{"id":371,"date":"2021-06-18T20:58:25","date_gmt":"2021-06-18T20:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/23\/?p=371"},"modified":"2026-06-19T11:48:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T11:48:35","slug":"the-self-immolation-of-david-buckel-towards-a-postdramatic-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/23\/the-self-immolation-of-david-buckel-towards-a-postdramatic-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Self-Immolation of David Buckel: Towards a Postdramatic Activism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Victoria Scrimer<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

On 14 April 2018, lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn\u2019s Prospect Park in what has been called the first self-immolation in the name of climate change. Yet, few people have heard about his final, extraordinary act of protest and even fewer people witnessed it. Some in the press and the attentive public, conditioned by conventional dramatic expectations, have critiqued Buckel\u2019s protest as a failed performance. However, drawing from Hans-Thies Lehmann\u2019s theory of postdramatic theatre, I propose that climate change\u2014causally diffuse, non-linear, slow-moving and often invisible\u2014presents, among other things, a challenge to dominant modes of perception. I argue that, when viewed through a postdramatic lens, Buckel\u2019s self-immolation successfully interrupts our politics of spectacle, gesturing towards a new aesthetic for environmental activism that eschews conventional dramatic narratives and decenters the human. 
Keywords<\/strong>: protest, performance, self-immolation, postdramatic, environmental activism<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early morning hours of 14 April 2018, David Buckel, a thin, bespectacled man in his sixties called in sick to work, walked the short distance from his home to Brooklyn\u2019s Prospect Park where the lawyer-cum-environmentalist laid out a neat, protective ring of soil on an inconspicuous patch of grass, carefully positioned an apologetic note for first responders nearby, and burned himself to death. Self-immolation is a relatively rare form of activism in the United States, but Buckel\u2019s self-immolation is rarer still. As New York Times <\/em>reporter Annie Correal pointed out in her initial coverage of the event, Buckel\u2019s is \u201cperhaps the first [self-immolation] anywhere in the name of climate change\u201d (A2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buckel was a pillar of the community composting movement in New York City and a renowned LGBTQ rights lawyer, well-known for his work on the case of Brandon Teena, a transgender man whose rape and murder in Nebraska inspired the 1999 biopic, Boys Don\u2019t Cry. <\/em>Yet, few activists and scholars have heard of Buckel\u2019s final protest. In fact, as several journalists were quick to point out, this extreme act of protest went mostly unnoticed by the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since its emergence as a protest tactic in the 1960s, self-immolation has functioned, in large part, as a carefully orchestrated, highly mediated spectacle designed to draw public attention to an issue. As John Whalen-Bridge points out in his book on Tibetan self-immolations, a full understanding of the act \u201cmust encompass not just self-ignition but the willful creation of an image . . . that will travel around the world\u201d (37\u201338). A self-immolation which fails to garner substantial visibility can, therefore, feel like a tragically failed act\u2014a sentiment expressed by many who weighed in on Buckel\u2019s death in comment sections, op-eds and social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I propose, however, that Buckel\u2019s unobtrusive, modest variation on this typically spectacular protest practice raises important questions for activists and their audiences about the complex relationship between dramatic representation and political change. I argue that what we might initially read as an ineffective protest, in fact, marks a foray from an activist performance tradition rooted in the conventions of dramatic theatre to a mode of performance that is more akin to what theatre theoretician Hans-Thies Lehmann has termed \u201cpostdramatic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first blush, it may seem flippant to talk of Buckel\u2019s death in terms of theatre. Buckel was not a character on stage, after all, but a loved and respected human being, and phrases like \u201cdrama,\u201d and \u201cperformance\u201d may connote, for some, a sense of insincerity. It is, therefore, worth briefly considering, as Arthur Shahadi does in his essay about the self-immolation of performance artist Kathy Change: \u201cCan suicide ever be considered using the same theoretical frames as performance? Could such an act be judged in terms of its aesthetic strategies?\u201d (53). If artists and activists take seriously (and I think we should) the notion that a protest\u2019s form is not incidental frippery, that it communicates important social and political values, then theatre and performance offer a generative and well-established lens through which to read these embodied communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suggest there is political meaning to be found in the ways Buckel\u2019s self-immolation fails to conform to certain hallmarks of conventional drama to which we are enculturated, like interhuman conflict, linear causality and representation. In her chapter, \u201cHow Does the Riot Speak,\u201d Sophie Nield suggests that people often dismiss certain forms of protest, like riots, as apolitical or \u201chaving nothing to say\u201d because they fail to conform to structural hierarchies and norms of accepted imagery (240\u201341). In a similar vein, I suggest that the attentive public have not fully recognized the \u201cpolitical speech\u201d (239) of Buckel\u2019s protest because it does not easily conform to protest norms rooted in dramatic convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not my contention that Buckel consciously theorized his protest in terms of theatre, but rather, as Raymond Williams observed in 1983, that we are living in a dramatized society in which the dramatic paradigm is \u201cbuilt into the rhythms of everyday life,\u201d so much so that it constitutes a \u201chabitual experience,\u201d an unconscious need we seek to fill (12). To attend to the ways this paradigm influences the reception of an act like Buckel\u2019s self-immolation, to speak of it in terms of theatre (dramatic or otherwise), does not diminish but expands its significance in ways that Buckel himself may not have anticipated, but that I venture to hope he would have appreciated. It is my contention that postdramatic theatre theory might shed new light on Buckel\u2019s final act and point activists and audiences in the direction of different ways of perceiving and responding to global threats like climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before attending specifically to how Buckel\u2019s protest disrupts dramatic expectations and protest conventions, it is first necessary to briefly contextualize his actions within a tradition of environmental activism whose primary mode of communication is dramatic. In his book, Actors and Activists, <\/em>David Schlossman makes the case that activists or \u201cpolitical people\u201d draw from a \u201cpool of conventions, a well of theatricality,\u201d particularly elements of spectacle, in their performance strategies for everything from marches to banner-drops and die-ins (88). The influence Schlossman identifies is not just that of performativity broadly defined by way of performance studies, but that of a technical, institutional, dramatic<\/em> theatre. Schlossman explicitly references activists\u2019 use of costumes, props and puppets as evidence of this cross-pollination, but such influence also extends to the use of basic conventions of dramatic theatre like visual representation of linear plots that feature clearly identified antagonists and protagonists. This, according to Lehmann, is the dramatic paradigm that has dominated European stages for centuries\u2014\u201cthe representation . . . of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play\u201d or the creation of a \u201cmodel <\/em>of the real\u201d (21\u201322). I speak from years of experience working with environmental activists when I say that activists are no exception and, like dramatists, they are deeply invested in the dramatic paradigm, the careful production of story, image and action aimed at evoking powerful emotions in their audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the clear influence of dramatic theatre on activist performance, activism is not often analyzed through the lens of aesthetic drama. More commonly, performance studies scholars treat activist performance as one stage of what anthropologist Victor Turner famously termed \u201csocial dramas\u201d (145). By Turner\u2019s account, activist performance\u2014he uses the Boston Tea Party as an example, but a self-immolation serves just as well\u2014constitutes only one step in a wider-reaching social drama, the breach of a norm, which would then precipitate a larger social crisis, redress, and eventual return to stasis (150). This is a somewhat utilitarian approach to activist performance in that it tends to draw our focus to the efficacy of an action in influencing a pattern of other \u201creal world\u201d events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The discrete function of an activist performance within the narrative arc of a broader social drama can obscure the fact that an activist performance, like a piece of dramatic theatre, also contains its own internal logic and dramatic structure. Self-immolation is the case in point, and its form is relatively easy to situate within the conventions of dramatic theatre: rising action (preparing the site and the self), moment of crisis (lighting the match), falling action (burning) and resolution (extinguishing). The incentive behind such structures is also easy to identify: actions from the Boston Tea Party to a tree-sitting to a blockade employ characters (often in costume, no less) who enact a microcosmic representation of the world they want their audience to see. Whether it is the fleeting image of a better world or the stark illustration of a world in dire need of change, activist performance is about allowing, or forcing, its audience bear witness to one particular vision of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite its obvious \u201creal world\u201d implications, Buckel\u2019s self-immolation, by his own account, is just such a microcosmic representation. In the explanatory note he sent to news outlets and authorities, Buckel wrote that his \u201cearly death by fossil fuels reflects what we are doing to ourselves.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> So, while Buckel\u2019s life and death are, of course, situated firmly in the real, given the framework he sets up in his suicide note, Buckel\u2019s body also stands in for (or plays the role of) an imagined collective in a fictive (if increasingly likely) dystopian future, blurring the boundary between the real and the symbolic. Baz Kershaw identifies this type of performance as a \u201csynechodic spectacle\u201d in which the part (the protest) stands in for the whole (society) (\u201cFighting\u201d257). Kerhsaw also suggests that these types of protest have a dramaturgy, or dramatic arrangement of images and events, worth attending to because the form of a given protest stands to reveal important information about the socio-political moment in which it takes place\u2014sometimes in ways that work counter to activists\u2019 intentions (257).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, Kershaw points out how a 1968 anti-war protest in London\u2019s Grosvenor Square slips from symbolic protest to a \u201cscaled down version of the irrevocably real violence that it aims to prevent\u201d (\u201cFighting\u201d 259). We see similar slippage in the 2017 Women\u2019s March when a massive crowd of women packed Washington, D.C. streets to congestion. The crowd, constrained by the architecture of the capitol city, chanted, \u201cThis is what democracy looks like!\u201d\u2014an ironic reflection of an election in which a woman won the popular vote but never made it to the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to analyze the ways in which activist performance, like Buckel\u2019s self-immolation and its reception, are influenced by the dramatic paradigm because, as Turner and others have pointed out, the messages, forms, images and ideologies of dramatic theatre implicitly inform or \u201cequip\u201d our lived feelings and behavior (On the Edge <\/em>300\u2013301). In particular, activists and audiences labor under conventional expectations regarding scale, spectacle, plot and character to draw attention or visibility to their cause. For instance, a 2018 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review<\/em> aimed at activists and advocacy workers instructs readers to \u201ctell better stories\u201d and suggests that effective stories will contain \u201ccharacters; a beginning, middle, and end; plot, conflict, and resolution\u201d and feature \u201cfamiliar plot structures\u201d to capture an audience\u2019s attention, guide their expectations, and allow audiences to orient themselves as the good guys within the narrative (Christiano and Neimand 32\u201333). The article cites several studies which suggest audiences will avoid or ignore stories that challenge these conventions. In other words, if an activist performance is left unresolved, if its action is not logical, if its scale is underwhelming, if its protagonists and antagonists have not been clearly identified, if its dramaturgy is at odds with its message, it is subject to a type of cultural invisibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially, the literal invisibility, or absence of images and eyewitness accounts, of Buckel\u2019s self-immolation seem to work against his stated aim to draw attention to climate change. From Instagram<\/em> to body cams, American society is one in which spectacle is the primary mode of social and political discourse. As Douglas Kellner argues in his preface to Spectacle 2.0,<\/em> \u201cthe election of Donald J. Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is the culmination of the politics of the spectacle that was first described by Debord,\u201d a politics that relies on \u201cseizing people\u2019s attention and emotions\u201d with disruptive, provocative and extraordinary events, the scope of which has expanded rapidly with new media (2\u20133). Trump\u2019s incendiary tweets, offensive photo ops and even his signature coiffure<\/em> are clear demonstrations of how the creation of spectacle can be used to \u201cdominate news cycles\u201d and, subsequently, to define the political agenda (Kellner 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists, attempting to wrest control of the political narrative, are continually drawn into this seemingly unwinnable competition of spectacular one-upmanship, often at their peril. Consider, for instance, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who reportedly told his governor\u2019s office: \u201cIf you don\u2019t see me, I\u2019ll burn myself,\u201d before walking into a busy intersection and setting himself ablaze in an act of protest widely credited with catalyzing the Arab Spring (Hasan). Unlike Bouazizi whose self-immolation, subsequent hospitalization and funeral were captured on film and widely circulated, Buckel\u2019s self-immolation is subject to the ephemerality of live performance.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (1984\u20132011), the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 and became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring against autocratic regimes. Photo: Web\/Wikipedia<\/a><\/em>. Accessed 7 May 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Self-immolation\u2019s political meaning, however, is not solely derived from spectacular imagery. As Nicholas Michelsen points out in Politics and Suicide<\/em>, the political impact of self-immolation is also narratively constructed after-the-fact by a public who mythologizes the event (61). In the two years since Buckel\u2019s death, there have only been approximately 80 unique, English-language media mentions of his protest, many of them just a passing reference and more than half of those mentions are concentrated in the several days following his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at Google trends, Wikipedia<\/em> analytics, and Twitter<\/em> trends,[2]<\/sup><\/a> a comparison reveals that far less extreme acts of protest like Colin Kapaernick\u2019s refusal to stand for the national anthem or the 2017 Women\u2019s March dwarf Buckel\u2019s protest in both initial interest and longevity of interest over time. Furthermore, there is also no discernible correlation between Buckel\u2019s death and public action on issues of climate change, fossil fuel usage or conservation. Tellingly, qualitative evidence also suggests that those who would be most likely to be aware of and moved to action by Buckel\u2019s death hadn\u2019t heard of his protest. For example, when the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion marched through Prospect Park in July 2019 (just one year after Buckel\u2019s death), their organizer, Jesse Ortiz, described Buckel\u2019s act as a \u201charrowing but meaningful gesture\u201d but admitted that \u201che\u2019d only heard about the incident recently\u201d (qtd. in Stremple). This suggests that something about Buckel\u2019s dramaturgy failed to resonate even with a politically active public predisposed to his cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The grand narrative in which Buckel\u2019s death did <\/em>find purchase, however, was in its notable lack of public response. For instance, the striking title of a New York Times<\/em> op-ed written by novelist and native Brooklynite Nathan Englander, just days after Buckel\u2019s death, bluntly declared \u201cA Man Set Himself on Fire. We Barely Noticed.\u201d Englander posits that Buckel\u2019s failure to garner banner headlines is a problem of \u201cstyle and form,\u201d suggesting that American aesthetic sensibilities lean towards the excessive violence of mass-shootings rather than the pseudo-religious austerity of self-immolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree with Englander that the ambivalence attending Buckel\u2019s protest is related to a misalignment of style and form, but not necessarily one of national aesthetics. In the West, self-immolation is often associated with Vietnamese or Tibetan monks, but self-immolation, as a protest tactic, is not inherently or uniquely representative of Asian religious or political aesthetics.[3]<\/sup><\/a> Immolation, which technically denotes only \u201csacrifice,\u201d did not become synonymous with \u201cfiery death\u201d until the 1960s with the self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk Th\u00edch Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c (Biggs, \u201cDying Without Killing\u201d 174).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is true that historical accounts of self-immolation in China date back thousands of years, but these are immolations in the literal sense of the word\u2014<\/em><\/strong>acts of religious sacrifice based on a dramaturgy of lavish and joyful gift-giving, set forth in chapter 23 of the ancient Mah\u0101y\u0101na Buddhist text, the Lotus S\u016btra <\/em>(Hurvitz 270). According to Benn, the Lotus S\u016btra<\/em> provided a \u201cliterary blueprint\u201d for auto-cremation based on its account of the self-immolation of the Bodhisattva Medicine King who attempts to attain Buddhahood by meditating for twelve thousand years, preparing his body with jeweled robes and anointing himself with fragrant oils before burning his body in sacrifice to the \u201cjoyous approval of all who witness it\u201d (\u201cLotus S\u016btra<\/em>\u201d 108\u201309). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dramaturgy of modern-day self-immolation, on the other hand, is more akin to Foucault\u2019s spectacle of the scaffold\u2014a painful <\/strong>scene of public accusation in which the suffering body serves as the site of a political power struggle. As Foucault details in Discipline and Punish, <\/em>highly visible performances of torture and public execution were the penal standard in Europe for centuries. Branding, stretching on the rack, hanging and burning were all part of a public \u201ctheatre of horror\u201d in which judicial investigation and punishment were inextricably interwoven (63). This display of state power, though, was subject to unpredictable \u201cviolent inversions\u201d (Foucault 64). If the cruelty of the executioner too far outstripped the violence of the crime, the crowd could be moved to pity or anger on behalf of the condemned and revolt against the state\u2019s performance of authority, making a folk-hero of the condemned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of an effort to neutralize the suffering body as a potential site of resistance, Western religious and political institutions at the end of the eighteenth century moved away from the practice of public torture, choosing instead to obscure and control the body behind closed doors\u2014a \u201ctransformation of state repression,\u201d which Biggs suggests was a precondition for the emergence of self-immolation as a protest tactic (\u201cDying Alone\u201d 23). Despite the absent executioner, activists have continued to re-stage the spectacle of the scaffold in a bid to draw out hidden power structures and reinstate the body as a volatile site for determining truth and galvanizing political resistance. A modern example of this phenomenon is the death of IRA activist Bobby Sands, whose fatal hunger-strike effectively cast Margaret Thatcher as a cold and unfeeling executioner on an international stage (\u201cBritain\u2019s Gift to Bobby Sands\u201d A26). Similarly, Th\u00edch Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c\u2019s self-immolation<\/a> served as an indictment of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem and his oppressive, American-backed regime (Biggs \u201cDying Without Killing\u201d 173).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This more secular interpretation of self-immolation as a political assignation of blame can and has resonated among American citizens and politicians. Th\u00edch Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c\u2019s protest generated wide-spread sympathy for the plight of Vietnamese Buddhists and American anti-war protestors like Alice Herz, Norman Morrison and Roger LaPorte, quickly embraced self-immolation as a protest tactic. These acts, extensively covered by the American press, had, in turn, lasting and discernible impacts on American politics. For example, Norman Morrison\u2019s death in 1965 so horrified Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, that historian Paul Hendrickson credits it as a tipping point for McNamara after which he demonstrated a noticeable \u201cturn against all he had made and masterminded\u201d in Vietnam (210). Given the way self-immolation has historically resonated in America, the issue of style and form at play in Buckel\u2019s self-immolation is not likely a misalignment of national aesthetics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather, I suggest, the issue of style and form at play in Buckel\u2019s protest is the burgeoning disconnect between a public habituated to drama and a global issue whose geographically diffuse, causally fragmented and temporally sustained form regularly exceeds the dramatic framework we are accustomed to. In Postdramatic Theatre, <\/em>Lehmann warns of a Western fixation with the \u201ccognitive programme\u201d of drama, suggesting that we fail to realize to what extent \u201call that we recognize and feel in life is thoroughly shaped and structured by . . . ways of seeing, feeling, thinking . . . articulated only in and by art\u201d (37).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 1994 study of risk perception seems to bear out Lehmann\u2019s concern, suggesting that we fail to recognize climate change risk because it does not fit into what is, I would argue, a conventional dramatic framework. The study suggests that \u201cclimatic change\u201d belongs to a class of \u201chidden hazards\u201d or problems which could pass \u201cunnoticed or unattended\u201d to until their effects reach such a scale that can no longer be ignored (Kasperson 9). Unlike more visible threats such as smog or raw sewage pollution, which tend to claim our attention because they can be \u201cpinpointed at places and localities, where cause and effect could be closely linked,\u201d climate change is a \u201cglobal elusive\u201d hazard characterized by \u201clengthy lag times between activities . . . geographical separation in source regions and the regions where the effects are manifested, complex interactions of human and physical systems and the slowly developing accumulation of materials in environmental sinks\u201d (11). In terms of dramatic theatre, we can think about the perceptual problems identified in this study (diffuse or fragmented time, place and action) as presenting a technically dramatic challenge vis-\u00e0-vis the classical unities Aristotle outlines in the Poetics<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, by way of a solution, Kasperson suggests that the chance of a hidden hazard like climate change becoming visible and, subsequently, high-priority would depend, among other factors,[4]<\/sup><\/a> on whether \u201cthe potential changes [of climate change] can be expressed in terms that indicate vividly the long-term risks associated with particular human activities\u201d (12). The author\u2019s call for vivid, linear demonstration essentially amounts to a conventional Aristotelian intervention\u2014the concentration of time and causality called for here hearkens back to Aristotle\u2019s recommendations regarding \u03b5\u1f50\u03c3\u03cd\u03bd\u03bf\u03c0\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd<\/em> or surveyability in the Poetics<\/em>,which suggests that plots should offer the observer a sense of \u201cunity and wholeness\u201d that is easily surveyable or \u201creadily taken in\u201d in one view (14).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow<\/em> provides a ready example of surveyability applied to climate change. The plot of the film follows a NOAA scientist who attempts to warn the U.S. leaders of an abrupt and major climate shift precipitated by a breaking ice shelf in Antarctica. Global weather disasters quickly erupt in major cities around the world and a tidal wave engulfs Manhattan, forcing U.S. residents to flee to safety in Mexico. The movie takes a long-term global phenomenon and condenses its action into a single dramatic scenario set in a familiar location. Centered around the survival of its human protagonists, the film imposes a clear beginning, exciting middle and satisfying end to what is, by all scientific accounts, an ongoing climate phenomenon whose effects will likely outlast the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Lehmann\u2019s point regarding perceptual biases towards conventional drama, The Day After Tomorrow <\/em>was a major box office success that measurably increased public awareness of climate change, generating \u201cmore than 10 times the news coverage of the 2001 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC report\u201d (Leiserowitz 34). A risk perception study centered on The Day After Tomorrow<\/em> revealed that audience perception of climate change was deeply influenced by the film\u2019s depiction of environmental catastrophe. The study, which surveyed audience members before and after viewing the movie, found not only that \u201cthe representation of environmental risks in popular culture can influence public attitudes and behaviors\u201d (including viewers\u2019 purchasing and voting decisions), but that the movie shaped viewers\u2019 conceptual model of the global climate system in ways that closely resembled the exaggerated, precipitous model presented in the movie (26\u201334). While the inaccuracy of the film\u2019s anthropocentric, hyper-rapid depiction troubled some scientists,[5]<\/sup><\/a> many others were happy to grant poetic license to filmmakers for the sake of pushing climate change into the media spotlight.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a social and political landscape where visibility often constitutes success or importance, environmental activists have treated the elusive nature of climate change as a problem that needs solving. As environmental campaigner George Marshall points out in his book Don\u2019t Even Think About It<\/em>, humans \u201chave inherited fundamental and universal cognitive wiring that shapes the way we see the world. . . . Without doubt, climate change has qualities that play poorly to these innate tendencies. It is complex, unfamiliar, slow moving, invisible, and intergenerational\u201d (226). For many activists, dramatization seems a logical and effective solution for making the invisible visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The optimistic enthusiasm with which the environmental community embraced The Day After Tomorrow <\/em>reveals the extent to which environmental advocates and activists put faith in dramatic representation to capture attention and influence the public. Anticipating the film\u2019s popularity (and largely ignoring its scientific inaccuracies), groups like Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and MoveOn saw value in the film\u2019s dramatic representation of climate change as a way to amplify their campaign messages, and the groups planned actions, websites and campaign events to coincide with the film\u2019s release. For example, in May 2004, shortly after the film\u2019s release, Greenpeace, confronted ExxonMobil with \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d by projecting 100-foot images of floods, storms and other impacts of climate change at the company\u2019s annual shareholder meeting (\u201cThe Day Before\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Greenpeace action at European Council Summit in Brussels. Photo: Eric De Mildt\/Greenpeace, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

We repeatedly see the dramatic paradigm at work in activist performances that creatively render the cause and effect of climate change surveyable on a global stage through dramatic representation. For example, in September 2019, Extinction Rebellion \u201csailed\u201d a bright pink boat emblazoned with the phrase \u201cTell the Truth,\u201d down London\u2019s major roadways and through Parliament Square, presumably illustrating the impact of future sea-level rise on the city. A month later, in Ireland, Extinction Rebellion activists staged a mock funeral, carrying a black \u201ccoffin for humanity\u201d through the capital, vividly demonstrating the future effects of climate change (Pollak). In December 2019, Greenpeace pulled off a spectacular protest at the EU summit, during which activists arrived at the venue in a vintage red fire engine and 28 climbers \u201cscaled the summit venue and wrapped the building with images of giant lapping red and yellow flames, setting off billowing clouds of black and white smoke, red distress flares, and sounding a loud fire alarm\u201d (\u201cActivists Take Climate Emergency to EU\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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