Friends of the Earth Brand Guidelines: David Brower’s 1969 Group, a Hand & a Green Circle

A split from the Sierra Club, then a federation.

Friends of the Earth began in San Francisco in 1969. English Wikipedia credits David Brower, who had been the first executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952, and says he left after a split over his opposition to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. Those named as helping him include Donald Aitken, Gary Soucie and Jerry Mander, and the group received funding from Robert O. Anderson, founder of the ARCO petroleum company. At a 2021 Friends of the Earth International session, published by the federation in July 2022, the founding member Edwin Matthews said the name was conceived by Anne Brower.

Matthews also described how a single American group became many. A lawyer in Paris at the time, he said he set out to “transpose the idea and the name to every country,” helping to start groups in France, the UK and Sweden. In 1971 he looked for a way to link them without an overall governing body, and said the closest precedent he found was the Red Cross. He drafted the first bye-laws of an association of independent organisations, and recalled a first meeting in Paris, with a walk in the forest of Rambouillet.

The federation’s own history says Friends of the Earth International began in 1971 with groups from France, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, working on shared problems such as nuclear energy and whaling. A small secretariat followed in 1981, initially staffed by volunteers and rotating from country to country. By 1983 there were 25 members and an elected executive committee, and in 1986 Sahabat Alam Malaysia hosted the annual general meeting, the first held by a group from the global south. The federation adopted its first shared strategic plan in 1994.

Bottles, branches and courtrooms.

The name is shared, but the groups are separate. In the UK, English Wikipedia says, the group for England, Wales and Northern Ireland was founded in 1971, with Graham Searle as its first leader. One early campaign left almost a thousand glass bottles at the London headquarters of Schweppes in protest at its non-returnable bottles. Others opposed an open-cast copper mine in Snowdonia National Park. Wikipedia counts eight local branches soon after the launch and 140 by 1976; groups in Scotland formed their own organisation in 1978. Jonathan Porritt became director in 1984, and when he left in 1990 membership had reached 226,000. From 2006 to 2008 the group led the “Big Ask” campaign for the UK climate law passed in 2008. It works through a dual structure: a registered charity, and a limited company that carries out political campaigning.

In the United States, the original group merged with the Environmental Policy Center and the Oceanic Society in 1989. Wikipedia says it is now based in Washington, D.C. It also gave its name to a case that reached the US Supreme Court in 1999, Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, over pollution of the North Tyger River in South Carolina, in which the court held that the plaintiffs had standing to sue.

The recent case it is known for belongs to the Dutch member, Milieudefensie. In 2021 a court in the Netherlands ordered Shell to cut its emissions by 45 percent by 2030, compared with 2019. That order was overturned on appeal in November 2024; Milieudefensie says the appeal court still found that Shell has a duty to reduce its emissions but could not set a percentage. The two sides met at the Dutch Supreme Court on 22 May 2026, Insurance Journal reported. Shell argues that lawmakers rather than courts should set such limits. A final ruling is expected in 2027, though sources differ on the timing.

How campaigning groups present themselves.

A campaigning group has to be recognised in places a company rarely goes: on a banner at a protest, on the side of a boat, on a lapel, on the cover of a report about something grim. That pressure shapes how these organisations present themselves, and the published guidelines of two of them show how it is handled.

Greenpeace’s visual identity guidelines say its yellow campaign banners have been used in non-violent direct actions for more than 40 years, and they build a colour rule around them. Its display type, Zodiac Sans, was drawn from the shape of inflatable boats, according to the studio that made it. Ships are a medium in their own right: the guidelines keep the rainbow for Greenpeace vessels. Even the logo began, by the group’s own account, as a felt-tip word on a beer mat.

Amnesty International offers the matching case at a smaller scale. Its candle in barbed wire, which Wikipedia says was first drawn for a Christmas card, appears on a pin badge the group sells, and its 2015 toolkit sets a minimum height for the wordmark. The same toolkit asks for yellow to be used sparingly and keeps the logo out of cover photos on social media. The Nobel Prize’s record notes that the group’s findings are published in special reports, so the report cover is one of its everyday surfaces.

Field photography has rules of its own. Amnesty’s toolkit says images should never be sensationalist and should show people as individuals with their own stories, with the date, names and location in the caption. Greenpeace’s guidelines, for their part, cite a single picture from the whaling campaigns, a small inflatable between the harpoon and the whale, as an image that tells its story on sight.

From a sun and hand to a marker-pen ring.

A dated account of the mark appears in the journal Nature. In April 2011 the science writer Henry Nicholls wrote that most of the network had swapped “the charity’s abstract sun and hand for a bright green, marker-pen circle” in 2001. Ann Doherty, then communications co-ordinator at the federation, told him that it was a very simple design, meant to represent the Earth, sustainability, cycles and unity. A figure with his article shows the earlier mark, dated to the 1990s, with the name set in English, French and Spanish, and beside it the 2001 circle with the name in a heavy sans.

Member groups may use Friends of the Earth or a translation, such as Amigos de la Tierra in Spain and Argentina. English Wikipedia says roughly half work under other names, sometimes reflecting an independent origin, among them Pro Natura in Switzerland, WALHI in Indonesia and Milieudefensie in the Netherlands. Local variation is visible too. Friends of the Earth Malta said in 2023 that it had first used the network’s font, colours and logo, introduced a softer version in 2019, and then commissioned a fuller identity from the design company 2point3.

Today the federation’s website lists 70 national member groups across four regions and calls itself the world’s largest grassroots environmental federation; a 2022 federation article gave 73 countries. Its secretariat is in Amsterdam, and its 2023 document Pathways to System Change sets out its current vision. An executive committee elected by the member groups employs the secretariat, Wikipedia says, and national groups run their own campaigns so long as they do not go against agreed international policy.

Friends of the Earth has also faced challenge. English Wikipedia records critics who say it seeks media attention rather than solving local problems, and who object to funding linked to oil and gas. In January 2017 Drill or Drop and Civil Society reported that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority had closed a case over a fundraising leaflet about fracking, following complaints including one from the shale gas company Cuadrilla. The authority issued no formal ruling; it said the group had agreed not to repeat the claims and told it not to make such claims without adequate evidence. Friends of the Earth said the case had been dropped without a ruling and that it would keep campaigning.

For a design guide, Friends of the Earth shows how a very simple mark can be shared by independent groups working in different languages. Compare Sierra Club, the organisation David Brower left, and Greenpeace, another name from early whaling campaigns. For this guide we use pine green, marigold and pale leaf with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Friends of the Earth’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.