Climate activists: How far is too far in raising the climate alarm? – Daily Maverick

Climate activists play a similar role to that of journalists: informing the public, shaping discourse, and wrestling the narrative back from the powerful. While journalists wear the chainmail of press freedom, activists dont have the armour of a similar social compact.

Terry Kaelber woke to find himself alone in bed on a Saturday morning in April 2018. He thought his husband David Buckel had simply slipped out of their Brooklyn apartment for a bit, and that hed be back soon for their usual visit to the local market. Nothing in Davids recent behaviour had given any clue as to what would come next.

David, a former human rights lawyer and prominent New York LGBT+ activist, had walked to a nearby park, where he texted local media outlets to say what he was about to do. He sat on the grass, doused himself in petrol he chose, deliberately, a fossil fuel and set himself alight.

The sun was barely up when Terry learned that his partner of more than 30 years was dead.

This was not a death of despair, Terry explains a few years later on the podcast Death, Sex & Money. It wasnt suicide. David was drawing on the Buddhist tradition of self-immolation, an act of offering up ones body in sacrifice, in this case as a political protest to shake the world out of a coma of climate complacency.

My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves, wrote the 60-year-old in a note explaining his actions.

Only it didnt do what hed hoped. The media barely paid attention beyond a few ghoulish moments, and then, predictably, moved on to the next story.

If only hed chosen to direct his activism into writing, Terry reflects.

He was such a great writer.

Is this kind of protest too much? Is it a step too far?

Judging by the reception of the rising wave of climate demonstrations around the world, it is.

But then so is the tomato soup splattered across the protective glass pane covering a Van Gogh by Just Stop Oil activists in 2022, even though the action was intended to leave the painting undamaged. Too radical. Greta Thunbergs address at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2019. Too angry. Extinction Rebellions disruption of city traffic now and then. Too inconvenient.

What comes next, after all normal channels have failed? When society continues to deafen itself to letter writing and public appeals and street march sing-alongs, is it time to break the law, asks Chris Packham, the British television presenter and David Attenborough protg in a recent Channel 4 broadcast.

Civil disobedience is already here, where activists are breaking the law peacefully in the interests of the common good, like the Extinction Rebellion sit-in at Standard Banks Johannesburg head offices this month to draw public attention to the financiers support of fossil fuel development on the continent. The protesters transgression was trespassing. Their punishment was to be manhandled from the property by security and bullied outside on the pavement by police.

This road to justice has a long history. Martin Luther King was all for peaceful law-breaking in the struggle for civil rights in 1950s America. If the law is unjust, he said, we have a moral duty to break that law.

South Africas liberation movement upped the ante against the apartheid state when it chose to meet violence with violence. The early 1960 Sabotage Campaign deliberately targeted infrastructure though, including places like pass offices which stood for state oppression. The mandate: dont hurt people. Nelson Mandela got locked up for 27 years for his part in this, although he was willing to die for it too.

Suffragette Emily Davison did die for the cause. After years of fighting for women to be regarded before the law as actual flesh-and-blood human beings, rather than objects through marches, clashes with police, arson, prison time, and hunger strikes in June 1913 she made her final protest at the Epsom Derby, a horse race that was a theatre for the rich and powerful. She stepped in the path of galloping steeds and was trampled under the kings horse. She died of her injuries. Some histories remember her as a militant.

These people werent popular at the time. Thats the nature of activism, its trying to lurch the zeitgeist out of inertia, and those benefitting from the status quo dont want disruption. But the Kings, Mandelas and Davisons of the world arent doing it to one day be on the right side of history. Theyre doing what is right, at that moment in time, so that we can have a world less cruel and exploitative.

And since were trying to avert societal annihilation, the stakes are a little higher this time.

Veteran war photographer James Nachtwey argues that reporting from the heart of violence is a way of negotiating peace. Wars are far removed from the lives of those in stable societies, so by showing us the murderous bloody maelstrom, journalists can shake us out of a fog of complacency and indifference. This is how we nudge society to demand more of itself, he says, in the hope of avoiding future wars. The roll of honour is replete with journalists whove died in the line of fire.

Environmental activists are dying, too, in a fight for a similar cause. Global Witness reckons that nearly 2,000 were murdered or killed on the job from 2012 to 2022 in the David-vs-Goliath battle to protect the land, forests, rivers, wildlife, culture and the global common good of a stable climate from predatory exploitation by corporations and complicit governments.

But journalists step into battle with the chainmail of press freedom, which gives a margin of protection, in and outside of war zones. Environmental activists dont.

Journalists are celebrated for putting their lives on the line. Climate activists are spat on, insulted, dragged from the road by irate drivers, vilified by right-wing media, and even charged with terrorism.

The binge-able BBC podcast Burn Wild tells the story of environmental activists in 1990s USA who had used up all peaceful means to stop clear-felling old-growth forests, and then turned to arson, using home-made fire-bombs to torch buildings and equipment. The states response was to charge them not just with arson, but with terrorism. The criminal implications were huge, in terms of adding years to their sentences. But the message to the public was as severe: by putting their mugshots on the FBIs most-wanted terrorist list, environmental activists were now on a par with extremists who fly passenger planes into tower blocks.

Standard Bank issued a mea culpa after its handling of the climate protests, but it only apologised for roughing up a journalist who got caught up in the fray, and for the banks transgression against a free press. How could it not respond cap-in-hand to Daily Maverick editor-in-chief Branko Brkics excoriating rebuke, and the heft of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) hovering in the wings?

The financiers curt, three-paragraph statement clearly regards the protesters as out of order and needing to be held accountable. The bank doesnt apologise for its excessive use of force in evicting them. The only damage the trespassers were doing was to the banks reputation, and even thats easily laundered when a corporation has a huge PR machine on standby.

Theres a mind-blowing disconnect between the push-back against these small inconvenient protesters voices, and the almost willful blindness towards those who actually control the narrative. Fossil fuel companies have been exposed again and again for deliberately misleading the public and stoking climate denial, even as theyve known for 30 years that carbon pollution will destabilise the climate. They have used calculated, well-funded communications campaigns to keep us on a path towards unimaginable suffering, so that they can keep pocketing their profits. Al Gore calls this the moral equivalent of a war crime.

Rightwing media stables like those in the Murdoch empire Fox News, et al have been complicit in climate disinformation and denial, and deliberately demonised climate activists by calling them extremists and eco-terrorists. You only need to look at video footage of irate European drivers dragging peaceful protesters from road sit-ins, or beating them up, to see how this media narrative emboldens people against vilified protesters. Drivers feel it is their right to physically assault protesters, an act of harmful criminality, in response to a non-violent act of civil disobedience.

I wonder what the people of Derna have to say about all of this bluff and bluster around soup and famous paintings and a few hours of traffic bottlenecks?

What Packham calls, kindly, a childish act of vandalism, is a soft way for a London student activist to say what journalists are reporting from the frontline of disaster zones: that the climate is already becoming dangerously unstable.

The suffering in Derna, where a third of the Libyan city was razed after a rain bomb collided with the problem of failing infrastructure and incompetent governance, is unimaginable. Over 11,300 people crushed under collapsing buildings, lungs filled with suffocating water in a raging torrent, swept out to sea.

Rebuilding the Mozambican city of Beira after Cyclone Idai levelled most of it in 2019 is more than a little inconvenient. Likewise, the full toll of that years cyclone season on Cabo Delgado province in the north of the country is only now being tallied. The Red Cross/Red Crescent joins the dots between Cyclone Kenneth, which arrived a few weeks after Idai, with the existing political instability at the time, and escalating conflict in the years following this record-breaking storm season.

How inconvenient were the floods in Durban in April 2019 and again in 2022, which killed hundreds, destroyed buildings, disrupted water, electricity and sewerage services, and left thousands homeless?

This is only just the start.

The activists who try to draw these largely invisible stories into the noisy, distracted, entertainment-craving global media-scape will never be popular. The problem isnt the messenger, its the message: its too fucking frightening to look the truth square in the eye.

Its easier to shoot the messenger, be it with bile or bullets. DM

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Climate activists: How far is too far in raising the climate alarm? - Daily Maverick