brian-fitzgerald.net

Another public nuisance brought to justice for protesting nuclear weapons back in the Reagan era. The banner (which Officer Steadfast there is holding) was a flop, but I managed to get a peace message out under the radar. Egad that hair. How geek those glasses.

Don't you hate writing your own Bio? I like ducking behind the third person and pretending it's the Encyclopedia Brittanica saying "Brian Fitzgerald monkeywrenched a nuclear weapons test detonation with three other activists in 1983 by playing Boy Scout and camping out near ground zero for three days" and stuff like that. But a friend calls me on this and says I should say it in my own voice. Cripes. More work.

I've been on an adventure with Greenpeace since 1982. In that time, I've flown over sagebrush desert in a hot air balloon to oppose nuclear weapons. Watched a blue whale breach off the coast of Iceland on a mission to save whales. Sailed the coast of India to oppose the deadly shipbreaking trade. Been arrested for opposing toxic waste, saying the killing of harp seal pups is a bad idea, and other forms of cultural sedition. I've lived in five countries and visited or worked in twenty more.

I'm married with two and don't own a car.

I love: the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo; the poetry of James Wright and William Butler Yeats; reading every page of The New Yorker; hiking out over the rail of a sailboat in a screaming wind; pounding the daylights out of my aging knees in a mogul field; playing with my kids on "Dadderday"; the Music of Frank Zappa, Dar Williams, Steve Earle, His Bobness, and too many more to name.

I hate: scallops, suits, and argyle sweaters.

I miss the days when the Usenet had an entire discussion thread dedicated to the misuse of the apostrophe with the possessive neuter pronoun.

I currently harumpf loudly about the state of the world while running Greenpeace International's online communications.

Been, Done

I arrived at Greenpeace via a book, Bob Hunter's Warriors of the Rainbow, which I read while snowbound one winter in a cabin in New Hampshire without electricity or running water. (Call it my Thoreau period) When spring came, I went to Boston where I ran into an old friend, Cathy Dees, who was canvassing for the organiztion I'd just read about in said book. Bells went off. Signs appeared. I went door to door for three years, and spent more and more time volunteering in the office to cook up action plans and do disarmament work. I eventually quit my day job.

Jon Hinck, Harald Zindler, Ron Taylor, and myself were the first activists to penetrate security at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site all the way to ground zero in 1983, delaying the test detonation of a nuclear weapon. We also unwittingly pioneered the use of mylar heat-retaining blankets as a counter-technology to infrared imaging, violated US national security when we spotted the first (then top-secret) Stealth bombers as we passed by Area 51, and set off an unfortunate rumor about UFOs when we later mentioned, in a Las Vegas bar, the strange craft we'd seen.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1985, I organized a banner-hanging on the Statue of Liberty. There were only three television networks in the US in those days, and the action made the evening news on all three. Greenpeace in the US only achieved a sweep one other time in its history, when Greenpeace anti-whaling activists were arrested by Soviet border guards in the USSR.

In 1985 I initiated the first trans-Atlantic email system for Greenpeace with the help of Greenpeace's über-geek, Dick Dillman. My "give it away free" policy at Greenpeace International led to that system spreading rapidly throughout the organization's global offices and becoming standard for the next eight years. It replaced the punched-tape telex we'd used for global communications until then, and provided David McTaggart and myself with communication in and out of the Soviet Union at a time when we were setting up Greenpeace's first non-western office, and when an international telephone call took days to book and complete. Only eleven other non-soviet users were online in Moscow at the time, and ours was the first system for a Non-Governmental Organisation. We used 300 baud acoustic couplers attached to Bakelite phones to do this, in a time before spam.

In 1986, Duncan Currie, Steve Sawyer, and I did the heavy lifting for Greenpeace's arbitrated lawsuit against the French Government for the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. It was the first arbitration to put a Non-Governmental Organization on equal footing with a Sovereign State. The multi-million dollar settlement financed the replacement of the ship, and provided the sole source of Greenpeace International's reserve fund for nearly two decades.

In 1995, I shouldered the work of reforming Greenpeace's governance system according to a blueprint laid down by Thilo Bode and unanimously agreed by the organization. It took two years to implement and earned me a spot on the Greenpeace International Senior Management Team.

With the turn of the century, I began driving the development of Greenpeace's online activism program and a global content management system known as Greenpeace Planet. Greenpeace Planet has, with a few national exceptions, standardized the look and feel of Greenpeace's websites worldwide and enabled a more globalized workflow. It is estimated to be saving the organization around 2.3 million Euros a year. Far more importantly, it uses no tables, relying exclusively on Cascading Style Sheets for layout. ;-)