UK Conservative and Liberal parties unite Call the latest act They called it a “shameful act” and a “pathetic act” respectively, while American environmental activists called the protests criminal.
“These exhibitionist vandals who attack our common cultural heritage deserve prison time, not support,” said Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist and executive director of Project Drawdown. I have written About X.
It’s fair to say Foley is in the majority, but the real question is: Will a “Just Stop Oil” strategy curb fossil fuel pollution, and if not, what will it curb?
What is effective climate protest?
To find out, I called Eric Schuman, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and Harvard Business School who studies nonviolent collective action. Mumbai To SelmaBut there’s no doubt that nonviolent protest has changed the course of history, he said.
He says the most successful companies tend to have three things in common.
First, protests must be disruptive and create pressure and a sense of urgency to do something. Second, the public must believe that protesters have constructive intentions and clear positive goals, not just hostility toward those with whom they disagree. Finally, while Schuman says this is more anecdotal, it helps to be relevant: protests have more power when their target is linked to a perceived injustice.
Take Earth Day for example. In the 1960s, Gaylord Nelson, a newly elected U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was frustrated that environmental protection efforts were not being promoted in Congress. He needed mass public support to get his representatives to act. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he Helped organize The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. An estimated 20 million people flooded U.S. roads and built political momentum for the passage of groundbreaking environmental protections. Endangered Species Act And Creation of The EPA was under the direction of Republican President Richard M. Nixon.
Did last week’s attack on Stonehenge pass these three tests?
It certainly caused confusion. The incident was covered by media around the world, but the group has staged similar protests in recent years, including pouring tomato soup through the protective glass of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” smashing a hammer into the case of the Magna Carta at the British Library and gluing themselves to a copy of “The Last Supper” (though none of the works were damaged).
But these demonstrations, including the recent one at Stonehenge, do not appear to meet the other two criteria for effective protest.
Just Stop Oil’s goal of ending UK government approvals of new oil, gas and coal projects is not unconstructive – it’s not even radical. Fatih BirolTop energy economist and scientist leads the International Energy Agency Published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal “Science” In May, they took a substantially identical position.
But if protest is symbolic, Many people consider the defacing of artworks to be a senseless act of vandalism unrelated to the climate crisis, despite advocates’ calls to stop oil. Argument People should feel as outraged about climate destruction as they do about monuments.
Did the Stonehenge protests set back climate change?
Just Say Oil did not respond to emailed questions, but pointed me to research by cognitive psychologist Colin Davis of the University of Bristol, whose experiments suggest public hostility toward protesters. It will not affect public support for their demands., “All publicity is good publicity.”. “
“People might ‘shoot the messenger.’ In the conversation, Davis writes:“But they are at least hearing the message sometimes.”
This view has historical support. At the height of the civil rights movement, Americans polled said that the lunch counter sit-ins in response to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech set the civil rights movement back.
More than 60% of Americans believe civil rights leaders are moving “too fast” for racial justice. 1964 pollby American National Election Research, Academic consortium. Just a year later, 74% of Americans in a Gallup poll said that “massive demonstrations” like those of Dr. King were “Harmful to achieving racial equality. “
“Disruptive protests are never popular in the moment,” Sean Patterson Jr., a research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email. “But nonviolent protests are never popular in the moment.” [civil rights] Protests, especially when met with government backlash, generated increased media coverage and ultimately galvanized public opinion on civil rights.”
Just Stop Oil has a similar goal – to wake society up to the injustice of the climate crisis – but its tactics are different.
Civil rights leaders like King didn’t just seek attention; they sought to expose the daily oppression black Americans endured to a white public that rejected it. Their protests were committed to confronting violence and vandalism, but never joining in it. Each protest targeted practices that had to be eliminated if America was to live up to its highest ideals, like forcing black people to sit in the back of the bus or drink from a separate water fountain.
Shuman says the climate change movement can learn from this: The civil rights movement didn’t mobilize most Americans to protest or sympathize with them, but it did inspire people who didn’t share its beliefs. Dismantling the racist system was the right thing to do.
Targeting works of art, rather than private jets and oil company headquarters, serves to alienate rather than inspire.
“Once protests cross a moral line, support really plummets,” Schuman said.