Kumi Naidoo

Fearless Director of Greenpeace International

Expelled from his Durban high school aged 15 for activism against apartheid, Naidoo ended up in exile in the UK until Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 (picking up a PhD in political sociology from Oxford along the way). Eagerly building on Greenpeace’s history of civil disobedience, Naidoo spent four days in a Greenlandic prison in summer 2011 after scaling an oil platform owned by Cairn Energy. After the disappointment of the Rio +20 talks in summer 2012, he drew on his experience in the struggle against apartheid and announced Greenpeace would be moving to a “war footing”. An eloquent speaker and writer, we’ve seen a lot of Naidoo in recent debates over the Arctic, and can expect to see more. He is @kuminaidoo on Twitter.