Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organization, focuses its campaigning on worldwide issues such as climate change, deforestation, overfishing, anti-nuclear issues, and now a long-running battle against Resolute Forest Products over the forest company’s logging practices in Canada’s boreal forest.
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Greenpeace unexpectedly tabled a booth this at this year’s BookExpo. Their presence at the trade show and the subsequent ads in Publisher’s weekly were “designed to pressure Resolute to modify its forest practices and also to drop a lawsuit it brought against the environmental organization.”
Resolute Forest Products first filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace in Canada in 2013, charging the organization with defamation and economic interference. Then came another lawsuit in May 2016 in Georgia alleging RICO violations and defamation. Greenpeace believes this is an infringement on free speech and aims to silence the group and possibly other advocacy groups as well.
Greenpeace brings this issue up to publishers due to the fact that publishers are buying products from resolute Forest Productions. Greenpeace took a petition to BookExpo, that was signed by more than 100 authors, calling for publishers to stand up for free speech by opposing the Resolute lawsuits and pressure Resolute into engaging in more sustainable forest practices.
“The message isn’t that publishers are the bad guys,” Rodrigo Estrada, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said, “we want to show them we aren’t the enemy.”