Greenpeace

As long as we’re on the topic of my early employment with posts one and two about my time with Burger King, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, I thought I’d wax a bit about my time with Greenpeace. I’ve mentioned this before, with how I was when Clean Water Action came a knockin’.

I started in January of my junior year of high school. My school, Community High School in Ann Arbor, had a Community Resource (CR) program where you worked or did a supervised project in town and got high school credit for it. My work at Greenpeace qualified.

I wasn’t very comfortable with raising money, talking to strangers, or knocking on doors so I made a conscious decision to throw myself to the wolves by canvassing for Greenpeace.

I started in January and we worked for four hours in the field and took in a radius of one hour’s drive from Ann Arbor plus an hour to eat before we got to our neighborhoods so a shift could last up to seven hours and I did two or three a week. I was the only high-schooler on crew. We needed to rake in $100 a night – we had a word for making that minimum amount but I can’t remember it now. In any case, $100 was it. They said you performed best in the same economic demographics you came from so I did just fine at collecting modest amounts, but drop me some place fancy and I could bomb. One night, in a rich neighborhood, I netted three dollars. Three one dollar bills. Total.

I just couldn’t look someone in the face and ask for $100-$200, which is what Greenpeace recommended we ask for. $100? Are you kidding me? Who had an extra $100 lying around to give away at any random day in the pay period? So I didn’t ask for it. I asked for $25-$50, my usual, and wouldn’t even get that in the wealthier areas. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was completely intimidated by their neighborhoods and the occasional stately bars/front gate. “Uh, I’m with Greenpeace? We’re, omm, in your neighborhood to talk to people like you? About… OK, I’m here to talk about the environment? Y’know, we’re the whale people?”

My favorite town to canvas in Michigan is Berkley. At one house, a woman opened the door and then called up the stairs to her partner, “Greenpeace is here. Do you want to come down?” The classic pass-off. But I got a surprise “Yeah,” the other woman said. She came down, we talked, I walked away with a check and some petition signatures.

That same night in Berkley another woman answered her door. She didn’t speak English very well but said I should come back when her husband got home, he’d want to talk to me. A half hour after the time she said, I went back and he was just getting home. I introduced myself, he said he liked my name, I told him I was named after Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. He was tickled. We spent the next half hour on his living room floor drinking Japanese beer and not talking about Greenpeace but he grabbed his checkbook before I left anyway.

My least favorite house in those 6 months was a guy who became incensed when I said I was with Greenpeace and announced he would shoot me if he ever caught me in the woods. I said Greenpeace did not have a position on hunting non-whale mammals. He got up in my face and repeated that he would shoot me. I walked away shaking and figured anyone in close proximity to him might be contaminated so I skipped his neighbor’s house.

I would also follow my gut on any house I got a bad vibe from. If I was approaching and it just didn’t feel right I wouldn’t knock on the door. It wasn’t the condition of the houses. It was like some houses just shouted bad juju and I didn’t want to get mixed up in it.

One guy came to the door yanking on a robe, hair disheveled, sweating, obviously just rolled away from something a lot more interesting than Greenpeace. I was like, “Dude, you answered the door?”

By the time I got used to knocking on stranger’s doors and asking them to give me money it was summer. The first night I had to take a canteen with me I quit. It was frickin’ hot. I prefer cold to hot if I have to choose and decided I’d rather work BK through another Art Fair then work every night (now that school was out) in the sun.

Greenpeace was a good job. I feel like I did something positive, and damnit I like whales. But knocking on doors asking for money totally sucks. I will always give money to good-cause canvassers. And offer them something to drink. And a bathroom.