught relationship between Greenpeace and the oil industry. In 2006, the Internal Revenue Service launched an audit of Greenpeace USA after receiving complaints from a group called Public Interest Watch, which had received funding in part from Exxon Mobil. The audit lasted months before the IRS concluded that Greenpeace could continue operating as a tax-exempt nonprofit. John Passacantando, the executive director at the time, said he believed in organizational scrutiny but objected to being targeted specifically because Greenpeace was a critic of Exxon Mobil. An Exxon spokesman confirmed the company had contributed to the watchdog group, while disputing that Exxon had initiated the audit.

• 5. Pipelines, Protests, and the Courts

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  Between 2011 and 2013, Phil Radford was arrested alongside actress Daryl Hannah at a sit-in on Pennsylvania Avenue as part of a sustained push to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Protesters attached themselves to the White House fence with flexi-ties while dressed in business suits, urging President Obama to halt the pipeline's construction and implement stricter power plant emission rules. When President Biden revoked the Keystone XL permit in 2021, Greenpeace USA applauded the decision while continuing to press for elimination of all fossil fuel subsidies. The protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline drew a more dangerous legal response. Energy Transfer Partners, the builder of the 1,000-mile pipeline, sued Greenpeace USA, EarthFirst, and BankTrack for racketeering and defamation in connection with their opposition to pipeline construction. A federal court in North Dakota dismissed the suit in 2019, finding the claims unfounded. Tom Wetterer, Greenpeace USA's general counsel, described the ruling as a warning to corporations attempting to silence civil society. The Intercept reported that Energy Transfer had hired the private security firm TigerSwan to build a case through fake social media accounts and by infiltrating protest camps. Energy Transfer did not stop there. In 2025, a North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace USA, the Greenpeace Fund, and Greenpeace International to pay $666.8 million in total damages - with Greenpeace USA and the Fund held responsible for $535 million of that amount. The jury found Greenpeace liable for defamation, trespass, nuisance, and civil conspiracy, concluding the organization had supported protests that were at times violent and had harmed Energy Transfer's business relationships. Greenpeace has appealed, calling the case a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and a threat to the right to advocate for environmental causes.

• 6. Who Leads the Organization

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  Annie Leonard joined Greenpeace USA as co-executive director in 2014. She had first worked with the organization in 1998, in her 20s, on a campaign to stop the exportation of hazardous waste to poorer countries. She had spent years traveling the world tracking waste disposal and investigating companies, work that contributed to the Basel Convention - an international agreement restricting the export of waste from wealthier nations to poorer ones. She is best known publicly for the 2007 web video "The Story of Stuff," which traced the lifecycle of disposable consumer items and became widely circulated online. In 2021, Greenpeace selected Ebony Twilley Martin as co-executive director, making her the first Black woman to serve as executive director of a national environmental organization in the United States. Twilley Martin had previously served at Greenpeace USA as chief officer of people and culture, director of human resources, and senior talent acquisition manager. She became an environmental activist in 2008 after her son developed asthma from living near a busy highway in Maryland. In accepting the position, she cited Hurricane Ida's landfall on Louisiana's coast as an example of the intersecting crises facing communities on the frontlines of environmental injustice. In 2022, Leonard recruited Tefere Gebre, the former executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO, to become chief program officer overseeing campaigns and communications. Gebre, who is originally from Ethiopia, told the New York Times: "I'm not leaving the workers' movement - I'm bringing workers to the environmental movement." His arrival marked a deliberate effort to bridge the labor and environmental movements, with particular attention to the impacts of pollution on communities of color and what Gebre has described as a xenophobic response to the climate refugee crisis.

• 7. Scorecards, Flotillas, and Plastic Rankings

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  Greenpeace USA does not endorse political candidates. It does, however, issue scorecards. In the 2020 presidential race, the organization ranked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at the top with an A+ score of 94 out of 100, based on his support for a Green New Deal and a commitment to ending fossil fuels. Incumbent president Donald Trump received a score of zero. Joe Biden, who won the election, received a D for not having released a plan to address the climate crisis at the time of scoring. In 2021, Greenpeace USA joined a flotilla of kayaks and small boats that gathered outside West Virginia senator Joe Manchin's yacht on the Potomac River in Washington D.C. Protesters held signs reading "Don't sink West Virginia," "Manchin pass the bill," and "No climate no deal," targeting Manchin's opposition to the climate provisions in President Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. In March 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Greenpeace activists intercepted a 50,000-ton Greek vessel delivering Russian oil to the port of New York. The protest took place during a 45-day grace period before the White House's sanctions on Russian oil and gas imports took effect. Activists unfurled a banner reading "Oil fuels war." Anusha Narayanan, Greenpeace USA's climate campaign director, said the companies responsible for high gas prices were the same ones fueling conflicts around the world. On single-use plastics, Greenpeace USA ranked 20 grocery chains in 2021. Giant Eagle, ALDI, and Sprouts Farmers Market received the best scores; Wakefern, WinCo Foods, and H-E-B ranked at the bottom. The organization described the sector's pace of change as moving "at a snail's pace." Two years after that initial scorecard, stores had begun selling reusable bags and offering biodegradable containers - a pace Greenpeace USA did not regard as adequate.