Sometimes you think you are the first person to think of an idea but these folks were way ahead of me. Some of the concepts in my next film END:CIV are presented in Testify by Michael Becker and Stephen Gamboa. Michael Becker also co-authored "Igniting a Revolution" and I’ll have him on the show later this summer. "Testify: Eco Defense and the Politics of Violence" is about an hour long and well fucking worth it.
Excellent Documentary!!
At some point a speaker indicated that greenpeace’s budget was at $300 million . . . The only way I can see this calculation as being accurate is if they were adding up its cumulative revenue over the history of the organization, or something similar. I glanced at 4 annual reports from the 2000′s their annual budget stays less than $10mil.
Otherwise, good docu.
@anon — That speaker was Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd and one of the founders of Greenpeace. He makes the same claim in Frank’s new documentary End:Civ (and it certainly looks like a different and more recent interview, but these folks do tend to recycle their talking points). Anyway, I haven’t checked the figures for myself and I don’t intend to at this point, but I think it should be noted that Greenpeace is a GLOBAL organization, and they’re actually a lot more active in many other parts of the world than they are in North America. In Argentina, for instance, I commonly saw full-length TV ads for Greenpeace, featuring uniformed ‘eco-warriors’ roaring through the rainforest on motorbikes, (presumably to get to the destruction in-time to drop their banners before it’s too late). Yet, I’ve NEVER seen a televised Greenpeace ad in the US or Canada. Which is anecdotal, of course, but certainly indicative. So, you should take this into account when doing any investigation into their finances. Many countries do not allow corporations to operate in their national territory without maintaining an official presence there — and this applies equally to “non-profit” entities. So, all of their fundraising activities won’t be conducted in one country, or by one corporate entity… nor will all such revenues be reported in one place. Also, perhaps it’s just a matter of semantics, but you refer to their “budget”, which is generally a statement of what is allocated for operating expenses, and doesn’t usually report how much money they’ve collected previously, what kind of financial reserves they’re sitting on, OR any capital gains from those reserves. This sort of thing is another aspect of what makes this entire non-profit industrial complex such a disgusting disgrace… they’re not at all transparent, especially not when it comes to questions regarding their finances.
Also, it’s another really tragic commentary on the assimilation of the modern environmental movement into the huge global non-profit industrial complex when some of the people and organizations that are featured prominently & positively in Testify could be (or even HAVE BECOME) subjects of ridicule in End:Civ… especially with the release of these two films being only about 5 years apart.
I’m thinking specifically of Forest Ethics and its founder Tzeporah Berman… and Kim Marks, who speaks on behalf of Forest Ethics in Testify. Both Forest Ethics and Tzeporah Berman are shown in a very negative light in End:Civ (rightly so, in my opinion). Though in Testify, Marks (and, by extension, Forest Ethics) are held out as proponents of a “no compromise” approach to ecodefense. Ironic, to say the least, since I know Marks personally and she has ‘shooshed’ me in front of a crowd for suggesting actions as non-violent as uprooting genetically modified crops. Even without the critiques presented by End:Civ, or my own personal experience with Forest Ethics and their spokeswoman in Testify, it’s ironic that her words are given such credence by the filmmakers since she utters many of them while sitting with an opened bottle of Aquafina in front of her.
I guess I’m a primitivist, because oh how I long for the good ol’ days… back before ELF had a self-appointed spokesman with his homemade “press office”.
In the immortal words of Charles Manson: “Ego is a too much thing.”