Greenpeace International

Dr. Gerd Leipold was appointed Executive Director of Greenpeace International in February 2001. He was born on 1 January 1951 in Rot, a small village in the Southwestern German state Baden-Wurttemberg. He studied physics at the University of Munich from 1970 to 1976. He continued his studies in Hamburg, where he read meteorology and physical oceanography. From 1976 to 1982 he was an employee of the Max-Planck-Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, where he developed ocean circulation models as part of the Institute's climate research program.

Paul Hohnen has worked intensively since 1975 on a range of global economic, development and environmental issues as a diplomat, international civil servant, Director of Greenpeace International, and Strategic Director of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Now an independent consultant, his clients include governments, intergovernmental agencies, business and non-profit organisations. Trained as an international lawyer, Hohnen worked from 1975 to 1989 as an Australian diplomat at the OECD in Paris, to the EU institutions, and in Fiji and Sri Lanka. He was closely involved in the 1992 and 2002 Earth Summit processes, and has personally participated in the negotiation of a wide range environmental conventions, including on climate change. He has served on the OECD Expert Panel on CSR, and since 2004 has been participating as an expert in the ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility negotiations. Frequently invited to act as a conference facilitator, Hohnen has been a keynote speaker at a variety of high-level business, government and NGO forums. He was featured on the cover of the Dutch magazine 'Ode' in 2000, and is a regular contributor to Ethical Corporation and other publications. Hohnen is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), a member of the SRI Advisory Committee of Henderson Global Investors, a Special Adviser to the UN Global Compact, a Special Adviser to the GRI, a Senior Consultant to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), and Adviser to the Earth Charter.

Peter Willcox, now 51, has returned to his roots to live on the Connecticut coast in the USA where he grew up. His father lives nearby in the same co-operative housing area he set up in the 1950s, when it was the first multi-racial community in the state. Like his father, he loves sailing and they both maintain modest wooden sailboats down on the jetty by his father's house. Peter has two teenage daughters who live with their mother in Majorca in Spain. He first combined his love of the sea with environmental education after he was drafted for the war in Vietnam and registered as a conscientious objector. He was assigned to the Clearwater, a vessel that took school students around the coast to learn about sailing and the environment. Then in the early 1980s he got his first job with Greenpeace, as captain of the Rainbow Warrior. Since the bombing, he has been a regular skipper on several Greenpeace boats, including the new Rainbow Warrior's protest voyage against French nuclear testing to Moruroa Atoll in 1991. Greenpeace has asked him to skipper the Rainbow Warrior again this year.

Steve, now 48, lives in Amsterdam with his partner and former Greenpeace Antarctic campaign director, Kelly Rigg, and their teenage daughter and son. Steve now runs the policy project for Greenpeace International's climate and energy campaign, lobbying governments and corporations on energy policies and attending marathon meetings of the now-operative Kyoto climate treaty. After the bombing, he became director of Greenpeace USA in Washington, In 1988, he moved to Greenpeace International in England succeeding Greenpeace co-founder David McTaggart as Executive Director.With the exception of a short stint running his own antique furniture business and dabbling in the film industry after stepping down from the top job, he has been involved in Greenpeace's climate campaign ever since. A seasoned campaigner on board Greenpeace boats and a tireless lobbyist, he led three Arctic expeditions in the late 1990s, and represented the organisation at both landmark UN World Summits on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. A keen rock guitarist, he likes to kick back and jam with his old Greenpeace mates whenever the chance presents itself.

Chris Nash is Professor of Journalism at Monash University in Melbourne. He has been active in community and environmental organisations for many years and has a strong commitment to social equity. Chris is a former award-winning journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a documentary filmmaker with international film festival credits (Brigadistas, Philippines My Philippines). He has directed major interactive online projects (www.australiast.uts.edu.au, www.tumblong.uts.edu.au ) and, for 10 years, was director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (www.acij.uts.edu.au). Chris is particularly committed to Greenpeace's mission of independence and bearing witness and sees it as an organised expression of 'citizen journalism'. The public right to know, freedom of information and expression, honesty and accountability are core values to which he has been committed all his working life, and he strongly supports community activism to bring issues and information sharply into focus for public debate. Chris believes that the crisis in environmental sustainability confronting humanity over coming decades poses fundamental political, social and moral challenges. They will only be resolved peacefully, equitably and democratically if there is a major shift in the way the mainstream media understands its role. It must move beyond a balancing act among corporate and governmental interests vested in the statusquo and address the full dimensions of the looming crisis in a clear-eyed way that is accountable to public engagement. New information technologies afford exciting opportunities to citizen- and community-based organisations such as Greenpeace to become active participants and catalysts in this public debate, and that is something Chris will support strongly from his position on the Greenpeace board.