Greenpeace chief off to new pastures

Melchett the activist: Arrested on a GM protest

By environment correspondent Alex Kirby

Greenpeace UK executive director Peter Melchett is stepping down at the end of the year.

He will spend more time on the family farm, which is converting to full organic production.

He will also be a part-time adviser on environmental and social issues to the food retailer Iceland.

And he says he leaves Greenpeace with his optimism about the future reinforced.

Long-term commitment

Lord Melchett, to give him his formal title, was educated at Eton, and served as a junior minister in the Labour Government of the late 1970s.

He has worked with Greenpeace since 1985, and has been its UK head for 12 years.

In a statement to staff and supporters, he says: "Greenpeace UK is stronger now than it has been since I started as executive director.

"Our campaigns are going well (but of course, never well enough), we have a wonderful staff, our finances are sound, and our income and supporters are on the increase."

Peter Melchett told BBC News Online: "It's a demanding job, and it's not sensible to think that you can go on indefinitely giving it as much as it needs.

GM crops

"I care desperately, passionately, about Greenpeace and its causes. So obviously I want to go at a time that will help it to achieve further success.

The success needs to be turned into concrete action to achieve further change

Peter Melchett

"Yes, we are on the crest of a wave with our campaign against genetically modified (GM) crops. And that in itself is a good reason to go now. The success needs to be turned into concrete action to achieve further change."

Greenpeace has made some redoubtable enemies down the years. So would Peter Melchett have done anything differently, or perhaps not done some things at all?

"I do have some regrets", he says. "I wish we'd got people to see the range and depth of our work more than we have. To give you one example, we recently obstructed the import to the UK of a shipload of illegal timber.

Invisible work

"But while our volunteers were chaining themselves to the vessel in front of the cameras, we were also working out of sight.

Greenpeace protests at timber shipment

"I was talking to ministers, and our campaigners were drafting a new timber procurement policy for the government.

"The result was that we persuaded the government to change its policy, and to protest successfully against illegal logging at the G8 meeting of leading industrialised countries.

"It's wrong to see Greenpeace as one-dimensional. But all that detailed work we were doing was invisible - people saw only the protest."

'Eternal optimist'

And Melchett remains hopeful, more so than he might have expected to when he began.

"I overwhelmingly believe change is possible. People are embracing organics with gusto - a real alternative that will reverse many of the abuses we've inflicted on the British countryside in the last 50 years.

"And if you'd told me 12 years ago that the head of Ford would be describing hydrogen as the fuel of the future, that the Prime Minister of the UK would be speaking approvingly of Greenpeace initiatives, I'd have said you were barking mad.

"I'm not heading off to my farm muttering jeremiads. I'm an eternal optimist."