Does attacking art change minds?
The article below offers no conclusions. I think that most people would see it as deplorable. It makes those who do it seem like nuts. I think it will discredit their message rather than promote it
First it was cake smeared on the Mona Lisa in Paris, then tomato soup splattered across a van Gogh in London, and then, last Sunday, liquefied mashed potatoes hurled at a Monet in a museum in Potsdam, Germany.
What these actions shared, aside from involving priceless art and carbs, was the intentions of the protesters behind them. Desperate to end complacency about the climate crisis and to pressure governments to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, they said they had resorted to such high-profile tactics because little else has worked.
None of the paintings were harmed, as all were encased in protective glass. But the actions went viral and set off an international storm of outrage and debate. Were the activists misguided attention-seekers who harmed the climate movement’s legitimacy while doing nothing to help the Earth? Or did they force a spotlight onto everything at risk if significant climate action isn’t taken fast?
It’s unclear whether throwing food at artwork, which follows a long line of guerrilla protest tactics, was a success.
For the climate activists, the protests amounted to wins, insofar as they nabbed far more attention than anything they’d undertaken yet. Despite decades of lobbying, petitions, marches and civil disobedience, planet-heating fossil fuel emissions are at an all-time high, and the window to avert further climate catastrophe is closing.
“We tried sitting in the roads, we tried blocking oil terminals, and we got virtually zero press coverage, yet the thing that gets the most press is chucking some tomato soup on a piece of glass covering a masterpiece,” said Mel Carrington, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, the group behind the Oct. 14 soup attack on van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London. After tossing the soup, the two Just Stop Oil activists glued their hands to the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” asked one, Phoebe Plummer, 21.
Carrington said the act was intended to elicit a visceral reaction, to force people to emotionally experience the potential loss of a masterpiece. “When you think about it, this is what we face with climate collapse,” she said. “The loss of everything we love.”
The soup action was inspired in part by an episode in May at the Louvre Museum, in which a protester creamed the glass covering of the Mona Lisa with cake, and urged onlookers to think about the Earth. (Just Stop Oil activists echoed that tactic Monday by smashing chocolate cake onto a waxwork figure of King Charles III.)
“We want to have this conversation, and to bring it around to our demand about what we need to do to avoid climate breakdown and collapse,” Carrington said.
In Germany, climate activists took notice. Carla Hinrichs, a spokesperson for the group Last Generation, said her first reaction was disbelief until she saw how Just Stop Oil was using the moment to highlight the planned expansion of oil and gas exploration off England’s coast.
“I realized it was genius,” Hinrichs said. “People get shocked, and then this window opens where they start listening.”
On Oct. 23, two activists with Last Generation headed into the Museum Barberini in Potsdam and, in a nod to Germany’s penchant for spuds, tossed runny yellow mashed potatoes onto the glass front of Monet’s “Grainstacks,” which sold for nearly $111 million in 2019. “Our win is when politicians react to the climate crisis,” Hinrichs said. “This is a step on the way, one that people talk about, that’s not ignorable.”
Hinrichs and Carrington said their groups had made certain the artworks were protected by glass, and in all three instances the museums said the paintings were unharmed, except for minor damage to at least one of the frames. Some museums are now looking to step up security, and the Barberini announced it would temporarily close until Sunday. There are also concerns about a potential “art protection crisis” that could see works being hidden away or permanently ruined.
Art has been targeted by protesters before. Suffragists attacked a series of artworks a century ago, with one slashing “The Toilet of Venus” by Diego Velázquez with a meat cleaver and getting lashed for it in the press.
The soup and potato museum protests similarly elicited shock and confusion. “Embarrassing confession: Did not know that climate change was caused by French impressionists,” Scott Shapiro, a professor at Yale University, said on Twitter. Conspiracy theories blossomed about the activists’ motives, as both groups received backing from the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit organization to which oil heir Aileen Getty and director Adam McKay have been significant donors.
Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of earth and the environment at Boston University, said the most effective social movements employed sustained and intense pressure for long periods of time, and that one measure of an action’s success was how much it builds a coalition or alienates people. While the museum protests were polarizing, he said, “at least we’re talking about it.”
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On Second Thoughts, Just Throw Plastic Away
Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: recycling plastic makes no sense.
This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums—probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide—on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street—Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.” The group’s overall policy remains delusional—the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling—but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
These fatal flaws have been clear since the start of the recycling movement. When I wrote about it a quarter-century ago, experts were already warning that recycling plastic was hopelessly impractical because it was so complicated and labor-intensive, but municipal officials kept trying in the hope that somebody would eventually find it worthwhile to buy their plastic trash. Instead, they’ve had to pay dearly to get rid of it, typically by shipping it to Asian countries with cheaper labor and looser environmental rules. In New York City, recycling a ton of plastic costs at least six times more than sending it to a landfill, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute study, which estimated that the city could save $340 million annually by sending all its trash to landfills.
The environmental price has also been high because the plastic in American recycling bins has gone to developing countries with primitive waste-handling systems. Much of it ends up illegally dumped, burned (spewing toxic fumes), or reprocessed at rudimentary facilities that leak some of the plastics into rivers. Virtually all the consumer plastics polluting the world’s oceans comes from “mismanaged waste” in developing countries. There’d be less plastic polluting the seas if Americans tossed their yogurt containers and water bottles into the trash, so that the plastic could be safely buried at the nearest landfill.
The Environmental Protection Agency has promoted recycling as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but its own figures show that the benefits are relatively small and come almost entirely from recycling paper products and metals, not plastic. I’ve calculated that to offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip transatlantic flight, you’d have to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles—and if you used hot water to rinse those bottles, the net effect could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
While finally admitting the futility of plastic recycling, Greenpeace is making no apologies for the long campaign to foist it on the public, and the group is unashamedly pushing a new strategy that’s even worse. It proposes finally to “end the age of plastic” by “phasing out single-use plastics” through a “Global Plastics Treaty.” This is a preposterous goal—imagine “phasing out” disposable syringes—and would be laughable except that environmentalists have already made some progress toward it. They’ve found yet another way to harm both the environment and humans, as demonstrated in the movement to ban single-use plastic bags.
Progressive activists may not care that these bans have added to the cost of groceries, inconvenienced shoppers, and caused new headaches for merchants. (After New Jersey forbade stores from offering disposable plastic or paper bags, supermarkets ran out of handheld shopping baskets because so many customers were stealing them.) But progressives also don’t seem to care about the implications for climate change and public health.
Banning single-use plastic grocery bags has added carbon to the atmosphere by forcing shoppers to use heavier paper bags and tote bags that require much more energy to manufacture and transport. The paper and cotton bags also take up more space in landfills and produce more greenhouse emissions as they decompose. The tote bags aren’t reused nearly often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint, and they’re breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses because they’re rarely washed properly. Researchers have repeatedly found these bags to be responsible for gastrointestinal infections, but the warnings got little attention until the Covid pandemic suddenly revived respect for disposable products.
As stores and coffee shops banned reusable bags and mugs during the pandemic, Americans relearned the lessons of the early twentieth century, when public-health authorities promoted Dixie cups and other disposable products to counter threats like tuberculosis and the Spanish flu. This marked the beginning of the “throwaway society,” and the term wasn’t originally used pejoratively. Americans welcomed plastic products and packages because they were so much better than the alternative. Cellophane was considered a marvel because it was both moisture-proof and transparent, keeping food fresher and enabling grocery shoppers to see what they were buying. Advertisements featured housewives rejoicing that disposable plates and glasses freed them from dishwashing chores.
Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain. Recycling, while impractical, at least offered emotional rewards to hoarders reluctant to put anything in the trash and to the many people who perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement—a sacrament of the green religion. But why demonize plastic? Why ban products that are cheaper, sturdier, lighter, cleaner, healthier, and better for the environment? One reason: the plastic scare helps Greenpeace activists raise money and keep their jobs. Environmentalists need something to replace their failed recycling campaign.
But there’s more to it than just financial self-interest. The best explanation I’ve come up with is that plastic bans are a revival of the sumptuary laws formerly imposed on the lower classes by monarchs, nobles, and clergy. Those laws forbade commoners from owning certain kinds of clothes, jewelry, furnishings, and other products. The restrictions consistently failed to achieve their ostensible purpose of reducing “unnecessary” spending, but sumptuary laws endured until the Enlightenment because they reinforced ruling-class power and status. An English countess could display her superiority by wearing a dress with silver stripes that were illegal for women of lower rank. Spanish prelates and Portuguese monarchs proclaimed their moral virtue and political authority by forbidding the masses from owning clothes, curtains, and tablecloths made of silk.
Today’s rulers and moral guardians achieve the same purposes with their petty edicts on plastic. California’s law forbidding hotels from offering disposable plastic toiletries is a gratuitous annoyance for travelers who’d like a little bottle of shampoo, but it enables the state’s politicians and environmental groups to exercise power and pretend to be saviors of the planet. The pretense is so ridiculous that even Greenpeace will eventually abandon it—but once again, that could take a few decades. The rest of us can start today.
https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doesnt-work ?
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The Greenies have failed
Where are the Greens, the environmental groups that were opposing us? You know, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy[1], Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Audubon Society, Natural Resource Defense Council, EarthFirst!, Sea Shepherd Society, Wilderness Society, Humane Society of the United States, People for the ethical Treatment of Animals, Smithsonian Institution, Union of Concerned Scientists, World Resources Institute, Friends of the Earth, and too many more.
They attacked property rights, ranching, mining, drilling, fishing, hunting, medical research, and so much more. They held huge meetings with wealthy backers like David Suzuki, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, and Prince Charles. Those meetings discussed how to get rid of us small guys – the protectors of the land and animal users and caretakers. In the early ‘90s, they concluded that there was “no silver bullet” to rid them of us at a meeting in Canada. We weren’t backed by big money. We got small donations from other “wise use” people – or, more often, we footed our own bill.
Why did they even think about silver bullets? Because we were so dangerous to society, they were backed by major $$$$$$$$$$. Here are the top ten “Environmental Grantmakers” for 1990, the heyday of the Green/Animal Rights/anti-industry war:
Richard King Mellon Foundation
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Ford Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
W. Alton Jones Foundation, Inc.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (there are tens and tens more feeding them.)
Corporations supply a great deal of funding to these Green organizations. Just some of those: Aldus Corporation, Amoco, ARCO, Burlington Northern, Burpee, Champion International, Conoco, Liz Claiborne, Orvis, Patagonia, Phillips Petroleum, Tabasco, U.S. Trust, Waste Management, Wells Fargo Bank, L.L. Bean, Chevron, Coca-Cola, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, J.P. Morgan, Philip Morris, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mars Foundation, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Penzoil, 3M, Weyerhaeuser, AT&T Foundation, Proctor 7 Gamble, Exxon, and again, so many more.
What was our crime? What did we do to sic all the major environmental groups on us and that the world’s major corporations needed to fund them? Supposedly, we were trashing the planet – killing birds and animals, tearing up the Earth, tearing down all the trees, despoiling the rivers, and polluting the skies.
Look at the situation now. Wind turbines are killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds. After not a long life, those turbines are buried, not very deep, but they stop any possible use of the land (and as they disintegrate, they pollute what Earth is there. I haven’t heard a peep or chirp from any Green group about all those dead eagles, hawks, or birds. Why not?
Far more creatures are being killed now than were ever in the past. Where are the Earth Liberation Front and the Monkey Wrench gang? We are watching the Earth being destroyed, and the so-called saviors of the Earth are sitting on their hands! They banned paper bags at the grocery store and replaced that biodegradable product with plastic bags!
Uh, Greenpeace, you are vocal about a kid’s birthday party losing 3 or 5 balloons, but plastic bags by the millions are okay? Ah, the makers fund you. Oops. The government is pouring millions of pollutants into the skies to reduce the sun’s heat. Two things there – pollution that is killing birds, animals, plants, rivers – oh, and us – but that last is probably what makes all the other things acceptable.
And where are those Greens now? No more environmentalists howling in the forest at the loss of trees because of environmental degradation? No Greens chaining themselves to a factory that is producing wind-turbine blades? No animal rightists march against PeTA for killing animals they take in?
So, we can assume those Green groups were either reinvented or bought out by big business to end the industrial revolution that allowed so many people to come up from poverty and survive to a decent age. That was their goal. Saying “the digital age” was replacing the industrial age was a farce from the beginning. I always wondered how those brilliant people thought they could build their computerized world without industry. Now I know; they couldn’t.
All those foundations and organizations listed above, and too many more in both categories, are trying to destroy 90% of the human population – and all the rest is collateral damage. Who cares? All those environmental organizations that were supposedly populated by nature lovers who couldn’t stand to see a mouse in a trap, a fur on a woman, a tree that was going to provide paper or walls for a house, a fish or cow used to feed us. Instead, they disappeared as soon as their marching orders were changed.
Now they man the barricades for Black Lives Matters (so the big boss can buy her mansions) and Antifa so they can cause wanton destruction and death while being eulogized for destroying people, businesses, and cities.
If the Greens were so dedicated to Mother Earth and her non-human denizens, why are they now letting it go to hell?
Our world is upside down. It is time for the silent majority to say NO! Loudly.
https://www.conservativehq.org/post/where-have-all-the-flowers-gone-long-time-passing
**********************************************************Italian eco-zealots lie in the middle of busy motorway in Rome as climate change hysteria sweeps Europe
Interesting that the Italian demonstrators seem to be PRO coal
Eco-zealots in Italy have blocked the busiest motorway in Rome as climate protests begin to sweep across Europe.
Protesters have sat in the middle of the Via Guglielmo Marcon in the country's capital holding banners aloft as part of Ultima Generazione, Italian for Last Generation, demonstrations.
The 'civil disobedience' movement was borne from Extinction Rebellion and the independent 'Ultima Generazioneâ' last year.
The protesters are demanding that disused coal plants be reopened and calling for a halt to a new drilling project for the research into and extraction of natural gas.
It was the latest such stunt by climate campaigners in a spate of high-profile incidents in which eco-warriors have targeted road networks and artworks across Europe.
Eco demonstrations, which have taken place in London every day this month, include two environmental activists who glued themselves to an exhibition of a dinosaur skeleton at Berlin's Natural History Museum yesterday to protest against the German government's climate policies.
In Berlin, two women wearing orange vests stuck themselves to metal poles supporting a dinosaur skeleton that was over 60 million years old, holding a banner that read: 'What if the government doesn't have it under control?'
They did not touch or do any damage to the skeleton itself.
The women were removed by the police after security guards at the museum alerted them to the incident.
The protest was the latest effort to force governments around the world to take swift action to reduce emissions over the damage global warming is doing to the planet.
One of the women, Caris Connell, said she was scared of 'forest fires, water shortages, famines, and war.
'Dinosaurs died out, because they could not withstand massive changes to the climate. That is also threatening us,' added the 34-year-old.
It comes after furious drivers resorted to dragging away a group of eco protesters who sparked fury by halting traffic on a busy motorway during a similar stunt in Rome earlier this month.
Rush hour motorists were blockaded on the Grande Raccordo ringroad outside the Italian capital by Last Generation activists who unfurled large banners protesting fossil fuels.
The disruption led to angry scenes as drivers got out of their vehicles to remonstrate with the eco-zealots and plead with them to get out of their way.
Some took matters into their own hands, physically dragging protesters out of the way.
One man on a motorbike begged to be let through, loudly arguing: 'I have to go, I'm a doctor.'
But a female activist refused to grant him permission to get through without seeing his medical identification and demanded he handed it over.
He eventually brandished his ID card and the demonstrator allowed him to bypass the human barricade.
In another tense exchange, one angry driver shouted at a protester: 'You have to move, move out of the f***ing way!'
When he started to physically drag the activist off the road, a woman intervened: 'Stop! You will hurt him.'
Another man stepped in and confronted the demonstrators, saying: 'This is not the way of protesting. Organise a proper protest, the motorway is not where you should protest. We have to go to work'
'Otherwise, this will become poor against poor. People will get angry and they will beat you and this is not fair... You're p***ing people off.'
The protesters' banners read 'no gas' and 'no coal' and they are calling for stronger government action on climate issue.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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