Is Activism Just Attention-Seeking? A Climate Activist’s Reckoning
A few days back, during an interview at journalism summer school, someone asked me a question I couldn’t immediately answer: is activism the same thing as attention-seeking? My mind instantly registered attention-seeking as a negative act and as someone who calls herself a climate activist, my first response was ‘Definitely not.’ For me the definition of activism was the same as the one established by Merriam Webster: A doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.
But doesn’t ‘direct vigorous action’ always come wrapped in a specific goal- someone’s attention it’s trying to capture? For a political activist, for instance, action might mean civil disobedience, whistleblowing or organized boycotts. For a human rights activist, it might mean documentation and reporting of abuses, hunger strikes and international pressure campaigns. For a climate activist it might mean school strikes, road blockades, and museum protests. Aren’t all these actions in a way intended to seek the attention of certain parties, say, the public or the government? So then isn’t activism the same thing as attention seeking?
After a lengthy discussion with my fellow journalists and activists, I concluded that activism could be considered as an act of seeking attention, but attention seeking was in no way activism. Still, I wasn’t satisfied by this conclusion. My mind kept wandering off to the negative connotation of activism/ attention seeking I had in my subconscious, things I had read about in the news or watched on television; two activists from Riposte Alimentaire throwing soup at the glass protecting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in January 2024, shouting slogans about sustainable food systems, or the Kony 2012 viral campaign that racked up 100 million YouTube views in six days and raised over $28 million but produced almost no accountable action offline (slacktivism), or the Just Stop Oil slow-march in London that trapped an ambulance on Waterloo Bridge in 2023.
In these particular cases, critics labelled these acts as destructive, extremist and performative, and gave rise to what researchers call the activist’s dilemma: the tactics that got the most attention started to damage public support for the people using them. The question I had in mind was: was this form of activism bad? Is what critics call armchair activism, moral grandstanding, or eco-vandalism still ‘real’ activism, just because it draws attention to a genuine issue? And if attention alone isn’t enough to earn that label- where does the credibility of activism actually come from?
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My interviewer then raised tree-hugging, songs, and vigils- the “softer,” quieter end of activism- and asked whether these were genuine activism or just a softer form of attention-seeking. I found myself thinking of the very word “tree hugger,” which has a literal origin most people don’t know: in 1973, women in the Himalayan villages of Uttarakhand, India, led by Gaura Devi, physically wrapped their arms around trees to block loggers, in what became known as the Chipko movement. It wasn’t symbolic theatre- it was direct physical obstruction, and it worked: after activist Sunderlal Bahuguna appealed directly to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India imposed a 15-year ban on commercial logging in the region in 1980, a ban that later spread nationwide.
What made it effective wasn’t the softness of the gesture itself, but the direct political pressure behind it- the hugging was the delivery mechanism for real obstruction, not an alternative to action.
That example changed my perspective entirely. I arrived at the conclusion to this question with the conviction that subtle symbolic activities were somehow inferior and only offered to those incapable of doing real disruption. But Chipko made me reconsider that. I came to believe that even the smallest, softest actions can carry real weight, and that activism, at its core, is meant to seek attention- that’s not a flaw in it, that’s the point. What separates activism from attention-seeking, I’ve concluded, isn’t how big it is or how disruptive it looks on camera. It’s the intention behind it.
To test whether this instinct held beyond my own head, I circulated an anonymous survey. 82% of respondents agreed that activism and attention-seeking are basically the same thing- which, oddly, didn’t unsettle me the way it once might have. What struck me more was that 76% said disruptive protest is only justified “depending on the cause,” and a striking 90% weren’t even sure whether a protest they’d seen had ever changed their mind. That uncertainty, more than anything, reflected exactly the tension I’d spent this whole piece trying to untangle. The numbers told me people are still uncertain — but certainty was never really the point.
So whether it is a fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg skipping school to sit alone outside the Swedish parliament with a hand-painted sign reading “Skolstrejk för klimatet”- school strike for climate or an LGBTQ+ activist leading pride marches in the heart of Washington, activism carries a different meaning for everyone who believes in its impact. It is an act of resistance- and resistance can take any form: a song, a vigil, a pair of arms wrapped around a tree, or a body blocking a highway.
Real activism, whatever shape it takes, is driven by a genuine desire for positive change- not by the desire to be seen. Attention is the tool. Change is the purpose. And it’s that distinction, I think, that finally answers the question I couldn’t answer when it was first asked of me.
