OneWorld diary

Mark Chisnell gives his observations on America's Cup news from Auckland

It's Ground Hog Day again - we're stuck in the weather pattern from hell. There's a low stalled in the Tasman and it's spinning squalls and fronts off and just smacking the whole island.

So we've all had a little more time for on the shore projects, and I even managed to get away from the normal axis of apartment, shorebase, boat and gym - spending an afternoon at the Auckland War Memorial museum to check out an exhibition of photographs taken to accompany John Pilger's work over the last thirty or so years.

There are some happy endings to his stories - East Timor finally celebrated their release from about four hundred years of colonial rule a couple of weeks ago - but it was pretty relentlessly depressing in its depiction of human nature seen through a lens held up to Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, South Africa, Indonesia.

Whether you love him or hate him (and Pilger has a black and white view of the world that tends to polarise opinion), it's difficult not to walk away from the exhibition with mixed feelings of guilt and anger about the actions of Western Governments and corporations.

Which is where organisations like Greenpeace come in - a channel for the anger and a balm for the guilt. And I'm sure I'm not the only sailing enthusiast that was horrified to see the news of the recent incident at the launch of the French America's Cup boat. I've read a bunch of different reports of the event, most of which indicate that the Greenpeace activists involved got a rush of blood to the head and over-extended their mandate.

I've been a member of Greenpeace for a long time and while questions can and have always been asked about their methods - and some of their research - they have mostly had my support and sympathy from incidents that date back to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior just down the road in Auckland Harbour, to the Brent Spar affair.

I don't want to excuse the actions of those involved in the Areva incident, but we shouldn't forget that their protest is against a company cut from the same cloth as those whose tracks can be seen trailing across the background in some of Mr Pilger's pictures.

The highly principled might argue that the French America's Cup team shouldn't have taken the money from Areva, although I get a queasy sense of moral ambivalence at this point. I'm not about to start lobbing those rocks when I've sailed on a cigarette boat - the Merit Cup sponsored Sydney 40 in 1999. The French AC team took the money because they felt it was what they had to do, and if others don't like it, then they have a right to protest - peacefully.

The trouble is that if you play word association in New Zealand with 'Greenpeace', 'Nuclear' and 'France' just about everyone's going to come up with 'Rainbow Warrior' - a protest by the French Government that was anything but peaceful. There's some unfinished business here and I think we can be pretty confident that this one is not going to go away. Let's just hope that after this incident, the protesting goes back to being non-violent.

And while we're on the topic of appeasing guilty consciences, we've had the first of our tree planting days. The idea is to put enough trees in the ground to make up for the damage that the OneWorld boats and cars do in the community via CO2 emissions.

There's several community tree-planting programs in the area, one of which is on Motutapu Island, next to Rangitoto in the Gulf. The aim is to re-establish areas of native forest, which will eventually provide the cover for the return of similarly native wildlife, some of which is nearly extinct on the mainland. The whole project is aimed at the bi-centennial in forty years time, so we are talking long-term.

The site was a scrubby hillside that ran down to a 'wetland' - aka swamp. I wondered if there was some deep psychological difference between those team members who elected to work in the apparently easy valley floor, rather than hump trees up the hillside, only to find that it took about 20 minutes to cut a hole through the barbed wire grass. While those that chose the struggle to the high ground were then rewarded with light soil and easy planting...