Greenpeace

The archive of Greenpeace International has been inventoried in 2007. This project was funded by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the VSBfonds.

Greenpeace is so well known that it has been called the McDonald's of the ecology movement. Its first action took place in September 1971, when a group of Canadian and American activists left Vancouver on a ramshackle boat to protest against underground nuclear tests. No doubt the most dramatic incident in the history of Greenpeace was the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Service in July 1985.
Today Greenpeace has offices in 40 countries and a membership of several million. Its sphere of activity includes nature management, animal protection, and all kinds of ecological issues throughout the world.

Since the Greenpeace International Secretariat decided to locate in Amsterdam (1989), there have been many contacts with the IISH. The Institute has always been interested in the international peace and ecology movements, and it houses among its collections the archives of organizations similar to Greenpeace, such as WISE (World Information Service on Energy) and WRI (War Resisters International). The transfer of the Greenpeace Film Archive, the Photo Archive, and, finally, the Greenpeace records, followed suit.

Posters, buttons, T-shirts, and flyers complete the Greenpeace collection at the IISH.

The aggregate of these materials facilitates multifaceted research of the organization:
• the inventory of the paper archive (150 meters since 1979) is available online
• a selection of extracts from the Greenpeace film archive
• a selection of photos from the Greenpeace photo archive at the IISH