Two Women Were Arrested After Spray Painting Charles Darwin’s Grave in an Act of Protest
The women were taking into custody almost immediately.
Published Jan. 15 2025, 11:29 a.m. ET
Visitors who lined up in Westminster Abbey to see the grave of famed naturalist Charles Darwin were greeted with quite the surprise on Jan. 13, 2025, when a pair of protesters took a can of orange spray chalk to the monument.
The ladies were working on behalf of Just Stop Oil (JSO), an organization dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers of climate change, amongst other things.
The women were taken into custody, but not before getting their message heard loud and clear: something needs to be done about climate change before it's too late.
You can learn more about the JSO protests, including what the authorities are doing about it, below.
Climate activists spray paint Charles Darwin's grave to highlight rising global temperatures.
The words "1.5 is dead" were sprayed on Charles Darwin's grave in orange spray paint by two women working on behalf of JSO. "We've done this because there's no hope for the world, really," one of the activists said about her artwork, according to the BBC.
The 1.5 concerns a report by the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) just days before the incident, which confirmed that 2024 had been the planet's warmest year on record.
The temperatures were 1.5 degrees Celsius (that's 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than what pre-industrial temperatures averaged. Preventing that milestone was also generally regarded as the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But, not enough has changed in the past decade, which appears to have prompted the women to take such drastic action.
Two women were arrested for the stunt.
Alyson Lee and Di Bligh are going to be spending time bind bars after they were taken into custody by the Met Police, who were called shortly after the vandalism took place. The duo — a retired assistant teacher and former Reading Council chief executive, respectively — said they targeted the high-profile grave for a specific reason, even though they knew they were bound to get in trouble for doing so.
"We've done it on Darwin's grave specifically because he would be turning in that grave because of the sixth mass extinction taking place now," Bligh said.
"I believe he would approve because he was a good scientist and he would be following the science, and he would be as upset as us with the government for ignoring the science," Lee added.
As of Jan. 13, 2025, both women were detained on suspicion of causing criminal damage and were being processed at an unnamed police station in central London, according to Reuters.
What kind of time or fines they'll be facing remains to be seen, but it seems like their goal of getting the word out about the 1.5C rise in global temperatures has been a success. Now, all that's left is to see if anything happens as a result of their efforts.