Barking Up the Wrong Tree
In the fight to mitigate climate change, are we better served by creating or disrupting?
“Let me tell you an uncomfortable truth people…” - Don Pearlman, oil lobbyist and lawyer in Kyoto
The above clip is from a performance of the play Kyoto, a political thriller staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company about the Kyoto Climate Conference in December 1997. It’s garnered rave reviews since opening in Stratford-Upon-Avon last year and is now on stage in the famous West End of London.
Without spoiling the whole story, Don - an oil lobbyist - creates an NGO so he can gain access to try to influence and inhibit the progress of discussions to act on climate change at the first COP in Berlin. He’s found out but continues his work off the main stage and is at COP3 to watch the growth from the seeds of confusion he had sown. Yet, the world still manages to come together to pass the first legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - the Kyoto Protocol. And by the world, I mean 192 countries but not the United States (the largest historical carbon emitter), which signed it in 1998 but it never passed Congress, and not China and India (the current largest and third largest emitters) because they were exempt from the legally binding part along with 98 other “developing nations.” (China did ratify it in 2002, along with India, to gain access to foreign investment.)
To me, Kyoto is a great example of what we need more of - works of art and creativity that support a connection with nature and the more-than-human world or share the climate change story in an incredibly compelling fashion. This is not to say we should exclude scientists from the conversations, but that the way we communicate their scientific finding needs to be as compelling to the average person with no scientific background as it is to those of us who care deeply about the climate crisis. In the case of Kyoto, the play brilliantly illuminates the stranglehold bad actors have on the COP process.
The play also makes a point - we need to create where others destroy.
That’s why I’ve found the spate of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion disruptions of artistic works over the last few years to be frustrating.
The most recent incident occurred at a performance of the play The Tempest in London. The production is notable because the lead is being played by the Golden Globe and BAFTA-award-winning American actress Sigourney Weaver. The lead - Prospero - is typically played by a man, making this production especially noteworthy.
The protestors rushed the stage to unfurl a sign that read “Over 1.5 degrees is a global shipwreck” and set off a confetti cannon.
I get it. Their aim was to garner headlines and they achieved that to a degree because I first read about this in The Guardian. Yet, I think they totally missed the mark.
As of 2023, 83% of the UK public and 77% of the US public think that climate change is real and a threat to humanity. Further, 90% of Londoners are motivated to help prevent climate change.
These stats show that thankfully, we are in a fundamentally different fight now than we were at COP1 or COP3. Most - not all - people do not need to be convinced that climate change is real. Even more than half of all Republicans in the U.S. agree that we should participate in international efforts to reduce the effects of climate change.
In the past, Just Stop Oil disruptors threw soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ at the National Gallery, one of the visitors at the time articulated it perfectly:
“The typical unthinking individual who doesn’t think about the big issues of the planet is not the kind of person who walks around the National Gallery.”
Rather than giving people an action to take, additional context or a piece of new information, the disruptors just interrupt the enjoyment of art for a lot of people who probably already agree with them. On top of the audience, Weaver is a well-known supporter of conservation and preservation efforts and a new book suggests that Van Gogh might have been an environmentalist.
In the U.S. a similar incident to The Tempest occurred at a production of An Enemy of the People staring Succession’s Jeremy Strong.
The Henrik Ibsen play is actually a great vehicle to tell a compelling climate change story. In fact, the updated version of the play by Amy Herzog used in this staging was noteworthy as it “has occasionally been described as having thematic echoes of the climate change crisis.”
In the play, Dr. Thomas Stockmann discovers that the water in the town’s spa is contaminated, risking public health and the tourism economy. When Stockmann raises the issue he rankles those who have economic interests and he becomes a town pariah.
The disruptors were a bit more clever in this case as they decided to shout that there is “no theater on a dead planet” during the press preview performance of the play. Yet the scene they chose to disrupt was so appropriate to the themes of the play that Strong played along, staying in character and much of the audience - including the critics - assumed it was part of the production.
“I thought it was all scripted. The timing was perfect to fit into the town meeting onstage, and the subject was related.” - Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times
Like so many when reacting to these disruptions, Strong expressed that he supports what the disruptors are saying (clip above from Late Night with Seth Meyers).
Disrupting during a press preview night made sure the disruptors made headlines, but again are they reaching the right people? The New York Times - with its theatre critic in the audience at this performance - reports that 90% of its audience consider themselves lifelong learners and 91% identify as Democrats. Probably not the type of people who still question the impact of humans on nature and climate change.
But - and it is a big but - I think this is a case of right tactics, wrong strategy.
Interrupting the enjoyment of the arts by people who probably already agree with you doesn’t make much sense. If anything, it probably creates a lot of resentment. (As expressed in this post, for example.)
But what about interrupting sport?
Just Stop Oil garnered a similar or greater amount of headlines when it interrupted rugby and football matches.
Football (soccer) is the world’s most popular sport by far, counting more than 3.5B fans. (13.2M went to live theatre in London in 2024 for reference.) And the global football industry has the annual carbon footprint of the country of Denmark with teams jetting all over the world on a weekly basis - even for games in their own country. In fact, the game’s governing body - FIFA - was called out for its false claims that the 2022 World Cup in the oil-rich country of Qatar was “carbon neutral”.
FIFA says it achieved the carbon neutral status through offsets, yet the Swiss regulator reviewing the claim said:
"Fifa was not able to provide proof that the claims were accurate during the proceedings"
I don’t have any connection to Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. I don’t have any understanding of either of the organization’s official strategy. However, it seems to me that making football fans aware of the impact of the game they love - and the greenwashing that its governing body engages in - would be a lot more effective than preaching to the choir by disrupting the arts. Especially, when work like Kyoto has demonstrated the ability to make headlines and earn audiences, leaving them more informed and engaged, rather than more annoyed.