Climate stunts and the soup heard around the world

Ahead of the United Nations climate conference COP 27 kicking off in Egypt, the UN Secretary General António Guterres said, “There is no way we can avoid a catastrophic situation, if [the developed and developing world] are not able to establish a historic pact … because at the present level, we will be doomed.”

“Present policies [on the climate] will be absolutely catastrophic,” he added.

Earlier this year he was even starker in his language, stating, “we have a choice — collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

Yet, recent climate protests with unconventional tactics are what have garnered more attention, more impassioned discussion and posed deeper societal and ethical questions than the countless well-meaning speeches we hear from world leaders, decade after decade.

It started with two young climate activists in the UK with a can of soup and a bottle of glue: A few weeks ago, a pair of British teenagers emptied a can of tomato soup on a priceless Van Gogh painting, “Sunflowers,” in London’s National Gallery and glued themselves to the wall to call attention to climate change. Other climate activists have followed suit in a number of similarly bold protests.

Like many climate change advocates, I was at first shocked and upset when I saw the video of the actions in the London gallery. “Why damage art? Why not protest at an oil company’s shareholder meeting?” I thought. In the ensuing hours and days critiques of this sort poured down on these young adults from climate activists and climate deniers alike with all sorts of arguments for why their actions were misguided.

But once I learned that the painting was covered with glass, which the activists knew ahead of time, and that the painting had not been damaged, my opinion changed.

This is exactly the type of activism we need more of.

As the history of the 20th century has shown us — from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., to more recently Colin Kaepernick — nonviolent forms of direct action are the most effective tools we have to change society.

In “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” King famously wrote, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And “dramatize” is exactly what the soup-throwing activists have done. While climate change is so easy for society to try and ignore (until the next extreme weather event), actions like this make it urgent — make it front page news, which is exactly what it should be, as the activists have pointed out. Frankly, we are not protesting nearly dramatically enough.

As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe points out, the most important thing we can do to fight the climate crisis is talk about it. From that perspective, this action had more of an impact than almost anything done recently to raise awareness about climate change and bring the topic into the mainstream.

The other benefit of protests like this is they spur copycats. It gives other people the courage and willingness to try a direct-action protest like that themselves. We soon saw activists in a German museum throw mashed potatoes on a Monet — then another Van Gogh painting, this time in Rome, was splattered with pea soup. (Both were covered with protective glass.) Just Stop Oil, the British climate campaign behind the original tomato soup action, also sprayed The Bank of England and a number of other government buildings with bright orange paint recently. Activists in Germany also glued themselves to a Volkswagen showroom and a dinosaur display at Berlin’s Natural History Museum.

As Aileen Getty, heiress to the Getty oil fortune, now a climate philanthropist, points out, “We can have a fossil fuel-powered economy, or we can have thriving life on planet earth. We can’t have both. The unfortunate truth is that our planet has no protective glass covering.”

Critics, on the other hand, seem more concerned with the optics than addressing the catastrophic climate emergency. Staff writer for The Atlantic Robinson Meyer wrote, “worst of all — they look bad,” “they look so silly” and “they don’t look cool.” Thankfully, these activists appear more concerned with saving life on Earth from impending calamity than looking cool.

As one of the activists involved in the original soup throwing, Phoebe Plummer, eloquently put it, “This isn’t a popularity contest. We’re making change. … This is the biggest crisis that humanity has ever faced.”

“Why aren’t you telling people how bad it’s going to get?” she added. “Quite frankly, it’s not happening in policy, so civil resistance is the only chance we have left to get the radical change we need in the timescale we have left.”

Are there productive ways of taking action that are more solutions-oriented, like spearheading community-based solar projects? Absolutely. The climate movement must create more opportunities, especially for young folks, to direct their efforts and activism. However, we are in an all-hands-on-deck type of moment. So, to the agitators throwing soup, mashed potatoes or orange paint to call attention to the climate crisis: Keep doing what you’re doing. We need you.

Andreas Karelas is the author of “Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America.” He is also the founder and executive director of RE-volv, a nonprofit climate justice organization that helps fellow nonprofits across the country go solar. Follow him on Twitter: @AndreasKarelas