Tomato soup splashed on a famous painting. Super gluing hands to the wall. Spilled milk in supermarkets. Bicycles blocking private jets.
A series of chaotic stunts, primarily across Europe, have drawn new attention to activists angry at world leaders they say are moving too slowly to combat climate change.
Protesters may appear to be vandals, but their targets — especially precious paintings — are typically protected from permanent harm. Meanwhile, experts note the headlines about the protests will live on.
Experts say societal progress is often spurred on by activists who history sees as heroes, but who may have seemed like troublemakers at the time. However, disruptive protests also come with risks.
Here’s what to know about the protests:
Successful protest often involves legal trouble
Deana A. Rohlinger, a sociology professor and director of research for the Institute of Politics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, said the stunts harken back to illegal White House picketing conducted by suffragettes in 1917. The women knew they’d be arrested and fined for protesting on the streets of Washington D.C. at a time when they had little political power.
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Fighting Jim Crow-era segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, Black activists conducted sit-ins at diners, again getting arrested while drawing attention to their cause.
In the 1980s, environmental activists in the United States who opposed logging put spikes – often nails and bolts in trees to prevent them from being cut down. The metal made using power tools dangerous. More recently, people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline occupied portions of the Standing Rock reservation in 2016.
Rohlinger said protest actions are most commonly committed by young people more willing to upset the status quo and who are willing to suffer personally via arrests and fines if it serves the larger purpose.
“Does it help increase the profile of an issue? Can it bring more interest, bring more awareness?” Rohlinger. “It can create some PR issues but it can also create some institutional movement for leverage.”
Why are climate protesters choosing such weird stunts?
Climate-change activists don’t have the power to make the radical, systemic changes needed to make a difference in combatting climate change. But they do have the power to draw attention to the cause.
One reason activists commit stunts, said Ernest McGowen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond, is that it’s an attempt to create strong visuals and generate attention that will connect faces with a cause.
GRAPHICS:From Mona Lisa to The Scream, Climate activists protest by defacing art
“If all you’re doing is holding meetings in the high school gymnasium, or posting on Facebook, people can avoid it. They don’t even have to know your grievance exists. They can go about their merry life with nary a worry,” McGowan said. “But as soon as I glue myself to the basketball court, I make the evening news or USA TODAY, and then they have to tell why I glued myself to the floor.”
Mention Greta Thunberg and you instantly know what she stands for, he said — same with Colin Kaepernick.
“The media is going to transmit those images and so when you become the face of the movement it makes it easier for the media because they don’t have to tell a long backstory,” he said.
Will protests backfire?
McGowan said protest actions that upset the status quo always risk losing popular support by giving critics ammunition to change the framing of the issue.
He said that’s what’s happened in part around the Black Lives Matter movement: Although the group pushing for systemic racial reform was designed to be publicly leaderless, critics got people talking about whether its founders inappropriately enriched themselves.
He said it’s the same with the protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020: critics made the debate about property destruction and civil unrest, diverting focus away from the fact that police officers murdered an unarmed Black man.
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