Civilly Disobedient.

🎧 PODCAST GUESTS: Charlie Pickering + Peter Kalmus + Van Gough + Dan Ilic

Oct 19, 2022

G’day Fearmongers,

When it comes to getting attention for climate action how does Civil Disobedience rank on a scale of “Oh dear, I’m late for work.” to “burn it all down” ?

We speak with a couple of people who have two different kinds of platforms, and how they use them when it comes to telling the climate story. Charlie Pickering, the host of the ABC TV show The Weekly. Whose platform is a staid, and small ‘c’ conservative publicly funded broadcaster, a broadcaster that talks about climate in staid, small ‘c’ conservative ways.

And NASA Scientist and climate activist Peter Kalmus who has a long track record of science communication but this year decided that he wasn’t cutting through so he chained himself to JP Morgan Bank in downtown Los Angeles. Big swings for climate.

An interesting chat about personal limits, personal power and systemic change.

This conversation was sparked after seeing the headline grabbing stunts of late with climate activists gluing their hands, and pouring soup over the artworks of long-dead painters.

Here’s one of the protestors from the Van Gogh stunt last week —

Greg Jenner @greg_jenner

I thought this was a badly executed stunt. Happy to admit I was likely wrong about that

In my mind it’s such a great stunt. Got headlines, disrupts the conversation, didn’t do any damage.

It shocked people out of their day to day ennui.

It’s the dead cat on the table. The tool that politicians have been using for decades, used in the hands of smart young people, trying something, anything, to save the planet. Fair enough.

Dan
Curator
Heinz Soup Museum