N5M Conference, March 1999

Neufarn is a tiny village east of Munich, about 15 kilometers from where I live. It boasts one hill, about 150 meters high, and off late it had this company who wanted to erect a wind wheel on that hill. The mayor, a social democrat, was excited and spread the news all around.
But then the storm set in. Suddenly there was a citizens' initiative, arguing against the "madness" of this windwheel. It was much to high, the shadow and noise of the wheel would "terrorize" the neighborhood, it would kill birds by the hundreds and almost certainly devalue property. There was a highly emotional city hall meeting. There even the chairman of the local Bund Naturschutz, an environmental organization, vetoed the project. After the meeting the project was canceled to the applause of the local conservatives. The few proponents couldn't even walk to the store without being called names and the mayor received threatening phonecalls.

In Ahlerstedt near Hamburg CDU-Councilman Luder Pott, who argued in favor of windmills, was held up on the street and threatened that he would pay dearly for high energy prices attributed to a planned windpark. Its like a civil war, he says. Daughters are not talking to their fathers any more, sons don't say hello to their brothers on the street.

Meet the specialists for creating near-civil war in two weeks. The "Bundesverband Landschaftsschutz" founded in late 1994, to this date has successfully blocked wind energy sites who valued between 300 and 500 million German marks (anywhere from 100 to 200 million dollar).
Their method is always the same: Plans of a wind energy site are being made public, three days later you get thousands of leaflets connecting them to every human ill in the world. The group cleverly adopts the language of the anti-nuke campaign. For example they claim they are a group of "concerned individuals" or "WKA-victims". Nuclear energy plants in Germany are spelt very much alike, AKW. They literally state that wind energy sites are more dangerous than transports of nuclear waste, infamous in Germany under the name "Castor transports".
For a long time their origins seemed mysterious. Some of their active leadership did come from one of those tiny villages that witnessed the first wind energy debates in the early 90s. But then where does their money come from? In their cause against the windmill scare they travel all over Germany, distribute materials in abundance and at two sites, one in the Rhine valley, the other in the easternmost Bavarian Forest, one of their leaders claimed he owned a holiday apartment there and so entered the discussion as a local citizen.
Environmentalists and journalists for a long time suspected that the Bundesverband-representatives were financed by industry, but they could never pin them down. Then their lawyer made a mistake: He distributed documents with a contact address in Bonn that turned out to be the headquarters of aluminium producer Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke, who themselves are owned by the Munich-based VIAG company. And VIAG makes 80 percent of its profits with conventional and nuclear power.

This new information was of no particular help, though, because this astroturf group still has the ability of acting very quickly. They turn up at every corner of the nation, distribute their leaflets, divide the community and once local environmentalists have gathered information and geared up for a campaign, they're gone again, but the damage has been done.

Another astroturf group has been equally successful, even though they employed a much different strategy: total openness. When facing the catastrophic development of their biotech directive being rejected by the European parliament - a historic first - biotech companies not only took on board hundreds of new lobbyists, but also contacted the Brussels representative of British and an European patient umbrella group, Genetic Interest Group (GIG) and European Alliance of Genetic Support Groups (EAGS).
At the reading of the directives second version in July 1997, this man invited several people, some of them in wheelchairs, who suffered from rare genetic disorders. He gave them yellow T-shirts saying 'patents for life' and arranged for them to talk to parliamentarians. Their message: Rejecting the directive would be tantamount to condemning these sufferers to death because without a patent no company would ever fund research to heal their disease.

Journalists quickly found out that one company did fund these envoys' voyages - the British biotech giant SmithKline Beecham. And that very same company appeared on the donors´ list of that particular organizers home group, based in Great Britain as well: GIG. In the course of six months this man had changed his opinion by a 180 degrees, turning from devoted anti-patent lobbying to advocating the release of genetic information to insurers. And what's more, his European member organizations had no idea of what he was doing in Brussels. When they were told by Greenpeace, they cancelled his authority to talk about biotech issues in public. But it was too late. The astroturf transformation had done its work.

In these two cases companies have successfully employed or even created citizens-organizations as PR tools. They have been successful because things happened too far off the national base to be effectively monitored. Control or counterstrategy was impossible and remains very difficult to this date.