Suzanne Harrington: Climate protests can be annoying — but less annoying than going extinct
A Just Stop Oil protester on court 18 after throwing confetti on to the grass during Katie Boulter’s first-round match against Daria Saville on day three of the 2023 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon.
When you think of Emily Davison, the woman who fatally threw herself under a race horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, what’s the first thing you think? Is it (a) how selfish of her to ruin a sporting event or (b) how she helped change the course of history for women’s rights? Probably (b), right?
Yet after the seven hottest days on earth in recorded history, what has been the focus after some climate activists harmlessly disrupted Wimbledon by throwing orange confetti around a tennis court? Weirdly, it's (a).
Yes, Wimbledon is a big deal in tennis. Like most major sporting events, tickets are expensive and hard to get. But climate change is a bigger deal, yet Just Stop Oil — the activists who use non-violent direct action to raise awareness of the deadliest thing we have ever faced as a species — are being vilified the way the suffragettes were a century ago. Selfish, immature, alienating, ruining a nice day out, not doing the cause any favours etc. As though the cause were something niche or optional, instead of our continued survival. It’s kind of baffling.
The thing is, people have been signing petitions, going on protest marches, knocking on doors, giving earnest interviews, writing articles, publishing books, making documentaries forever — and nothing has changed, except the temperature of the earth and our chances of surviving it. The academics who founded Extinction Rebellion realised this, studied previous successful protests which got things changed, and concluded that non-violent direct action was a tactic which had worked for the emancipation of women, for Gandhi, for the American Civil Rights movement, for the liberation of gay people...
Today, such action is needed not for a particular group within society — although there are still plenty of oppressed minorities — but for all of humanity.
Just Stop Oil has perfected protest as theatre: flinging soup on a Van Gogh, pitch invading the Premier League, disrupting the cricket, the snooker, the Chelsea Flower Show. Which is annoying, if you are attending such events, but considerably less annoying than going extinct.
The problem with protest is that we only appreciate it retrospectively, looking over our shoulder from 20, 30, 50 years into the future. Maybe then will we realise just how brave and dedicated those Just Stop Oil people really are, putting themselves out there to be public hate figures, screamed at from the front pages of newspapers, monstered online, criminalised, reviled. As though they were eating babies in public, instead of flinging orange powder around in a desperate effort to draw attention to climate destruction.
We need our protestors. They are the ones who will instigate change, while the rest of us are busy looking at our phones or being distracted by this week’s scandal. We need the disrupters, the annoyers, the irritators, to get out there and glue themselves to things, to cause delays, to inconvenience people. Not because it’s a fun thing to do, or fun for anyone it impacts, but because it’s a crucial public service. We just never realise it at the time.
