Seaman leaves Neste to join Greenpeace

Martti Leinonen’s next voyage will be to the Amazon

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By Hanna Syrjälä
     
      ”It was fun”, is how Martti Leinonen, who works at Greenpeace, describes the incident in which he was put in jail in Nuuk in Greenland. “The atmosphere was positive. There were people from different parts of the world.”
      Leinonen was detained after he and 20 others broke onto an oil drilling platform in the North Atlantic. Greenpeace opposes oil drilling in Arctic areas because an oil leak would devastate the unique nature there.
     
Greenpeace was in Greenland with the help of its vessels Arctic Sunrise and Esperanza. The Esperanza crew had an unexpected person on board: Paul Simonon, the bassist of The Clash, a band which was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. He ended up in prison as well.
      The rock musician, who served as an assistant cook on the ship, did not make much of an issue of himself. “I only heard later who he was. On the ship he scrubbed toilets and cooked”, Leinonen laughs.
      The Greenpeace people were held for two weeks. They were then expelled from Greenland.
     
Rock stars and sitting behind bars: these are the kinds of circles that Leinonen never imagined that he would find himself in a year and a half ago while he was still working for Neste oil. He served as a navigation officer on a tanker that dealt with crude oil transport in the Gulf of Finland.
      He did not find the work fulfilling. “Originally I chose seafaring as my profession because I thought that it would offer adventure. It proved to be rather boring. One did not see the world on the ships.”
      Leinonen quit and applied for work at Greenpeace. He has not regretted the decision.
     
The environmental organisation has three ships that it uses in its environmental activities. Leinonen has been appointed to the post of second navigation officer of the Rainbow Warrior 3. The steel-hulled schooner is brand-new, and was custom-built for Greenpeace.
      This autumn Leinonen took part in a test fun of the new ship. After that, it sailed around Europe, and people who donated money for its construction got a chance to get to know it.
      Who were the contributors? “Ordinary people, but also celebrities and nobility: some wanted to keep their donations a secret.”
     
Leinonen will rejoin the ship in the spring. That is when the vessel will tour South America, to fight the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. “We will study and document things. If this is not enough, we will take direct action.”
      Speaking of direct action, what is the justification of Greenpeace action that breaks the law? Leinonen answers enthusiastically. “Civil disobedience gets things moving. It is taken into use when talk is not enough. I have seen that it works.”
      Leinonen gives an example of how they prevented two ships that were illegally fishing for tuna from leaving port in Taiwan.
     
“Fishing in the Pacific Ocean is poorly supervised. As soon as we took issue with the matter, officials also took a stand.”
      Leinonen said that he used to think that Greenpeace’s direct action was mindless troublemaking.
      “Actually, the action is well planned and peaceful.”
     
Greenpeace was not familiar to Leinonen before. However, he had experienced an ecological awakening already before he joined the organisation. He listened to the Viimeinen Atlantis (“Last Atlantis”) album by the Finnish heavy metal band Stam1na, and became convinced. “The album was about climate change and about how capitalism and the consumer society are destroying our living environment. I felt that this is, indeed, how things are.”
      So what gets an activist to believe that the world can be saved? Leinonen says that the earth will save itself, but that people will make their own lives impossible.
      “When every tree has been cut down and every river poisoned, man, with a pile of money in his lap, will notice that you can’t eat banknotes. Humankind will become extinct. Mother Earth, meanwhile, will take a 15-billion-year nap, but will wake up more beautiful than ever.”
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.1.2012
     


Links:
  Greenpeace Finland

HANNA SYRJÄLÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
hanna.syrjala@hs.fi