said to the retailers, “Look, Friends of the Earth are going to campaign against this and we just want to warn you and give you the opportunity to take action in advance”. Local group materials were prepared and groups were notified that Friends of the Earth were keen to have a big action on Easter Bank Holiday weekend 2001. The organisation also set up a special dedicated website, and bought about 10-20 domain names that really Scots should have bought a while back. Friends of the Earth started setting up a website so it looked like it was Scots Miracle Grow website, but actually when you started reading it more closely you realised it was not. They contacted Des Lynham, who did a lot of the advertising promotion for Scots and specifically the Miracle Grow brand, presuming that he would be asked to do the TV advertising for the new compost, Friends of the Earth wrote to him in January 2001. Then they contacted colleagues in the PCC and in the space of a week, Des Lynham’s agent got letters from the Chief Executives of the Wildlife Trust, RSPB, and Plantlife. As to the results, and a lot of these things are supposition, but it is evident that some of the national chains that were briefed decided not to stock Miracle Grow compost. Des Lineham in the end did not feature in the TV advertising. The Miracle Grow website when launched by Friends of the Earth received 2000 hits in three weeks. Put in perspective, the <> site gets around 5000 a week, so it did not do badly. One hundred Friends of the Earth local groups actually took part in the action. Up and down the country, groups were outside DIY and garden retailers stocking this product, making the point about the destruction of peatlands. At least a hundred press cuttings were obtained from across the country – local, regional and national newspapers - about the campaign and coverage of actions by local groups. Tens of thousands of potential customers were made aware of this issue through interaction with local groups outside the stores, and it is estimated - and these are the ones known about – around 1,500 to 2,500 letters went to Homebase in the first month of the Miracle Grow campaign. Similar volumes went to other retailers, particularly Wyevales, although it is not known precisely how many. Friends of the Earth like to imagine that perhaps that bit of work had some impact on helping Scots to think about adopting a more constructive approach to Thorne and Hatfield Moors, and the organisation certainly feels that whether or not it had any impact on the company, the local groups and press coverage did get the message out about peat to the UK public. Where do Friends of the Earth go from here? Well first of all, it should stressed that Friends of the Earth is actually run by local groups –the body was set up originally by a few groups working on environmental issues as a national body to provide information and back-up to their campaigns and so actually the board is appointed by the local groups, and they can have a very key part in the decision making processes of what work is done. At the 2001 annual group conference a motion was proposed and unanimously adopted that Friends of the Earth should continue to work on the peat issue, but more to the point, that it should look at it from both a peat and green issues perspective. So Friends of the Earth has the mandate to carry on campaigning, but how is the organisation going to do it? Should it act through confrontation – the route chosen in the past, or are there other options? It is very clear that there is an extremely strong stomach in the local groups, as well as nationally, to go down the confrontation route, but it is only fair to look at other options. It has to be admitted of course that the situation is very different to what it was even two years ago, let alone five. There are now NGOs, the UK Government, and retailers such as B&Q and Homebase, who both have a very clear policy on phasing out peat, and other companies are committed to the Biodiversity Action Plan – 90% of growing media to be peat free by 2010. This is a pretty good starting point to move forward from.
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Peat Conference July 3rd and 4th 2002 – Published Oct 07