The war on everything: Why we’re sick of protests
We're framing climate change the wrong way.
Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.
📢 This week we’re doing something a little different. With recent protests at New York Climate Week — as well as the occupation of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office by the youth-led Sunrise Movement — I thought we should dive into climate protests.
But since many of these climate protests are led by young people, I’m handing off today’s newsletter to Isabelle Drury, a self-described “Zillennial” and author of the Substack Finding Sanity, a newsletter about making sense of the world we live in and imagining the world we want to create.
If you like what you read, check out Isabelle’s newsletter:
As the hottest summer on record has shown, the climate crisis is no longer a far-off future concept — it’s an immediate issue calling for immediate action. And with governments worldwide failing to seriously address climate change, many people are turning to activism.
When you picture climate activists, you often imagine sign-yielding, chant-singing protestors marching to demand action. While protests bring many, many benefits beyond creating change — such as generating solidarity and bringing socially and economically marginalized groups to attention — in recent years, protests haven’t been as effective as we may think.
Unlike successful protests of years past (civil rights, voting rights, labor laws), modern political movements have been criticized for the rising popularity of street marches without a plan for what happens next, or how to keep protesters engaged in the process. The popularity of “clicktivism” creates a feel-good illusion that is equivalent to “real” activism.
On top of this, protests can be given too much weight. Protests are meant to be just one part of a layered approach to bring about change. While it feels like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech can be credited for civil rights legislation across the country, it was just one part of the layered approach employed by the movement for decades.
The size of the issue may also affect the outcome of the protest. A protest for a specific outcome, such as an arrest of a police officer or removal of a facility member, may more likely move the needle than a protest against a huge, all-encompassing issue like climate change — especially when part of the answer calls for a total transformation of society or economic systems.
One of the biggest issues, however, is how climate change is framed. Climate change is too often seen as a fight between large corporations and everyday individuals, the idea of good guys and bad guys, us vs. them. In the face of problems, we tend to default to a war narrative: a war on drugs, on poverty, on terror, on crime.
This narrative can cross into politics, too. Climate change can seem quite polarizing, but global warming used to be a bipartisan issue:
From the 1980s on, meddlings by oil giants like Exxon sowed doubt about the science behind climate change, successfully lobbying Republicans due to their business-friendly reputation. With growing polarization during the Obama presidency, and the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under Trump, the issue became associated with the left.
But by positioning climate change as a partisan issue, we push ourselves into yet another war. By shutting out certain parties, we create missed opportunities to elevate climate as a bipartisan priority.
Climate change will affect everyone across the globe, and everyone needs to be involved, political leanings aside.
If war is our only answer, we must fight harder, harder, and harder. But this habit of fighting becomes an obstacle to victory. We’re so used to campaigning against things that we lose sight of where we actually want to go. As we become war-weary, we also become protest-weary.
But amid this weariness are many ways to influence climate action beyond protests and marches. Climate activism backed up with real grassroots action is one of our most powerful tools for making long-term change.
When people come together to try to solve something they deeply care about, it teaches us to value our shared love for the environment over our political differences.
If climate change is a war, fossil fuels will win. But if we put our passion into creating a better future — instead of fighting with each other — we’ll be much closer to a healthier, greener Earth.
 | A guest post by
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War and protest weary. So true. I also feel that as the exhaustion -- and inevitable apathy -- sets in that more extreme tactics (like tossing paint on a Van Gogh) actually set the movement backwards. And how we talk about this IS so important. I read about how when Amsterdam made the switch to put parked cars next to traffic, then cyclists, then pedestrians, it was called the Stop the Child Murders movement. It wasn't called "pedestrian safety." It wasn't about "global warming and the need to stop driving." It hit at the core of the matter: killing kids. I think we don't talk about the death and suffering caused by fossil fuels in these intimate ways on a national or international level. Thanks for featuring Isabelle, Brandon!
So powerful! I agree that climate protests seem like they’ve lost their focus, but I would say one exception was the most recent Climate Week protest in New York. I think we need to see more unity in the movement!