Just Stop Oil activists could take a page from the civil rights movement, experts say.
Last week, two climate protesters walked up to Stonehenge dousing the 5,000-year-old stone monument in a cloud of orange dye. Police eventually arrested a 73-year-old man and 21-year-old woman, members of the group Just Stop Oil, a self-described nonviolent civil resistance group.
Workers were able to clean the stones, but defacing the cultural treasure, even if temporarily, has drawn near universal condemnation on both sides of the Atlantic — and, as intended, plenty of attention.
Britain’s conservative and liberal parties united to call the latest act “disgraceful” and “pathetic,” respectively, while an American climate advocate labeled the protest criminal.
“Self-aggrandizing vandals who attack our shared cultural treasures deserve prison time, not support,” Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist and executive director of Project Drawdown, wrote on X.
Foley, it’s safe to say, is in the majority. But the real question is: Will Just Stop Oil’s tactics curb fossil fuel pollution? If not, what would?
To find out, I called Eric Shuman, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and Harvard Business School who researches nonviolent collective action. Tactics have varied from Mumbai to Selma, he says, but nonviolent protests have undoubtedly changed the course of history.
The most successful ones, he says, tend to share three common elements.
First, protests must be disruptive, creating pressure and urgency to do something. Second, the public must believe the protesters have constructive intentions with clear positive goals, not just animus toward those who disagree with them. Finally — though Shuman says this is more anecdotal — it helps to be relevant: Protests carry more power when the target relates to the perceived injustice.
Take Earth Day. In the 1960s, newly elected U.S. senator from Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson was frustrated by his failure to push environmental action through Congress. He needed a massive display of public support to sway lawmakers. Inspired by the student antiwar movement, he helped organize the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. An estimated 20 million flooded U.S. streets, igniting the political momentum for the passage of landmark environmental protection efforts such as the Endangered Species Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, all under the auspices of a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon.
Did this past week’s attack on Stonehenge meet this three-part test?
It was disruptive, surely. Media outlets featured the story around the world, as they have other similar protests staged by the group over the last few years: splashing tomato soup on the protective glass over Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers, smashing a hammer against the case with the British Library’s Magna Carta and gluing themselves to a copy of The Last Supper. (None of the objects were damaged).
But these demonstrations, including the latest one at Stonehenge, don’t appear to meet the other two benchmarks of an effective protest.
It’s not that Just Stop Oil’s goal — ending British government approval of any new oil, gas and coal projects — isn’t constructive. It’s not even radical. Figures such as Fatih Birol, a top energy economist who leads the International Energy Agency, and scientists publishing in the prestigious journal Science in May take virtually identical positions.
But if protests are symbols, many see defacing art as senseless destruction disconnected from the climate crisis — despite Just Stop Oil supporters’ argument that people should feel even more anger toward the destruction of the climate as they feel about a monument.
Just Stop Oil didn’t respond to a list of emailed questions but pointed me to the research of Colin Davis, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol. His experiments suggest public animosity toward protesters doesn’t affect public support for their demands, a version of “all publicity is good publicity.”
“People may ‘shoot the messenger,’” writes Davis in the Conversation, “but they do — at least, sometimes — hear the message.”
There’s some historical support for this view. Most Americans, at the height of the civil rights movement, told pollsters that protests from lunch counter sit-ins to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” set back the cause of civil rights.
More than 60 percent of Americans believed civil rights leaders were moving “too fast” for racial justice in a 1964 poll, according to the American National Elections Studies, an academic consortium. Just a year later, 74 percent of Americans told Gallup that “mass demonstrations” like King’s were “detrimental to achieving racial equality.”
“Disruptive protests are never popular … in the moment,” writes Shawn Patterson, Jr., a research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, by email. “But nonviolent [civil rights] protests, particularly when met with state pushback, drove media coverage and eventually public opinion on civil rights.”
Just Stop Oil’s goal is similar: to awaken society to the injustice of the climate crisis. Yet their tactics are different.
Civil rights leaders like King did not merely seek attention. They sought to expose the daily oppression endured by Black Americans to a White public that chose to deny it. Their protests were committed to confronting violence and destruction, while never joining it. Each protest targeted a practice — whether forcing Black people to sit at the back of the bus or drink from a different water fountain — that had to be dismantled for the United States to achieve its highest ideals.
Shuman says the climate movement could learn from this. The civil rights movement did not convince most Americans to join, or even sympathize, with protesters. But it did force people who didn’t share its convictions to see that dismantling a racist system was the right thing for them to do.
Targeting works of art, as opposed to private jets or the headquarters of oil companies, alienates more than it inspires.
“When protests cross some moral line,” Shuman says, “support really plummets.”