Greenpeace - To the Last Tree Standing
05/09/2018
Advertising Agency
Warsaw, Poland
Białowieża Forest is the last primeval forest in
Europe. Home to a unique ecology, the forest is protected as a national park and
UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, around 150,000 acres of the forest
sits outside that protective status. Almost half of the trees in the entire
forest are dead, eaten away by infestation from an insect called the spruce
bark beetle. This infestation was used by the Polish government as
justification to log down the forest on the edges of the UNESCO-protected area.
Despite a court order from the European Court of Justice, and pressure from
activist groups such as Greenpeace, the logging continued for well over a
year. The debate around the topic quickly turned to become a political
issue and negotiations with public were stuck in a deadlock. Seemed like
Białowieża was already doomed to extinction. Nobody wanted to listen to each
other. So whom would the government
listen to if they neglected opinion of scientists, NGOs or even their friends?
There’s only one group – their future voters.
Our strategy laid in the truth that young people
have more political influence than they are given credit for, and educating
them can create real change. Especially, that (as not many people realize)
there’s no age limit for signing a petition. The problem was that teens in
Poland are completely not interested in political issues that Białowieża Forest
became, moreover, many of them were not even aware where it is and how unique
it is.
That’s why we decided to utilise Minecraft – a
computer game that allows users to explore and build upon a 3D virtual
landscape – to begin this process of education, building a scale custom map of
the Bialowieza Forest in the cult digital world.
We recreated the forest
as a 1:1 scale Minecraft map, featuring 7 million trees made of 50 million
blocks. The gaming community loved it and it was used in schools and art
installations.
The map provided a platform to launch
360 Facebook ads, a photography exhibition and a documentary film. Back online,
teenagers played in the map during the school holidays, before the campaign
climax saw one of Poland's most popular influencers, Gimper, live stream his
experience of the digital forest on gaming site Twitch.
More than 10,000 people were watching live when he arrived at the scene
and saw that every tree in the landscape had been digitally cut down. We took
Białowieża, which they already got to know and loved, away. This helped young people to realize
the importance of what is happening in real life. And to take action.
Result? 170 000
petitions signed, over 100 000 million people reached, environment
minister dismissed.