Infiltration and Efficacy: A Performance Analysis of Ecoactivism in the Age of Corporate Hegemony

In 1971, the group that would eventually become Greenpeace attempted to sail from Vancouver to Amchitka Island—twice—to witness and protest the American nuclear testing taking place on the island. The global media attention that the effort garnered motivated the United States to end the testing and restore the island to a bird sanctuary (Durland 67–68). Since that time, Greenpeace has become one of the largest and most influential environmental nongovernmental organizations in the world with offices covering operations in “more than 55 countries” and a purported 2.5 million individual donors (Greenpeace, “Who We Are”). The group relies heavily on direct action in its work against nuclear proliferation, whaling, toxic waste mismanagement, single-use plastics, and a host of other environmental issues; these actions are often so dramatic that Greenpeace has been theorized as a guerrilla theater company (Durland 68). In 2015, Greenpeace launched the Detox Outdoor campaign in an effort to eliminate the use of perflourinated and polyflourinated compounds (PFCs) from the supply chain of major outdoor brands like The North Face, Columbia, and Patagonia. PFCs are chemicals that are often used in waterproofing for outdoor products like jackets, gloves, and sleeping bags: they have been shown to accumulate inside the body of living organisms, been detected in the bloodstream of humans, and are linked to reproductive disorders (Cobbing et al. 2). In this multifaceted campaign, the group relied heavily on performance-based actions, including an online meme action in which activists posed nude in extreme environments and held banners with messaging directed at the companies, storefront occupations in which activists placed themselves in front of and in the display windows of retailers wearing nothing but boxes printed with messaging criticizing the companies’ behavior, and two separate performance hikes that illustrated (1) the presence of PFCs in the environment and (2) the possibility of a world without them, respectively. In 2017, Greenpeace declared victory when Gore Fabrics—a major supplier for all of these outdoor brands—committed to eliminating hazardous PFCs from every part of their supply chain by 2023 (Greenpeace, “You Did It!”). In this campaign, it seems, performance worked—it did something.

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