Let me begin by saying I’m not a golfer. I used to play, but I don’t anymore. I have a lot of issues with it and I’m no holy roller, so I won’t say I stopped golfing only because of my environmental and social equity issues with the sport. As is often said, golf is responsible for many a good walk ruined. I understand its popularity though and I absolutely have watched many PGA tournaments on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Nothing puts me to sleep on the couch faster than the smooth whispers of Jim Nance describing the break of the green.
Sunday’s final round of the Travelers Championship brought golf back to the forefront of my dinner conversations. If you’ve been under a rock the past day, you may not know that, as the leaders group approached the final hole of a very dramatic and close finish, 5 climate protestors stormed the 18th green with smoke bombs and T-shirts that read “No Golf on a Dead Planet”.
It wasn’t an overly aggressive protest, and if I’m being judgmental, Extinction Rebellion clearly didn’t send their best athletes. But I can imagine it scared people who didn’t know what was going on. The protest did little to stop the tournament and caused only a minor delay, but they did accomplish something. Sunday, we were talking about golf… and climate.
"I was scared for my life. I didn't even really know what was happening. But thankfully the cops were there and kept us safe, because that's, you know, that's just weird stuff."- Bhatia said, as quoted by Sky Sports.
Okay. Weird stuff. Not really. We just had a heat wave in June in New England, the hurricane season is expected to be one of the worst and we’re getting tornadoes in new parts of the country who don’t normally experience them. We are battling a longer and more extreme wildfire season and we have states legitimately worried about running out of water. And Akshay Bhatia thinks it’s “weird stuff” that people are protesting this. My daughter was at the golf tournament and was at the 18th hole when it happened. She was super annoyed by the protesters. (insert eye roll here) My mother-in-law thought they should all be arrested. Honestly, people do love to hate on climate protesters. It’s because they inconvenience us. Although many countries are punishing climate protesters with harsher sentences today, the concept of peaceful protest still appears to be a sound one.
According to an article in “The Conversation”
By seeing protests, directly or through media, bystanders can come to identify with protesters, possibly increasing their belief in their own power to cause social change.
This can create a positive feedback loop. Researchers have found that emissions decrease in US states with large numbers of environmental protests. Polling from YouGov also reported a significant rise in the number of British people concerned about climate following Extinction Rebellion’s early 2019 protests in London.
Protests can also help achieve policy change if the policy being protested is already under public discussion – and if protesters have support from politicians. And in countries where politicians are elected based on public opinion, protests that increase environmental awareness can encourage change through altering people’s voting habits.
Researchers have written that these disruptive tactics deployed by climate activists may actually help a movement – even if we find them annoying, such as our golf disruptors on Sunday. Heather Alberro, a lecturer in global sustainable development at Nottingham Trent University argues that disruptive protests by the radical flank can "render the demands of mainstream counterparts more palatable in the eyes of governments and the public, effectively advancing the entire movement's agenda"
So…a few not so graceful protestors storming the 18th green can actually help the movement seem a little bit more “palatable”.
Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, also notes that dislike of the protestors themselves or their tactics doesn't appear to result in less support for climate action. In fact, it tends to do what people using these "disruption as shock" tactics want it to do, she says – pulls the conversation towards where they want it to go and even generates more support for the issue. Again, we appear to be talking about climate…and golf. I don’t advocate for the destruction of anything, especially artwork, but I’m okay with a golf tournament, because let’s talk about golf. Many would argue that a pristine green golf course in the middle of Arizona, that’s taking up a precious resource-water- to sustain completely non-local vegetation and landscape may not be a good thing. And many would argue it’s not the best use of land right now, and still more might argue that it’s not the most socially accessible activity.
But aside from all that, those protestors were annoying because it was an inconvenience that we had to wait for them to do their thing before we could finish the golf tournament. And that’s the point, to inconvenience all of us, to remind all of us that the planet is in crisis right now. It’s not a bad thing.
So, it’s really easy to hate on these people who are just trying to make us think. And it’s not their fault that the only way to get us to do that is to interrupt our Sunday golf tournament. Heck, I might organize a protest for next Neocon, on Wednesday…but I don’t think anyone will be there….