Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge

They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. Just Stop Oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it. As the cloud clears, the orange stains remain, soaked into the ancient sarsen stone.

A video of Wednesday’s act of vandalism, posted by an X account devoted to Stonehenge, has accumulated more than 30 million views. The camps have coalesced as you’d expect: Conservative and moderate voices have reacted with outrage, while left-leaning environmentalists have argued that critics should be more concerned about the state of the planet than a bit of plant-based coloring that was easily removed. If I have to pick a side, I’m with the gentlemen wielding the washable dye. (I am an environmental-studies professor, after all.) But the protest left me frustrated: yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.

The Stonehenge incident seems to reflect a once-fringe belief that is now creeping into the mainstream of today’s environmental movement, influenced by extreme pessimists who view our species as a terrestrial parasite poisoning the Earth, our greatest accomplishments mere trifles. These environmental misanthropes pin the blame for climate change on all of humanity. This is misguided: We should be pursuing an environmental humanism, one that wants to defend both the planet and the human estate from the predations of dirty-energy billionaires and the oil addiction they supply.

Over the past few years, some activists within the environmental movement have rightly begun to feel that measured protest tactics have failed to gain necessary traction. New organizations have embraced controversial actions such as obstructing traffic, interrupting sports games, blockading oil facilities, sabotaging gas stations, and defacing luxury-car showrooms.

Around 2022, groups such as Just Stop Oil also began targeting historically important artworks at museums and galleries: gluing themselves to a copy of The Last Supper, throwing soup at the (glass-protected) Mona Lisa. Activists have generally taken care to make sure that these works are not damaged by their protests. Still, the strategy of taking aim at civilizational wonders, of which the Stonehenge incident is only the latest example, would seem to target humanity itself. The hope is that these shocking acts will generate attention, shaking people and politicians out of their complacency.

[Read: The climate art vandals are embarrassing]

Even if protests are more about disruption than simple persuasion—and it is worth noting that a majority of Americans are already convinced that climate change is a major threat—social movements that hew to universalist talking points seem to be the kind that prevail: “I Am a Man” rather than “Black Lives Matter.” Protesters who have to explain themselves to the public are losing: Shouting “Planet over profit!” and blocking the entrance to Citigroup, a corporation that has provided nearly $400 billion in financing to the dirty-energy sector since 2016, requires little justification. Throwing soup on the Mona Lisa requires a lot of it.

A climate protest the day after the Stonehenge one adopted a more productive approach: A different pair of activists used a handheld saw to cut through a fence at Stansted Airport, in London, then spray-painted streaks of orange on two private jets parked on the tarmac. Just Stop Oil claimed responsibility and posted the corresponding video on X, stating that the protesters were “demanding an emergency treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030” and claiming that Taylor Swift’s personal plane was at the airport at the time. (This has been disputed by Essex police.) Unlike the Stonehenge flour dusting, which defaced—if only temporarily—one of humanity’s most cherished relics, this second protest focused the public’s attention squarely on the celebrities and oligarchs carelessly pumping carbon into the atmosphere, leaving the world’s poor and future generations to foot the bill for their hedonism and profit-seeking.

Years from now, in a hotter, wetter, more broken world, making fine-grained distinctions between the Stonehenge and Stansted protests might look like pointless quibbling. I find it hard to imagine that members of my infant child’s generation will look back on the current moment and think that either of these acts of protest were too extreme. (They may well think that they were not extreme enough.) I’m inclined to greet the critics of the Stonehenge protest with a bit of a shrug: The site was ultimately left unharmed, just as the protesters planned. At the same time, climate activists, and those who support them, should think strategically about where they shine their spotlight and whose ire they’re attempting to draw.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: The people cheering for humanity’s end]

Amid the coverage and discussion of the Stonehenge protest, one figure has been lost in the cloud of corn flour: the bystander who ran toward the protesters and tried to stop them, not knowing whether the canisters loosing orange haze were filled with something innocuous or sinister. This person seemed to react, with little time to contemplate the consequences, out of a basic human instinct: that some things belong not to people or companies or countries, but to human civilization—defined not in racial or nationalistic or geographic terms, but as a species-level project that is ours to steward collectively.

I was moved by this anonymous bystander’s bravery. The protesters’ and the impromptu counterprotester’s causes are deeply entangled: Humanity’s great works mean nothing without a livable planet, and a livable planet certainly means much less, at least in human terms, without our civilizational inheritance.

Environmental activists would do well to direct their orange outrage machine at jet-setting celebrities, the cosmopolitan rich luxuriating courtside at tennis matches, feckless politicians, multinational oil conglomerates and the ghouls who preside over them. And while I am not encouraging anyone to engage in petty acts of environmental vandalism, I will say that I wouldn’t be distraught if the paint on those private jets, unlike the corn flour on Stonehenge, turned out to be permanent.