Cover Photo: Just Stop Oil
This year the war against oil has been raging, with many protests erupting across Britain, led largely by a group known as Just Stop Oil. This group is most famous for throwing tomato soup onto Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers in the London National Gallery. Before that though, they staged a series of other nonviolent protests including disrupting Premier League soccer games by handcuffing and gluing themselves to the goals mid-match. Why are they doing all this though?
The group’s main goal is to raise awareness to the cost of fossil-fuel based energy in England, and the fact that renewable energy sources would be far cheaper (nine times cheaper, in fact) than the inflated costs of oil and gas. The protesters said, after gluing themselves to the wall by the soup-covered painting: “What is worth more—art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup.”
The activists chose Sunflowers for the same reason that they attached themselves to the soccer goals mid-match. Their goal is nonviolent disruption of the normal proceedings of the country in a way that is shocking and attention-grabbing to the media, but is nondestructive in the end. For example, the Sunflowers painting was behind glass, so throwing the soup—despite being flashy, did not actually damage the painting.
Major media sources have cited this lack of violence/destruction to property as being one of the strongest parts of the activists’ protest strategy. They start conversations about the energy crisis in England by falsely ruining something, a disparate point to the actual ruining of the earth by their governments continued denial to seek out other energy sources.
written by Brady George.
