Thursday, March 28, 2024

Activist throws paint on Royal BC Museum’s woolly mammoth exhibit

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An activist advocating for action against the climate crisis has thrown pink paint on the Royal BC Museum’s (RBCM) mammoth exhibit to publicly ‘kickstart’ a new protest campaign.

A video was posted to Twitter by On2Ottawa which is the official account for the new campaign wishing to call all Canadians to rally and march on Ottawa to remind political leaders of the ongoing climate crisis if action is not taken. 

“If the government does not enact the citizen’s assembly to tackle the climate and ecological crisis in the next one to two years, then we will be travelling to Ottawa to demand one,” said the woman identified as ‘Laura,’ who spread paint on the mammoth.

“At 11 a.m. today an incident took place in which Woolly, the iconic and beloved Royal BC Museum mammoth, was defaced by activists and pink paint was applied to his tusks,” RBCM spokesperson Samantha Rich said in a media statement to Victoria Buzz

“Museum security staff safely reprimanded those involved, and called Victoria Police Department who quickly arrived on the scene and took the activists into custody.”

“Museum staff members from the exhibitions and conservation teams successfully cleaned off the water-soluble paint from the entire diorama.”

“There was no permanent damage to Woolly, who has been a favourite for visitors of the museum for over 40 years, and the exhibition was reopened within 90 minutes.”

“Thanks to a bit of elbow grease, he’s back to his old self. It was helpful that the paint was mainly just on his tusks,” added Rich.

VicPD say they’ve arrested three suspects in connection with the vandalism of the iconic wooly mammoth. Their investigation is ongoing.

Prior to painting it pink

Prior to this video, Laura has been featured in another On2Ottawa video explaining why she believes that climate action must be taken by federal government entities. 

On2Ottawa is concerned that with rising temperatures, food will become increasingly more difficult to produce as populations grow, frequency of natural disasters will increase and eventually mass migrations will have to take place because more regions will become uninhabitable.

“All this pressure will result in societal collapse and we will not know life as we know it right now,” said Laura in the previous video. “We need drastic change as soon as possible.”

Laura and On2Ottawa say they believe that society as a whole has one to two years to sort this out before our collapse.

The On2Ottawa movement hopes to unite all climate action causes and endeavours to demand a people’s assembly in lieu of our current government.

Rather than democratically voting in politicians, a people’s assembly in On2Ottawa’s vision would see random citizens from across Canada selected and educated on what are the most pressing issues to society as we know it. They would replace our current administration.

 

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Curtis Blandy
curtis@victoriabuzz.com

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