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Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A new podcast asks: Are ‘radical' climate activists really that radical?
In October 2022, two protesters with the group Just Stop Oil shocked the world by tossing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh's iconic 'Sunflowers' in London's National Gallery. 'Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?' said one of them, Phoebe Plummer, moments after the two soup-throwers glued their hands to the wall. The painting, safely behind glass, was unharmed. But the soup-throwers were ridiculed. Piers Morgan, the British media personality, called it an act of 'childish, petty, pathetic vandalism.' Journalists and scientists warned that stunts like this would alienate people and undermine support for climate action. Just Stop Oil, however, didn't change course. They spray-painted Stonehenge with orange powder, zip-tied themselves to soccer goalposts, and blocked rush-hour traffic in London, with hundreds getting arrested. A new podcast series digs into what drove these activists to pull these shocking stunts — and whether they actually work. In 2023, Alessandra Ram and Samantha Oltman, two journalists who met at Wired over a decade ago, quit their jobs to investigate every aspect of this story, from the street blockades and court drama to the money trail that supports disruptive climate activism. After they gained trust with activists, they embedded with Just Stop Oil, at one point observing how its members get trained for police confrontations (they 'go floppy,' with their limp weight making it harder to get dragged out of the street). The podcast, 'Sabotage,' landed in Apple's top 40 podcasts and just wrapped up with its series finale last week. 'Sabotage' raises a key question: Are 'radical' climate activists really that radical? After all, the suffragettes actually slashed famous paintings, and 'Sunflowers,' despite all the uproar over the soup incident, still sits untarnished in the National Gallery. All kinds of people have gotten arrested in order to bring attention to climate change, as the podcast documents, including climate scientists and a doctor motivated by how a warmer world spreads infectious diseases. If you take a clear-eyed look at what climate change means for life on this planet, Ram and Oltman ask, what's the sane thing to do? The pair launched their production company, Good Luck Media, to 'tell stories you won't be able to stop talking about' — ones that just happen to concern climate change. As they developed the podcast, they used a litmus test to see if a particular story was worth telling: If they shared it while getting a haircut, would the stylist be into it? Their podcast goes in unexpected directions — one episode follows a love story disrupted by a prison sentence, while others explore the wealthy heirs, like Aileen Getty of the Getty oil fortune, who are giving their inheritance away to controversial climate activist groups. The podcast was co-produced by Adam McKay (the director of Don't Look Up and Succession) and Staci Roberts-Steele of Yellow Dot Studios. Convincing Just Stop Oil activists to talk wasn't easy. 'There are so many misconceptions around this group, even though they have been, especially in the U.K., covered all the time,' Ram said. 'People really just like to troll them.' The journalists slowly gained trust by approaching interviews with curiosity instead of judgment. 'What we found really fascinating as we embedded with them was understanding they're incredibly strategic, despite how almost goofy some of their stunts are,' Oltman said. The soup-throwing protest in London's National Gallery, for instance, was critiqued as nonsensical — what does attacking art have to do with climate change? — but it turns out that the absurdity was the point. Recent research by the Social Change Lab in London shows that Just Stop Oil's illogical protests get more media attention than those with a clear rationale and also lead to an increase in donations. It's part of a growing body of research that shows climate protests achieve results, even unpopular ones. Just Stop Oil's stunts appeared to work. Just two and a half years after the infamous soup-launching — and despite the United Kingdom cracking down on peaceful protests with years-long jail sentences and raiding activists' homes — Just Stop Oil has already achieved its central goal. This spring, the U.K. confirmed it was banning new drilling licenses for oil and gas. Just Stop Oil announced in March that it would be 'hanging up the hi vis,' boasting that its movement kept 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground and was 'one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history.' Hundreds of protesters marched through Westminster at the end of April for the group's final action — though there's been plenty of speculation that their disruptive stunts will continue under a new name. Given Just Stop Oil's over-the-top actions, you might expect the activists to have big personalities. But Ram and Oltman found that many of the protesters they met were shy, quiet, and anxious. 'I was startled by the gulf between who these people seemed to be in their actual personality and the risks they were willing to take, particularly in the public shame and outrage front, to try to move the needle on climate change,' Oltman said. 'Sabotage' paints their stories with nuance, managing to avoid the usual media caricatures to reveal the real people behind the movement through small, vivid details. The infamous soup-throwers, for instance? The night before their demonstration, they practiced the Campbell's toss in a tiny bathroom, making a mess as they hurled tomato soup at the glass in the shower. 'I haven't been acting in a radical way by joining Just Stop Oil,' Anna Holland, one of the soup-throwers, says in the podcast. 'We're facing the extinction of everything we know and love. And the only radical thing a person could be doing right now is ignoring it.' This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new podcast asks: Are 'radical' climate activists really that radical? on May 20, 2025.
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Telegraph
Just Stop Oil poster girl avoids jail for M25 protest
A Just Stop Oil poster girl has avoided prison for her part in M25 protests that caused misery for motorists. Phoebe Plummer, 23, and fellow activist David Mann, 51, were among 45 demonstrators who scaled gantries to protest about oil and gas licences in November 2022. Mourners missed funerals and students were late for exams as traffic ground to a halt during the protests. Plummer, of Lambeth, south London, was convicted of conspiring to disrupt the M25 by a jury at Southwark Crown Court, while Mann earlier admitted the offence. Judge Justin Cole branded the protesters 'arrogant' for thinking they were 'cleverer' than those whose everyday lives they disrupted. He said: 'It was part of a plan to cause major disruption to the M25 by climbing on motorway gantries. 'Neither of you played an organisational role but you were motivated by a desire to cause large-scale disruption and to attract publicity for JSO and their aims.' The judge said the protests continued over four days and cost the Met Police more than £1million and the economy more than £750,000. Mann was in breach of a conditional discharge at the time over a previous protest while Plummer was on bail for another matter, the court heard. Before she was sentenced Plummer, who represented herself, said: 'I will always try to speak the truth even when there are attempts to silence me. 'Whatever sentence you give me today will not deter me.' The judge said there was a 'realistic prospect of rehabilitation' when he sentenced Plummer to a two-year prison term suspended for two years. She was also ordered to perform 150 hours of community service. Mann was handed an 18-month community order including 100 hours of community service. Plummer, who is on benefits, was ordered to pay £500 in costs but told she can pay it off at £30 a month. Mann was ordered to pay £200 and can pay monthly instalments of £20. In 2024 Mann took to GoFundMe to raise cash after complaining about the fines that he has racked up through his climate change protests In July 2024 JSO co-founder Roger Hallam, 58, and four other activists were jailed for a total of 21 years after they helped bring the M25 to a standstill on four consecutive days. Earlier in May Abigail Percy-Ratcliffe, 25, and Ian Bates, 65, were also convicted of plotting to disrupt the M25 in November 2022. Percy-Ratcliffe was given a 15-month sentence suspended for 21 months, while Bates received 18 months suspended for 21 months, running consecutively with a six-month suspended sentence for a previous offence.
The Sun
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Two Just Stop Oil activists who made mourners miss funerals by bringing M25 to standstill walk free from court
TWO Just Stop Oil activists who brought the M25 to a standstill walked free from court yesterday. Phoebe Plummer, 23, and David Mann, 51, were among 45 demonstrators who scaled gantries on the motorway. 3 Mourners missed funerals and students failed to get to exams in time in November 2022. Plummer was convicted by a jury of conspiring to disrupt the M25 while Mann admitted the offence. Judge Justin Cole called them 'arrogant' for thinking they were 'cleverer' than those whose lives they disrupted. He said at Southwark crown court: 'Neither of you played an organisational role but you were motivated by a desire to cause large-scale disruption.' Mann was in breach of a conditional discharge due to a previous protest while Plummer was on bail for another matter. The M25 protest also came a month after she threw soup over a Van Gogh painting in London, for which she got two years' jail. Plummer, of Lambeth, South London, told the judge: 'Whatever sentence you give me today will not deter me.' She was handed a suspended two-year jail term, with 150 hours of community service. Plummer, who is on benefits, must also pay £500 in costs, at £30 a month. Mann, of Ipswich, was given an 18-month community order, including 100 hours of service. He must also pay £200 costs at £20 a month. Last year he tried to raise cash to help pay all the fines he has racked up. 3
Irish Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Sadhbh O'Neill: Art can communicate messages about our dying planet that are otherwise hard to hear
On October 14th, 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland of Just Stop Oil threw two tins of soup at an 1888 Sunflowers painting by Vincent van Gogh at the National Gallery in London, glued themselves to the wall and asked the crowd whether art was worth more than life. In the uproar that followed, which eventually led to their conviction and jailing for criminal damage and trespass, no one has seriously attempted to answer their question. Is art really worth more than life? To compare human life with a painting is ridiculous. And yet, the painting – which is behind glass and was not damaged in the protest – is worth an estimated €90 million. Plummer and Holland were also drawing attention to the fact that we don't even notice what is important about either life or art. [ Sadhbh O'Neill: Legal threats see some climate activists turn to clandestine sabotage activities Opens in new window ] The symbolism of their protest highlighted something important about the way that art is taken for granted and seen as a stable backdrop to civilisation; our confidence that the Sunflowers will always be hanging on a gallery wall somewhere, and that our descendants will be able queue up patiently to see it and then, having consumed their quota of highbrow culture, move on to the next thing. A civilisation without art is unimaginable: it goes where we go, and adorns caves, museums, ordinary homes and palaces. It is worn, sung, woven, painted, recited and danced wherever humans have ever been. As humanity's oldest companion, art probably knows us better than we know ourselves. But we are ignoring a catastrophe that threatens both. In this context, could a generous splattering of tomato soup be seen as a small inconvenience to make us sit up and pay attention? READ MORE Art in all its forms has been central to our emerging awareness of our relationship with this beautiful, broken world and its many and diverse inhabitants. Artists use imagery, sound, installations, rubbish, conversation (like Sharing the Oyster, an intergenerational dialogue between experienced oyster fishermen and school-aged children from the Clarinbridge area) and even smells (see Distillation, Luke Casserly's journey into the Irish bog landscape through scent ) to evoke a sense of connectedness, kinship and nostalgia for a dying world. If you were to read nothing about ecological devastation, and only experienced artistic renderings of this reality, you would probably get all the education you need to understand what is happening, what it might mean for us, and how we might respond. As the writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh put it at a DCU climate change conference last month, art allows us to speak truth in a world of falsity. Having said that, art does not need to make anything happen for it to be worthwhile. While many artists have experimented with imagery of sea-level rise (including Línte na Farraige, a visual light installation by Finnish artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta) or created Postcards from the Future (such as the 2010 exhibit at the Museum of London) to convey the urgency of climate change, art that is purely propagandistic or didactic tends to have limited traction with either the public or art critics. Even in a climate-changing world, art is still a search for the sublime. Photographer Edward Burtynsky 's series Oil is a meditation on industrial and devastated landscapes that is awe-inspiring and oddly beautiful. Artist Deirdre O'Mahony , in a newly commissioned film to accompany her series Between A Rock And A Hard Place in the Carlow Visual centre for contemporary art, discusses how in her early years as an artist, students were 'taught' to paint. Later on, they were encouraged to find a subject, or told there was no subject, after all. It took her decades of practice and inquiry to find a subject, only to discover it was what was all around her. She has since produced artworks inspired by the Burren landscape that encourage people to see its eclectic and fossilised features in new ways that somehow remind us of our own humanity, vulnerability and interconnectedness with all living things. In The Model Plot , O'Mahony is collaborating with Imma, the Loy Association and horticulture students in a sculptural planting experiment to highlight how the potato ridge can be viewed as a source of heritage, food security and collective knowledge. Art can communicate messages that are hard to hear, or that we don't want to hear. Ireland's basic income scheme for artists is the very least that the Government should be funding to support creative practice that deepens our collective understanding of our world. If you are not convinced of art's ability to capture our human vulnerability with indignation at a time when human rights are being violated without consequences, go see the exhibition of renowned Irish artist Brian Maguire that is in the Hugh Lane until May 18th. Art is not more important than life, but if we paid it more attention, it might save lives. Brian Maguire's exhibition, La grande illusion , runs until May 18th at the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Parnell Square, Dublin
Euronews
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
Protestors who threw soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers appeal against 'draconian' prison sentences
Two protestors who threw soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting have been in court today appealing against their prison sentences. Phoebe Plummer was sentenced to two years and two months for the soup throwing, while Anna Holland received a prison sentence of 20 months. They are part of a group of 16 activists who are appealing against their sentences, which range from 15 months to five years in prison. Others were jailed for stopping traffic, blocking an oil facility and attending a Zoom call to discuss disrupting traffic on the UK's M25 motorway. All 16 appellants are from the protest group Just Stop Oil whose stated aim is "nonviolent direct action to resist the destruction of our communities as a result of climate breakdown. We do not consent to plans that will result in 3C of warming and mass death." Why are Just Stop Oil appealing their prison sentences? The Just Stop Oil protestors say they received unduly harsh prison terms – which total 41 years - for disruptive but peaceful actions. The group argues that the jailed protestors are 'political prisoners' who were 'acting in self-defense and to protect our families and communities.' They say the protestors are in prison "because Just Stop Oil threatens the profits of the fossil fuel industry." Environmental organisations Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK are backing the appeals of five of the protesters, who were jailed for planning November 2022 demonstrations that saw protesters climb gantries above a busy motorway. Friends of the Earth said the sentences posed a 'serious threat to our democracy.' 'Silencing those striving for a better world will not make these escalating crises disappear – doing so only serves to stifle our democracy,' the group's senior lawyer Katie de Kauwe said. Other appellants were jailed for digging and occupying tunnels under the road leading to an oil terminal in southeast England. Previous UK government brought in tough new anti-protest laws The Conservative government that lost power in July 2024 toughened anti-protest laws in response to eco-activists who blocked roads and bridges, glued themselves to trains, splattered artworks with paint, sprayed buildings with fake blood and doused athletes in orange powder to draw attention to the escalating climate crisis. The government said the laws prevented extremist activists from hurting the economy and disrupting daily life. The Court of Appeal hearing is scheduled to last two days, with the three judges likely to hand down their ruling several days or weeks later.
