His name was Wynn Bruce.

He is not the first climate martyr and he won’t be the last. People are only going to become more and more desperate and examples like this will become more and more common.

Tweet source here, read more here

in the wake of aaron bushnell’s self immolation, i’ve been reflecting on an article i read several years ago about wynn bruce, a man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court building on earth day 2022 to bring attention to the climate crisis. this is an excerpt from “witness to a fire” by jay caspian kang, published in the new york times on april 28, 2022:

It’s hard to get comfortable with such violence. Wynn Bruce’s act of protest feels senseless because his death will not change the way legislators, corporations and individuals go about their polluting lives. There is a silent calculation among witnesses that accompanies any act of civil disobedience, even those we may agree with on principle: What is the point? This is standard fare for how many people think about protests, violent or not. We tend to pathologize the activists and imagine that they must be animated by the pettiness and greed that motivates us. In many cases, they are.

But self-immolation forces the witnesses, whether in person or through the news, to confront an intensity of conviction that goes well beyond what they may think is possible. In this way, self-immolators like Thich Quang Duc become almost inhuman, even holy. At the same time, the act establishes an entirely personal connection because the real question at hand isn’t really, “Why did he do that?” Rather, the self-immolator is asking you — with all the intimidation and self-righteousness a person can muster — “Why don’t you care even half as much as I do?”

I am still horrified by self-immolation, but I also believe that we should resist the urge to write it off as the last act of the mentally ill and the desperate. Nor should we simply frame each incidence with some made-up measure of how much effect it has had on the world. The discomfort we feel over this practice and our sincere desire to see it end should not preclude us from taking it seriously as an act of protest. We should hope this practice ends, but we also shouldn’t just look away.

Wynn Bruce lit himself on fire on Earth Day 2022 because he believed it might inspire people to work against climate change. There is not any more or less meaning we need to take away from it.

Where's the US media coverage on this? A climate activist self immolates in front of the Supreme Court to protest climate inaction... and almost nothing. Barely a peep.

Should he have done it in front of the White House? On the steps of the Capitol? Where would the media have noticed his sacrifice?

On Earth Day, April 22, Climate Activist Wynn Bruce self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington DC.

I saw little coverage in relation to this act. I don’t think it’s right to stifle the selfless action of an individual consumed by concern for the planet; especially as it was his last act on this earth.

I have been working on these pieces since I heard about the incident, and I really didn’t want to release them until I was truly satisfied, as I wanted to do as much justice as possible to the issue.

Art makes ugly issues easier to digest. It can serve as a subtle reminder without forcing the viewer to see the violence of the issue head on.

I hope the message Wynn Bruce was trying to convey spread to the right people. I hope it wasn’t in vain.

I'm sorry, but I am feeling INCREDIBLY fucked up about the fact that Wynn Alan Bruce, a Shambhala Buddist and climate activist, self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court Friday, April 22nd, Earth Day, in an act of protest over a lack of climate change action, and basically nobody is talking about it. The few places it has shown up in the news have been incredibly vague, usually only saying that "a man who lit himself on fire in Washington died."

Am I wrong? Am I wrong for feeling INCREDIBLY fucked up and unsettled that NOBODY is talking about it???

On Earth Day, a Colorado Buddhist man, Wynn Bruce, self-immolated outside of the Supreme Court in an act of protest against the government's inaction towards climate change.

His death is being largely ignored by mainstream corporate media and only started to see a modicum of coverage yesterday due to the noise kicked up by social media postings.

Because it makes sense why instead of fixing the planet with climate change and global warming, they decided "Let's make problems amongst ourselves and take away woman's right to abortion". A scientist, Wynn Bruce, set himself on fire to bring attention to global warning, but the people who have power to change it ignored and changed the point of focus.

Make it make sense.

As a companion to my prospective book announced here, From “Black Lives Matter” to “Most Non-Europeans Aren’t Human”: The Peregrinations of Liberalism, 2020-2022, I now also plan to write From Anti-Natalism to Suicide Advocacy: The Peregrinations of Leftism, 2020-2022.

I joke, and I make no apology for joking, because it’s important to joke. It’s one of the things that will keep you from killing yourself. What is suicide but the ultimate form of taking oneself too seriously? 

The specific political motive in this case, as endorsed by our psychoanalytic intellectual above, last seen here at Grand Hotel Abyss diagnosing half of America as psycho-fascists, requires more specific scrutiny, however. Buddhism, I think, is a red herring, especially since people in the comments are observing that western or American Buddhism lends itself to a nihilism not present in traditionally Buddhist cultures, about which I’ll take them at their word. I suspect we’re dealing with a different spiritual pathology, expressed in its highest literary register here:

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent ‘How lovely!’ becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent.

There is a truth in this perception, grief’s insight into the evanescent triviality of the pleasures taken by those who have lost nothing—or, worse, who have been callous enough to recover from their losses. Certainly, this is as valid as any true mood, any aesthetic. 

But a political movement based on such aesthetics, such affects, and on the spurious self-congratulation of experiencing-unto-suicide griefs that are finally not one’s own, is without ethical legitimacy. There is more genuine morality in the basic selfishness of tending one’s own garden—the whole world would be in flower if everyone did that—than in the grotesquely tumescent englobalizing compassion of this post-political aesthetic left. “Com-passion” literally means “suffering with,” a virtue when limited to an actionable range, but now extended beyond human endurance by a media apparatus that makes the far distant feel nearer at hand than your own life—because, through the medium of your phone, the far distant is physically in your hand. 

Public suicide—the literally spectacular divestiture of one’s own power—is a perverse but logical conclusion of this left that refuses to own up to the power it actually exercises as it dictates expertise to authoritative institutions themselves more and more devoted to abolishing the merely human (“all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go”), though it’s admittedly much less common and less commonly encouraged than other forms of totally annihilating the corrupt nature in one’s self:

I saw myself as a being of water and light, an angel imprisoned in a filthy human body. I resented having to eat, sleep, piss, and shit. I particularly hated having sexual desires and wanted to be rid of them.

To maintain one’s own expert standing, one must pledge fealty to this left, which has monopolized accreditation. It used to be that if one were shrewd enough, one could do this without too severely compromising any rival loyalties—to the liveliness, say, of art or nature, or to a metaphysics not consecrated to the revolutionary pessimism that has afflicted the left since the industrial proletariat failed to bring about the promised Millennium. But if it becomes an open cult of death? If it instructs its pilgrims to immolate themselves publicly—or at least fails to instruct them not to, while seeming to regard it as a worthy but extreme way to act on an accurate perception of reality—is one still a “fascist” if one raises one’s hand to object?

Further reading for anyone having doubts and second thoughts: my essay on Camus’s The Rebel, my short story “White Girl,” my novel Portraits and Ashes.

This is just going to keep happening if nothing is done 

More from kottke.org:

It’s shocking and sad but perhaps not surprising how little media attention this has gotten. Bruce, a Buddhist, seems to have planned this action for several weeks or even months, leaving clues in a repeatedly edited comment on Facebook. His action mirrors that of Thích Quảng Đức in 1963, who self-immolated in Saigon in 1963 to protest the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Rest in peace, Wynn Bruce.

Wynn Bruce, a 50yr old activist lit himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington DC in protest of the inaction towards climate change.

If this is overlooked, idk what will get people to realize that THIS IS A PROBLEM. And we need to fix it.

DON'T FORGET WE ARE BURNING

DON'T FORGET WYNN BRUCE

A moment of recognition and respect for the final actions of Wynn Bruce, who died on April 23, after immolating himself in front of the U.S. Supreme Court as an act of protest against the climate crisis.

He is at least the second environmental activist to take such a course of action in four years, the previous individual being David Buckel who died in NYC.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/26/wynn-bruce-fire-supreme-court-climate-activist/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/nyregion/david-buckel-fire-prospect-park-fossil-fuels.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share