Climate Protesters Deface Darwin’s Grave After Hottest Year On Record

Two climate protesters defaced Charles Darwin’s grave at London’s Westminster Abbey on Monday, spray painting a pointed message about global warming that has led to criminal charges.

The activists — Alyson Lee, 66, and Di Bligh, 77— sprayed the words “1.5 is dead” in orange chalk over the British biologist’s white marble gravestone. The message references news from Friday, when scientists declared 2024 as the hottest year in recorded history, with temperatures surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time since the industrial age, when humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels. Almost 200 countries that signed the Paris climate accord in 2016 agreed on 1.5 as the threshold for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Lee and Bligh spray painted Darwin’s grave at 10 a.m. Monday morning, demanding that the U.K. government works to phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by 2030. The two retirees have been charged with criminal damage, released on bail and are scheduled to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on separate dates next month. They’re affiliated with 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 hurled soup at Van Gogh famous painting “Sunflowers” in 2022. In September, a judge sentenced the activists to jail, saying he wanted to deter similar stunts.

The sentence clearly did not stop Lee and Bligh from kneeling on Darwin’s grave wearing “Just Stop Oil” paint cans and wielding paint cans. Westminster Abbey said it would take immediate action to clean the markings.

“Ten years on from the Paris Agreement, we have already exceeded the so-called safe temperature rise of 1.5 degrees, and are heading for over 3 degrees of warming,” Lee, a retired teaching assistant, said in a statement from Just Stop Oil. “This rapidly accelerating crisis means huge 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 datasets.

“It is important to emphasize that a single year of more than 1.5°C for a year does not mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades rather than an individual year,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases the impacts on our lives, economies and our planet.”

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres also weighed in, saying that individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit “do not mean the long-term goal is shot.” Instead, he said, they show “we need to fight even harder to get on 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 Species, became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. Darwin died in 1882 and is 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. “It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works cooperatively against common threats.”