US actor James Cromwell stages dinosaur protest at Cop15

Actor from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom urges leaders to take more forceful action to end nature crisis

The US actor James Cromwell revisited his role in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with a modern twist in a protest against inaction on the nature crisis. He urged leaders at Cop15 to “Stop the Human Asteroid” as he stood in front of a model dinosaur surrounded by pictures of world leaders’ heads as bits of rock flying into Earth.

The 82-year-old actor – known for his roles as Ewan Logan in Succession and the farmer in Babe – staged the protest near the Cop15 convention centre in Montreal, where more than 10,000 people have gathered to create the next decade of targets to bend the curve on biodiversity loss. He told the Guardian: “With all the history of the Cops, we have achieved nothing, absolutely nothing, and they know that. I don’t know how they look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.”

He said he found it extraordinary how large the conference was, how many people were genuinely very engaged with biodiversity loss, and yet how little was being accomplished. He said: “No leaders are showing up [at Cop15], the ones that show up have no plan, except to make sure that nothing happens.”

Cromwell, who was collaborating with US-based NGO Avaaz, urged leaders to give land back to Indigenous peoples, and to give them proper rights and funding to look after it.

The actor is a veteran environmental activist and has been arrested for protesting a number of times. His most recent stunt was to superglue his hand to the coffee counter at Starbucks to protest against the fact that oat milk was more expensive than cow’s milk.

On Wednesday, Cromwell had delivered a passionate 10-minute speech urging people to “rewire” their heads. “We are one great hive of consciousness creating this magnificent planet and we’re making a mess of it,” he said, adding that world leaders’ priorities were being warped by donors who give them money. He said: “We have to basically rewire our heads to get through our thick skins the idea that the responsibility lies with us, and that there is something that we can do.”

He told delegates that he demanded his character in Succession, Ewan Roy, who is the older brother of media mogul Logan Roy, took a moral stance on his unscrupulous, rich family. He changed the script and sat down with creator Jesse Armstrong to explain why the character needed to change for him to take the part. He is also known for his roles in The Green Mile, LA Confidential, Six Feet Under and ER.

He has long described capitalism as a “cancer”, saying in his latest speech that it “now covers every aspect of our lives over the entire globe. It is rapacious, it is cruel, it is destructive. And it does not work.” Cromwell said billionaires have “no business at the Cop” unless they take responsibility for the damage they’ve done, pay taxes, and acknowledge they are no more important than anyone else. Currently they are contributing to making sure “nothing progressive really happens”.

Elsewhere in the city, a dozen or more people gathered to protest against the philanthropic work of billionaires, wearing masks of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, with banners reading: “Don’t surrender the planet to billionaires”, and “corporates out of CBD”, referring to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. Climbers hung an 25-metre (80-foot) banner from a building that read: “Biodiversity versus Billionaires”. Many expressed anger that Andrew Steer, the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, is speaking at Cop15.

“These massive infusions of billionaire philanthropic cash into the UN CBD are perpetuating the financialisation and corporate takeover of nature,” said Helena Paul of EcoNexus and the Global Forest Coalition. “We stop them by saying we cannot have private finance for biodiversity, which is for all of us. We need finance that is accountable.”

During the opening ceremony of Cop15, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told delegates to “forget the deluded dreams of billionaires – there is no planet B.”

cover photo: Actor and activist James Cromwell called on world leaders to ‘Stop the Human Asteroid’ in the talks at Cop15 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 15 December. Photograph: Graham Hughes/AP