Some thoughts on letting go of the past.
I started my career in fundraising working with Greenpeace Canada's door to door canvassing team in 2010. It was an experience that changed the direction of my life profoundly. It also led me to acquire a great many t-shirts featuring Greenpeace branding. The shirts were well loved and well used, but after many years of love, the time came to part ways with my prestigious Greenpeace T-Shirt collection. In an effort to ease my sentimentality and separation anxiety, my friend encouraged me to take photos of the shirts and then write a blog to document my collection.
So I am. Then I am disposing of the shirts in the most ecologically responsible way available. This means this blog might not offer the reader a whole heck of a lot, and I am honestly fine with that, because I did not write this for you (sorrynotsorry). I wrote this because, for the years I worked there and for many afterwards, my Greenpeace t-shirt collection was an achievement I was very proud of. They weren't just shirts, they were memories. I need to let go of the shirts, but I don't want to let go of the memories.
This was my first Greenpeace t-shirt. It's the one you get when you sign up for a monthly donation of $12.00 or more (or at least, it was when i worked there). I believe it's an American Apparel organic cotton t-shirt -- an effort to defensively pre-empt criticism about a radical environmental organization manufacturing consumer goods with third world sweatshop labour (at least American Apparel's sweatshop was in the US?) I wore this shirt when I went door to door canvassing for Greenpeace and I remember feeling like it helped me to succeed, like people believed I was who I said I was while wearing it (establishing that you are not a total scam artist is a pretty big part of successful door to door canvassing). This shirt was hard to say good bye to, but the armpits were gross and worn out.
My second Greenpeace shirt was a Kyoto Defender shirt, from when the Greenpeace team had organized an effort to try to stop Stephen Harper from abandoning the Kyoto Protocol. I remember wearing it to a demonstration that opposed a highway expansion, and I wore it canvassing as well. I remember getting compliments about it, which surprised me, because I always thought it was kind of plain looking. But I was proud to have two Greenpeace shirts, and to have survived my first weeks in the precarious world of door to door fundraising.
My memory of exactly which shirt I acquired in which order is hazy at best (perhaps from enjoying my fair share of a different sort of green peace, haha) but I think the next one was the Kleercut Victory shirt from the forest campaign targeting Kimberly Clark. This logo was one of my favourites because it felt subversive for co-opting the familiar "Kleenex" branding and replacing it with "Kleercut". This campaign was over long before my time at Greenpeace began, but I learned a lot about it. It was a fantastic example of Greenpeace being successful in changing supply chains and business practices, in this case, to significantly increase the demand for recycled wood fibre and implement better forestry standards through Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification. I loved this shirt, but it had holes and stains.
The next shirts to say goodbye to are the seafood campaign shirts. I was so happy to get my hands on the "Out of Stock" shirt, because the first time I had seen the branding was in Adbusters magazine. Boy did I ever think Adbusters was cool, and it felt good wearing this shirt. The second shirt was from the Cloverleaf Tuna campaign.
During my time with Greenpeace, their Oceans campaign focused on getting Supermarkets to implement seafood sustainability guidelines. Greenpeace released a series of high profile annual supermarket rankings that encouraged Canadian supermarkets to sell seafood caught through less harmful fishing methods. This is what the "Out of Stock" branding was meant to communicate -- that many fish stocks we rely on are severely depleted or collapsing. The Oceans campaign later moved from supermarkets to focusing specifically on Tuna, again using the effective method of ranking Tuna companies from best to worst in terms of their environmental impact.
One of my favourite memories of working at Greenpeace is of the afternoon I wore a shark costume to help deliver a banner and petition to Cloverleaf seafoods asking them to adopt ethical fishing practices.
The next T-shirts I got were about energy. I had to trade with a friend who had duplicates to get a "Stop the Tar Sands" shirt, which at the time was highly coveted in Vancouver's Greenpeace office. This shirt held special significance for me given that I grew up in Alberta and had only moved to metro Vancouver recently when I started at Greenpeace. Learning about the Tar Sands (or the ethical freedom sands as we refer to it in Alberta) was an awakening, not just about Climate Change, but about what it felt to experience two very different political cultures. Living in Alberta, I did not realize the reputation the province's bitumen really had, and learning about it was shocking.
The "Climate Rescue" shirt is from a demonstration I participated in to oppose the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Greenpeace staff and volunteers (uninvited, of course) attended an investor conference Enbridge was participating in so we could distribute information about the company's awful environmental record of oil spills. The pipeline idea was ultimately defeated, thanks in large part to community based activism.
The next Greenpeace shirt had a picture of a whale on it. I am pretty sure I received it as a reward for raising over $50 in new monthly donations in a single night of door canvassing. That works out to about $600.00 a year, assuming all the donors I signed up stick around at least a year. In reality, some leave sooner, but some stay much longer than a year. I wore this shirt a lot the weekend of the Greenpeace staff camping trip, which was so much fun. As you can see from the nasty crusty armpits, this shirt, like all my Greenpeace shirts, had seen better days.
"Sal for BC Premier" was an effort I remember very fondly. It was so cheeky and was a fantastic example of a creative effort to use humour to convey an important message. If I remember correctly, this campaign was Greenpeace's response to the retirement of BC Premier Gordon Campbell, who had committed to the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement
but had failed to complete its implementation before leaving office. Greenpeace decided to run a spirit bear for leader of the BC Liberal Party, based on the totally reasonable assumption that an actual bear would be less destructive than any of the declared BC Liberal leadership candidates. The tongue in cheek effort helped to ensure the incoming BC Premier did not forget about the great bear rainforest. The third image is from a Greenpeace US t-shirt a friend brought me back from a trip.
This blog is long. If you are still reading, please enjoy this video of a tiny hamster eating a tiny burrito as a token of my gratitude.
The next shirt to say goodbye to is from the "Facebook Unfriend Coal" campaign that was organized by Greenpeace International. The point of this campaign was to encourage Facebook, a trendy and popular company, to commit to using only green energy for its data centres. The video they made for this campaign was really cute. I remember wearing this shirt to a talk that Tzeporah Berman gave at Capilano University and she spotted me in the audience wearing it. She'd been speaking about this campaign as part of her talk, so seeing me wearing her campaign t-shirt made her happy, which made me happy.
That talk was the same evening that someone first told me I should start blogging. It took me almost eight years to take her advice.
Finally, we've come to the last of my Greenpeace t-shirt collection, the 40th Anniversary shirts. Greenpeace has hundreds of "founders" in Vancouver, because this is where it all started. A group of Vancouverites got on a rickety old boat and sailed up to Amchitka, an island off the coast of Alaska. They were trying to stop a nuclear test and in the process helped to create the modern environmental movement.
When Greenpeace turned 40, the Mayor declared the anniversary official "Greenpeace Day" in Vancouver and planted a commemorative tree. A lovely reception was held in a building near Crab Park, and myself and my colleagues got our picture in the paper. There was also a festival held at Sunset Beach. It was a great day and thinking about it still makes me smile.
So that's it. Fourteen. Fourteen different Greenpeace t-shirts. Assuming I haven't forgotten any of them, I could go two straight weeks wearing nothing but Greenpeace shirts, every day a different environmental message. It's a wonder I didn't get in more fights. Wow.
Working at Greenpeace was one of the most exciting and challenging jobs I have ever had. It was an opportunity that started me on a path to a wonderful career in non-profit fundraising. It taught me to hustle, but also, what it felt like to have meaning in your professional life, something that, from then on, I decided was more important to me than the size of my paycheque. I learned so much going door to door talking to people about the environment, and I met so many amazing people, some of whom are still friends today. I'm grateful for these experiences and how they contributed to helping me become who I am. And I was very grateful for all the shirts.
Thanks for reading!
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