Locking Up the Messengers
A few weeks ago, I looked out my window and watched my city disappear. New Yorkers have since referred to that moment as the orange apocalypse, a whistling-past-the-graveyard sort of joke. It wasn’t our stinging eyes, or even our labored breathing that shook us when that sooty orange cloud descended. We knew that climate emergency was more than a hashtag. What we were seeing and smelling was a smoke signal from a catastrophic future.
By the weekend, the Air Quality Index was green, the sky blue, and we could go back to what we do best when it comes to our burning planet: avoid thinking about it. The media, as usual, helped. Climate change was barely covered during the orange apocalypse. The stories were about smoke plumes, wind patterns, fine particulate matters, lightning strikes, and human carelessness. Oh, buried somewhere might be a boilerplate sentence like “Most experts agree that human caused climate change has contributed to the duration and intensity of the Canadian wildfires,” but that was as easy to ignore as a side effect warning in a pharmaceutical ad.
There’s an activist slogan from the 70s: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” That was Joanna Smith and Tim Martin’s intention as they entered the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. They went straight to Gallery 3, towards a small sculpture housed in a protective plexiglass cabinet: “Little Dancer Aged 14,” by Edgar Degas. Tim covered his hands in black finger paint, Joanna did the same with red. They streaked handprints down the plexiglass and finger painted a house and a burning tree on the plastic base.
While they sat on the floor waiting to be arrested, Joanna and Tim addressed museum visitors. Tim said: “We need our leaders to step up, put their differences aside and simply be responsible”. Joanna saw Little Dancer as a vulnerable child. “She’s imperfect,” she said, “like we all are imperfect, but she’s strong and not resigned to destruction.”
Images of their action generated millions of views on social media. Joanna and Tim were quoted in national and international publications. They brought attention to a week of protests in Washington centering around a demand that President Biden declare a national climate emergency.
Joanna and Tim made news, but they also made powerful enemies. In a video posted on Twitter, the director of the National Gallery of Art denounced the fingerpainting as an attack on a work of art. The FBI said that it was launching an investigation. A month later the Justice Department indicted Joanna and Tim on charges of destruction of public property and conspiring against the government of the United States. If convicted, they face a possible ten years in prison and a half million dollar fine. This is Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, by the way, the agency that dawdled for two years before it began to investigate who was behind January 6 — an actual and violent conspiracy.
Joanna and Tim had engaged in a classic act of nonviolent civil disobedience. No person was attacked, no work of art harmed. They put washable fingerpaint on plexiglass and plastic, after which they submitted peacefully to arrest. If it had been graffiti artists tagging the plexiglass, they wouldn’t be facing years in prison. Joanna Smith and Tim Martin weren’t prosecuted for what they did, but for why they did it. The indictment was about intimidation, not justice.
If anyone doubts the sense of urgency that led to Tim and Joanna’s action in in Gallery 3, I suggest you download the 2023 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thousands of the world’s top climate scientists conclude that this is a critical decade in the fight to avoid the worst outcomes of global warming. We have until 2030 to make drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions. Every year we delay, brings us closer to tipping points that will make our actions irrelevant and climate catastrophe certain.
One of the lead authors of IPCC report, the Australian climate scientist, Joelle Gergis put our task this way: “Stabilizing our earth’s climate is the most important decision humanity will ever face. We are the generation to make or break our civilization.”
With seven years to go until the end of the decade, Carbon emissions are still rising. Yet, our government still doesn’t act as if we’re in an emergency — the opposite. Last March, around the time the IPCC released its report, the Biden administration approved Willow. This Alaskan drilling project will extract fossil fuels not for seven years but for the next 30. Two months later, the administration approved the Mountain Valley Pipeline which will give power companies the means to transport gas for 50 years.
Our government puts politics and profit over the future of every species on the planet. They slow walk us towards catastrophe, while they lock up those who try to awaken us to the truth: This is an emergency. The injustice perpetrated on Joanna Smith and Tim Martin endangers us all.
Stuart Waldman, @late-life Activist
Please sign this petition to have the Justice Department drop the charges
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/petition-drop-charges-against-joanna-smith-and-tim-martin
