“Throw canned goods at the Mona Lisa,” might not have been my answer to “How do we get people to care more about climate change?” But it was someone’s answer—and it did get people to talk, even if it was just to complain about those damn kids destroying precious cultural artifacts with soup. (Also: the Mona Lisa is behind glass, so restoring it only required Windex and a rag.) As Elizabeth Weil explains, art museum protests are financed, organized, and driven by strategy along with rage:
One organization finances disruptive climate groups and disruptive climate groups only: Climate Emergency Fund. Among its grantees are Just Stop Oil, which threw the tomato soup and glued the Vermeer; Last Generation, which splattered the mashed potatoes on the Monet; Zepeda’s group, Declare Emergency; and the Social Change Lab, which conducts research on activism. This summer, Sam Nadel, the SCL’s interim director, told me about the key findings. The first is intuitive: People dislike disruptive climate protests and the radicals who do them. The second is a surprise: Those same annoying climate disruptions make people more likely to give money to moderate climate groups.
