Activists are burning themselves over the climate crisis, yet the world ignores them

He received little global attention, but on Earth Day this year, climate activist Wynn Alan Bruce died after setting himself on fire, writes Donnachadh McCarthy

He had been planning it for at least one year (Facebook)

A growing aspect of being a climate and ecological protector is the grief, rage and despair one has to process, while watching so much of the earth’s remaining natural world get destroyed.

There is the grief at witnessing colleagues, like from Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, imprisoned in greater and greater numbers, both in the UK and around the world.

America has sentenced a peaceful climate protector to eight years in jail for an oil-pipeline protest, the UK just introduced 10-year sentences and Australia is threatening 25-year sentences!

Now on top of this is the grief at people so despairing at the lack of action that they are horrifically burning themselves to death, in a plea to the world to act.

He received little global attention, but on Earth Day this year, climate activist Wynn Alan Bruce died after setting himself on fire outside US Supreme Court. His friend, Dr K. Kritee, also a Buddhist priest from Colorado, said he had been planning to do it for at least a year.

“This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year. #wynnbruce I am so moved,” she wrote on Twitter.

In 2018, leading LGBT+ rights lawyer David Buckel died after setting himself on fire too, in a protest over the climate crisis. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he said at the time.

Over the decades of my involvement in environmental protection, we have  tried politics, marches, petitions, lobbying, sit-ins etc. As these failed to get the action necessary, we resorted to civil disobedience by peacefully blocking roads or entrances to corporate headquarters. As these have also failed, young people are now resorting to civil resistance by disrupting the fossil fuel industry itself, including coal mines, oil terminals and gas-pumps.

But emissions keep rising, forests felled and wildlife exterminated. Financial institutions boast about “net-zero plans” and yet continue to pour billions into new fossil fuels, an act called economic and moral madness by the UN Secretary General.

They dare to call peaceful protectors “eco-terrorists,” for risking their freedom to halt the actual eco-terrorism by the fossil fuelled establishment destroying  human civilisation and what remains of the natural world.

Our media almost totally ignored Wynn’s sacrifice. His horrific death was merely a footnote, if that in most of the media. The front pages in the UK obsessed about an MP looking at porn instead.

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The self-immolations of David Buckel and Wynn Bruce scream at us that we are now in a terrible conundrum. Our leaders have shown they are utterly incapable of saving humanity. If we overthrow them, we end up with the institutions needed to slash carbon emissions being paralysed potentially for years.

So, if marches, protests, petitions, politics, sit-ins, mass arrests, civil disruption and now truly horrific acts of self-immolation have failed to get our media to step up to save us, what on earth will?

The Ukrainians have shown what plucky courage can do in the face of threatened annihilation, against all the predicted odds. Just like the courageous but desperate young people from Just Stop Oil are showing being arrested on oil tankers across the UK.

Can the rest of us show equal courage and determination to peacefully take on the leaderships of our global corporate media waging a far more destructive fossil fuelled war on all of us, and if so, how?