Why Everyone Is Overreacting to the Sunflowers Incident — And Underreacting to the Climate Crisis

Disclaimer: This article is not intended for the faint of heart. Read at your own discretion.

The world recoiled in horror last month not in response to one third of the country of Pakistan being submerged by biblical flooding, nor to the shocking discovery that 500,000 Somali children are currently at risk of dying of starvation as a result of a seven-year-long dry spell that has obliterated their country’s food supply, but rather something altogether far more horrifying:

Climate activists in the UK vandalized Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers with tomato soup.  (Photo: @JustStop_Oil)

In the early hours of October 14th, two climate activists affiliated with the nonviolent advocacy group Just Stop Oil — which seeks to put an end to all new oil and gas projects in the United Kingdom — shocked visitors to the National Gallery in London by dousing famous artist Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers with tomato soup before gluing themselves to the wall adorned by its frame. Though the activists confirmed beforehand that the painting was covered by a protective glass sheet and would therefore suffer no damage, this fact seems to have eluded their most ardent critics, so keen have they been to attribute the deteriorating state of our world to anything other than the people veritably responsible for its impending demise. Take for instance the following statement by noted conservative writer and “comedian” Andrew Doyle:

Doyle’s tirade is a microcosm of the reactions of all too many casual observers to not only this particular stunt, but also the very idea of utilizing civil disobedience as a means of drawing society’s attention to the issue of climate change in general. After all, if in your zeal to alert ordinary people to the urgency of the climate crisis you destroy or blemish something that they value highly — like a priceless work of art — then what reason will they have to take your message seriously? To answer this question, it is instructive to turn our attention to a similar incident that took place no more than three months before that which forms the subject of this article — and yet which received not so much as a minuscule fraction of the coverage accorded to the latter. 

In July of this year, Mexican art collector and millionaire businessman Martin Mobarak incinerated a drawing by the world renowned artist Frida Kahlo in his Miami apartment to resounding applause and virtually zero international condemnation. The drawing, called Fantasmones siniestros (“Sinister ghosts”), was destroyed to artificially inflate the value of some 10,000 NFTs created of its likeness. Says the FAQ page of the website of Mobarak’s ostensibly charitable foundation Frida.NFT, “The [drawing] was permanently transitioned into the Metaverse on July 30th, 2022.” Browsing Frida.NFT, one might be led to believe that Mobarak’s platform has been used to fund Mexican artistic institutions like the Frida Kahlo Museum and the Palace of Fine Arts, though precisely zero evidence has been furnished in support of any claim to this effect. What’s more, Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature has even published a statement denying the Palace ever having been involved with Mobarak, who is now thankfully under investigation by the Mexican government for “alleged” violation of his country’s Federal Law on Archaeological, Artistic, and Historical Monuments and Zones. 

(Screenshot of a Twitter video depicting Mobarak’s destruction of Fantasmos siniestros. Note that it got several orders of magnitude fewer views than the most-watched video of Sunflowers getting soup’d)

No matter your political persuasion, it is (or at least should be) uncontroversially true that Mobarak’s offense was far more of “repudiation of civilisation and the achievements of humanity” than Just Stop Oil’s vandalism of Sunflowers, for in the former case not only was the piece of art in question actually destroyed, but moreover it was destroyed for no other reason than to make a relative handful of already obscenely wealthy people even wealthier. With this in mind, it seems worth asking: why the disparity in outrage? The fact that it was a Kahlo piece certainly can’t be it; like van Gogh, she is internationally regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of all time. Nor could we point to Mobarak’s decision to burn the drawing in the comfort of his own home, for he was being showered with the exhortations of the local press for the entirety of his ridiculous event. No, I think the actual reason why Sunflowers excelled where Fantasmos siniestros did not is far more banal: Our society would rather take out its wrath on disposable targets than acknowledge its own problems. The book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman offers a concise explanation of what exactly determines a certain target’s disposability in reference to differential mainstream media coverage of American client regimes versus American enemy regimes:

“A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation[emphasis added].”

Thus we may semi-jokingly refer to van Gogh as a “worthy” victim and Kahlo as an “unworthy” one, though the real-world parallels are easy to derive: we have collectively calculated that the two climate activists who besmirched Sunflowers (both young and female, I might add) constitute fair game while legitimate criminals like Mobarak ought to be let off the hook lest we ever find ourselves in the position of having to critically examine our society’s worst qualities. It’s no wonder, then, that most people have responded to the activists’ central plea — “What is worth more, art or life?” — with either complete silence or the dubious retort that we are being presented with a false tradeoff. After all, who wouldn’t love to spend their free time perusing an art gallery where all the paintings have been swept away by a Category 5 hurricane? At the end of the day, what so enrages them isn’t an imagined affront to the legacy of a famous artist; it’s the fact that someone had the audacity to use that artist’s image to give a voice to the countless millions of unworthy victims who are currently being written off by the architects of what economist Steve Keen describes as “the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.”

However, even a description of such caliber as Keen’s might be inadequate. After all, we Homo sapiens have not actually been around for the overwhelming majority of the history of life on Earth, so there’s very little for us to relate to when we understand the scale of the climate crisis through such a lens. So I’m going to try something slightly different instead just to make sure that the sheer gravity of our current predicament is made as clear as possible. 

Imagine that an infamous terrorist group has infiltrated the United States. Let’s call them the International Pyromaniacs Advising Armageddon, or IPAA. Suppose that by dint of years of bribery, manipulation, and racketeering, the IPAA’s members have managed to quietly establish chapters in every corner of the country without once running afoul of any of the Three Letter Agencies, and that now they’ve decided for the first time since their organization’s inception to resort to violence to realize their goals. To this end, they start setting fires in drought-prone states like California, Nevada, and Idaho to extract concessions from local and state politicians, and with disastrous consequences: thousands of people perish from their conflagrations and many millions more are forced from their homes in search of refuge. It seems no one in the West is safe anymore, and the IPAA inform us through their anonymous press releases that it’s only going to get worse as time goes on.

(An artist’s rendition of what San Francisco would look like if the IPAA actually existed. Thank God I just made them up for this article!)

However, the IPAA are not content to limit their roster of crimes to mere arson. Following in the footsteps of some of history’s most reviled villains, they begin deploying militia to towns and cities scattered throughout the country for the sole purpose of seizing municipal water supplies and blockading compensatory federal shipments of the precious liquid, sometimes for months at a time. Close to one-third of Americans now wonder whether they will have enough to drink, while the national food supply is placed in jeopardy by the artificial depletion of critical reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

(Another “artist” I “commissioned” was kind enough to draw how the Overton Arm of Lake Mead would have evolved in the past 22 years if the IPAA existed.)

Yet the IPAA’s bloodlust knows no bounds. Consequently, they suffer no compunctions when they plant and detonate a vast network of explosives around the Hoover Dam and thereby unleash sudden and catastrophic flash flooding onto all those unfortunate enough to fall within its line of fire. Tens of millions of people are forced to evacuate either further West or to the Eastern seaboard, which itself has latterly been the subject of IPAA assaults intended to artificially shrink its borders and thus cut off the entire country’s access to the Atlantic Ocean. Their efforts prove successful, and the American economy enters a prolonged depression consequent to the dramatic collapse in export demand that results. 

(A final “artist” — the last I was able to contact — agreed begrudgingly to produce the above “painting” of what Las Vegas would look like if the IPAA actually did blow up the Hoover Dam.)

Several months pass and in that time, the situation has worsened faster than even the most pessimistic of observers could have predicted. The IPAA’s siege has reduced the American people to a ghastly shadow of its former self, with crime rates spiking to their highest levels ever in U.S. history and hundreds of millions plunged into penury where they could once at least hold onto the faint hope that they might someday gain access to middle-class status. What pockets of resistance remain are brutally extinguished by the militia, and with no one left to restore any semblance of order, the worst effects of the IPAA’s savagery begin to set in: gradually — then rapidly — millions of Americans find that they are now unable to feed themselves not just on a regular basis, but indefinitely. Excess mortality increases exponentially as the streets become inundated by flocks of people desperate for the assistance of some sympathetic onlooker. People turn into husks; husks into corpses; and corpses into kindling. The survivors somehow manage to weather the figurative and literal stench that now envelops them, having dispensed with what hope they might have once had a long time ago. At the same time, the IPAA converts its colossal prison population into an expendable slave labor force, not even having to break the law to do so thanks to a convenient clause in the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment. This enables them to accumulate wealth and luxury on a scale previously thought unattainable even as the vast majority of the population teeters on the edge of total implosion. Young people are especially vulnerable, as everything they have been raised to think of as valuable and worth striving for — college, a well-paying job, a family, retirement — is now gone forever. The prospect of deliverance diminishes with each passing day, and with it, people’s capacities for empathy and accommodation. Friends turn on each other and families splinter as the imperative to survive takes precedence over everything else. And after a financial crisis of hitherto unparalleled magnitude erases their own prosperity, the members of the IPAA find themselves in the same position. But rather than providing the country with a much-needed respite, the IPAA’s collapse instead ignites a powder keg that permanently shatters what equilibrium they had managed to construct during their reign (however horrid it might have been). Organized society thus breaks down completely. The most heavily armed Americans senselessly kill anyone who happens to find themselves in their immediate proximity before eventually succumbing to the elements for want of any practical survival skills. Meanwhile, those who do manage to eke out a living are plagued by constant fear of the possibility that one day, the shroud of the wilderness (buildings are far too conspicuous after all) will offer insufficient protection from dangerous actors. It’s an intensely miserable existence, so it’s no surprise that growing numbers of people come to prefer taking their own lives to inhabiting a world that seems as though it would like nothing more than to see them break. As a result, the birth rate falls to well below half its replacement level and a mass depopulation of unprecedented proportions ensues. Vast metropolises that once harbored millions of people become emptied of life. They — along with the forests, deserts, and grasslands — are converted into inadvertent mausolea that future forms of intelligent life will gaze upon in horror. But it would serve them best to arrive as late as possible, for over the course of millions of years most of this organic matter will be transmuted by a variety of ancient geological processes into peat and, eventually, coal, coal which they will then be able to use to fuel their own species’ ascent to planetary hegemony. What they will not know, however, is that encased within every last kilogram of their vast hydrocarbon bounty is the dreams and anguishes, the passions and hatreds, and the first and final breaths of a human being. 

Such is the future that currently awaits us. It is so unlike anything our species has ever encountered that even my account could end up discounting its worst effects. Indeed, as I stated earlier, my only goal was to articulate the climate crisis in terms that I felt would be familiar to the majority of us — not necessarily those most befitting its true severity. In reality, climate change transcends even the stuff of legends, and that is due in no small part to its inherently chaotic nature, a quality which all but precludes it from the realm of human comprehension. This fact has been well-recognized by climate scientists since at least the 1970s, hence their heavy reliance on mathematical models and computational systems to do much of their thinking for them, and for good reason: our brains are simply not sophisticated enough to carry out even a tiny fraction of the calculations required to understand and appreciate the climate system in all its magnificent (some would say providential) complexity. This explains the alarmingly high number of climate models — some barely over a decade old — whose predictions have been vindicated several years before they were originally forecast to occur. For highly impressive though these models are, none of them are immune to the pervading specter of uncertainty. And neither, by extension, are we. For all we know, within a few years some major climate tipping point like the loss of Arctic summer sea ice or the savannization of the Amazon rainforest will activate and thereby unleash a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop of warming for which we will have developed exactly zero preparations or remedies. Think of it as akin to that game in the Netflix series Squid Game in which the contestants are forced to cross a bridge composed of, on the one hand, regular glass panels which shatter upon impact and send all those who step on them tumbling to their death, and, on the other hand, panels made out of tempered glass which can safely bear the weight of two adult humans; make one wrong move, and before you can even sense it, you’re dead. However, even here the analogy breaks down when we account for the fact that, in the show, each regular panel is contiguously paired with a tempered counterpart — though which is which is a matter of pure chance. This means that any contestant could theoretically utilize a fairly straightforward expected value calculation to optimize for the number of tempered panels they step on (in fact one of them, a math professor, attempts just this and proves remarkably successful until his luck eventually runs out and he is violently “eliminated” as a result). Climate change, sadly, is not quite so generous. If given enough time, it will eviscerate all of our intuitions just as surely and just as brutally as it will everything else — and none of us will be able to slow (let alone stop) it when it does. 

However, since I am a principled person, I will concede to the following without hesitation: none of what I have predicted so far is certain to happen. Not by a large margin, in fact. And it is for that reason that I now advance the question to you, dear reader: at what point does the probability of it happening become sufficiently high for disruptive action to become an acceptable form of protest? Where exactly do you draw the line between “repudiation of civilization” and “absolutely necessary and commonsensical alarm bell”? I imagine that in any other case most people would have wildly variable responses to this prompt, but if applied to my particular hypothetical, it’s not at all implausible to suggest that a unanimous consensus would obtain that the most appropriate place to take action would be the very instant the IPAA initiated its first attack. Why? Because the IPAA is tangible and discrete, meaning it possesses the twin virtues of being both readily identifiable and (relatively) easy to neutralize. Contrast this to the climate crisis, which is diffuse, amorphous, and — to a certain degree — already irremediable. The full extent of the horrors it is unleashing and has yet to unleash is sadly inscrutable to a general public so accustomed to being able to ascribe all of its woes to some mysterious Other, be it a sadistic terrorist group or, as it so happens, two young women protesting their country’s government for unnecessarily expanding fossil fuel production at the expense of humanity’s common future. Despite this, there is at least one thing I’m fairly certain we can all grasp, and that is the growing realization that something is…off. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? That lingering sensation that the future we’ve been sold isn’t actually up for grabs. That the happy ending we all subconsciously long for might never actually materialize — or maybe it’s just an evolutionarily conditioned mental construction that our species developed to keep itself sane in times of crisis. It feels like that sensation is becoming ever more pronounced with each passing year, no? Perhaps not. But if that truly is the case for most of us, then we ought not to be condemning but praising groups like Just Stop Oil, for it is thanks to their tenacity that more and more people are starting to treat the climate crisis like an actual crisis and not a mere hot-button political issue. At the end of the day, all it takes to activate that transition is a single shock. The real question then is this: will that shock be enough for you? 

BY NEO CHATTERJEE