Bunny McDiarmid is an activist with more than 30 years of experience leading national and international campaigns. She is no stranger to Greenpeace, having worked in various capacities with the organisation starting in 1984. She currently serves as co-executive director of Greenpeace International.
She first joined Greenpeace as a crew member on the original Rainbow Warrior, as it prepared to carry out the relocation of the residents of Rongelap Island, which along with Bikini Atoll (in the Marshall Islands) was radioactively contaminated by the US nuclear testing program. She remained on board as the ship continued to New Zealand on its way to protest French nuclear testing at Moruroa, but the voyage was cut short when the ship was bombed by the French secret service in Auckland in July 1985.
Undeterred, Bunny joined another Greenpeace ship as part of a larger flotilla sailing to Moruroa and where a sustained month long protest raised the regional pressure and support for a nuclear free Pacific treaty. She then returned to the Marshall Islands, spending three months living and working with the Rongelap community in their new home and to find out how Greenpeace could continue to support them whilst they petitioned the US for a clean- up of their home island and compensation for the nuclear legacy they were left with.Her love for the Pacific motivated Bunny to help establish the Greenpeace Pacific campaign in 1987, leading regional teams on nuclear, oceans, forests and climate campaigns. She went on to establish a Greenpeace regional office in Fiji in 1994, living in Suva until 1997 when she left Greenpeace to work with her partner running a sailing charter business for scientists working in the Antarctic Peninsula, South America, the Pacific, and the NZ sub-Antarctic.
Bunny returned to Greenpeace in 2000, working in a variety of campaign leadership roles including the international nuclear campaign and the international deep-sea bottom trawling campaign, before taking the job of Executive Director in Greenpeace NZ/Aotearoa in 2006. She remained in this post until October 2015.
