Phiebe Plummer is willing to pay any price to raise awareness of the climate emergency. At the age of 21, she has been arrested 11 times. One of them, for throwing tomato soup on the glass that she covers The sunflowers Van Gogh at the National Gallery. Plummer is part of the Just Stop Oil coalition, a group that has taken civil disobedience to another level and has a concrete proposal: to guarantee that the UK Government commits to stop the production and new licenses of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).
“I didn’t imagine my life like this… I’m scared of going to jail, but I can’t sit still in the face of the climate emergency,” Plummer points out during a talk organized at the festival Planet Summer, at London’s Southbank Cultural Institution. “In the next 30 years there will be 1 billion refugees because the earth will be uninhabitable, how could I look someone younger in the eye and tell them I didn’t do everything I could to stop this?” His words open up a conversation about the frontiers of activism and about the extent to which these actions have an effect on the population.
Plummer recalls that his demands are aligned with those of the International Energy Agency and the United Nations. That his actions —the last ones: disrupt Wimbledon or stop parts of the main road in London — irritate and shock, he takes it for granted. “We focus on nonviolent civil disobedience tactics because it is the only hope we have left to bring about the radical change we need. Look in a history book: social movements are disruptive, ”he says. He believes that it takes “ordinary people” doing extraordinary things to keep the conversation going that would otherwise fade. “When my friend Eddie interrupted the world billiards championship made more headlines than 90,000 people demonstrating in central London for four days.”
While they share the urgency, not all activists find these tactics effective. Beyond the initial noise, they don’t always resonate with ordinary people, who have the information, but don’t know what to do with it. “There is a danger of focusing on something marginal for the whole of society. Most people are not activists and never will be,” says Rupert Read, former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion group and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. “Most people don’t want to glue themselves to a painting, but they do know that the crisis is getting worse; and wants to go beyond recycling or donating to Friends of the earthBut sometimes you don’t know where to start.
Doubt hovers over whether radical activism can polarize the population and be counterproductive
Read has created the platform Climate Majority Project to give tools to what he calls the “moderate majority”. In his workshops in different cities in the United Kingdom, efforts to grow food or generate energy are joined, and topics such as the preservation of natural resources or the improvement of biodiversity are discussed. Furthermore, the platform finance other initiativesas wild card, an organization that demands that the main landowners of the country take charge of the regeneration and recovery of the original habitats of their lands; o Net Zero Lawyers, which works with lawyers from multinational companies to help companies implement fast and meaningful climate action. “Lawyers litigating with companies to make them comply with the laws that exist now and those that may come… The same could be applied to auditors, insurers and many more sectors,” she explains. “Getting attention could be a starting point, but what we need now is a lot of people. Millions of people who demand a change”.
For the Nigerian poet and writer Ben Okri, all voices are needed, including the uncomfortable ones, to add political victories. He himself, one of the most internationally recognized African authors, has decided to dedicate all his work, henceforth, exclusively to draw attention to the climate emergency. It seeks to find a new narrative against apathy. Because only by accepting reality can we change it, he says. No need to fall into despair. “We have to activate global awareness quickly and at all levels, make this subject inevitable, that it be everywhere, until it is saturated. Talk about it with your neighbors, with your children. Using our voice and our vote is also our responsibility.”
Beyond calling for action, the doubt always hovers over whether radical activism it can polarize the population and be counterproductive. “These actions run the risk of breaking the social consensus that exists around the need to substantially reduce emissions and comply with the Paris Agreement,” says Tom Harwood, a British journalist and analyst. Okri replies that he has heard this before. “The suffragettes were asked the same question when they chained themselves, when they jumped on horses to claim their right to vote: ‘Won’t they harm the cause?’ The cause is bigger than we can imagine, ”he opines. “We are dealing with the greatest crisis the human race has ever faced. Focusing the debate on those who try to alert us is frivolous compared to the magnitude of the issue. The important thing to wake up from apathy is to know that we still have time to remedy it, he affirms. The role that activism will play in this process remains to be seen. “History will judge it one way or another, if we are lucky enough to have books about this stage,” Read concludes.
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