Just Stop Oil campaigners say naturalist Charles Darwin ‘would be turning in his grave’ … [+]
Two climate protesters vandalized Charles Darwin’s tomb in London’s Westminster Abbey on Monday, painting a message about global warming that has led to criminal charges.
Activists – Alyson Lee, 66, and Di Bligh, 77, splashed the words “1.5 is dead” in orange chalk on the British biologist’s white marble headstone. The message refers to news from Friday, when scientists declared 2024 to be the hottest year on record, with global temperature rises exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time since the industrial age, when humans began to burn large amounts of fossil fuels. . Almost 200 countries that signed the Paris climate agreement in 2016 agreed to 1.5 degrees Celsius as the threshold to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Lee and Bligh spray-painted Darwin’s grave at around 10am on Monday, demanding that the UK government work to phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by 2030. The two pensioners have been charged with damage criminal charges, have been released on bail and are scheduled to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on separate dates next month. They are linked to Just Stop Oil, the group behind controversial climate protests at other high-profile cultural sites, including Stonehenge and London’s National Gallery, where activists infamously threw soup over Van Gogh’s famous painting “Sunflowers” in 2022. In September, a judge sentenced the activists to prison, saying he wanted to prevent similar stunts.
The sentence in the National Gallery incident clearly did not stop Lee and Bligh from kneeling over Darwin’s grave wearing “Just Stop Oil” T-shirts and using stencils and cans of paint. Westminster Abbey – the site of multiple coronations and royal weddings – said it would take immediate action to clean up the marks.
“Police were called to the scene and dealt with the incident,” Westminster said, according to the Independent. “The Abbey remains open for visitation and worship.”
“Ten years after the Paris Agreement, we have already exceeded the so-called safe temperature increase of 1.5 degrees and are heading for more than 3 degrees of warming,” Lee, a retired teaching assistant, said in a statement from Just Stop Oil. . “This rapidly accelerating crisis means that large parts of the world will become unable to support life, resulting in millions of refugees, social collapse and extinction for countless species.”
The World Meteorological Organization last week confirmed 2024 as the hottest year on record based on six international data sets.
“It is important to note that a single year of more than 1.5°C in one year does not mean we have failed to meet the long-term temperature targets of the Paris Agreement, which are measured over decades rather than a year individual,” said the WMO secretary. – General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “However, it is essential to recognize that every part of a warming scale matters. Whether at a level below or above 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, any additional increase in global warming increases the impacts on our lives, our economies and our planet.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also weighed in, saying that individual years exceeding the 1.5 degree limit “does not mean that the long-term goal has been achieved”. Instead, he said, they show that “we have to fight even harder to get on the right track; Leaders must act – now.”
Why Charles Darwin’s grave?
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection detailed in his 1859 book On the origin of speciesbecame the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. Darwin died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey’s Scientists’ Corner, also the resting place of Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.
“Darwin once said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent that survives,'” Bligh said. common.”
Just Stop Oil is known for the disruptive protests at high-profile cultural venues that have been met … [+]
