Ejercicio Grupo B - 3 · Inglés PAU Canarias Junio (Ciencias) 2024

GRUPO B

How will throwing soup at the Mona Lisa save the planet?

Now the environmentalists go against the Mona Lisa: they have gone and thrown soup at the most famous

artwork in the world because they think their ideas about climate change are more important than ordinary

people getting to admire da Vinci’s masterpiece.

Two activists from Riposte Alimentaire, a French environmental activist group similar to British

5 JustStopOil (JSO), recently took the opportunity to protest at the Louvre. After emptying a bottle of an

orange liquid onto the Mona Lisa, one of the women protesters was captured on video shouting: “What is

more important: art or the right to a healthy and sustainable diet?” This provocative act was part of a

broader campaign by Riposte Alimentaire and JSO to stop approving new fossil fuel projects.

Thankfully, the painting was not damaged. The Mona Lisa has been behind safety glass since the 1950s,

10 after a vandal threw acid at it. Over the years, there have been other attacks on the painting, and in 2022

another climate activist, a young man camouflaged as an elderly woman so he could get close enough to

the painting, spread cake over the glass while shouting, “Think of the planet!”.

This latest assault on the Mona Lisa indicates the profound and increasingly violent attitude of the climate

movement. They think that their extreme ideas about climate change are more important than ordinary

15 people enjoying the world’s masterpieces. JSO already did something very similar to Van Gogh’s

Sunflowers in 2022, and the similarity is no coincidence: Riposte Alimentaire and JSO are part of the A22

Network, a very powerful and rich environmental organisation.

The climate activists are so sure that the world is about to end that they think almost any action, even if

destructive, is justified. For instance, Extinction Rebellion, another similar organisation, has gone as far

20 as to state that “its activism isn’t about the climate.” Climate change is, they say, just one “symptom of a

toxic system” supposedly defined by white man supremacy, patriarchy, and European colonialism, among

others.

When these greens throw things at great works of art, their aim, apparently, is to expose our decadence.

Surprisingly, some still argue that criticising these actions is not worth it. Of course, this perspective is

25 naive. Some eco-activists have already damaged precious artworks.

Significantly, these kids protesting for environmental causes come from privileged families enjoying a

comfortable life in industrial societies. However, they claim we must put an end to those industrial societies

where they live luxurious lives. It also seems contradictory that those Louvre activists are protesting

against eco-unfriendly farming practices while French farmers are taking to the streets of Paris to oppose

30 the green regulations, which they think make their lives intolerable.

Fragment adapted from The Spectator, January 2024

3. FIND a word or expression in the text that means... (1 point)

a)

b)

c)

d)