Greenpeace's bold fundraising strategies echo its aggressive, cutting-edge approach to protecting Mother Nature's greatest gifts.

By Abny Santicola

It all started when a group of American and Canadian journalists and activists, inspired by the Quaker ideology of bearing witness to social problems, banded together and sailed a small vessel to protest the U.S. government’s testing of nuclear weapons beneath the island of Amchitka off the coast of Alaska in 1971. Their coalition — then called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee — sparked the beginnings of Greenpeace, an organization that 35 years later has 40 offices internationally and takes on some of the world’s most powerful political and corporate entities in the name of protecting the planet.