Who Is Tim Martin Of Declare Emergency?

Tim Martin was tired of not being heard. The 54-year-old father of two young sons had tried everything he could think of to get the message about the climate emergency out to his rapidly growing Raleigh, North Carolina community. Trained as both an architect and structural engineer, Martin intrinsically understands the symbiosis that great buildings need to sync with their surrounding environments, inspired by his research on design principles and the architectural marvel the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington.

In a quiet irony for someone who protested inside a museum, Martin considers his craft a bit like an artist’s.

“It’s just like being a potter, or a painter,” he explained, “You don’t want to lose your sculpture or clay pot on the kiln because of technical problems, but at the same time, you have to focus on the intuition and wisdom to make good decisions. That’s what our society is suffering from…trust in our intuition…”

But Martin lacked the means to fight against a system more powerful than he in his rapidly developing city. He tried to explain to his city council that there was a massive price to pay for low-cost developments that cut down hundred-year old forests to no avail. He organized a climate-centered film symposium at his local Unitarian church, but attendance was low. He asked to speak at his sons’ school about the dangers of economy over stability, but he was rejected, and in his own words, probably “freaked everybody out” by a perceived threat to student ambition.

The maddening obstacles he faced reminded him of the early days of the tobacco industry’s disinformation campaign—one that killed his 47-year-old mother when he was just 25. Yet despite more than an hour explaining his thoughts to me, approximately five hours of viewing materials he provided as background, and decades of his own understanding, it was the easy avenue to economic growth that superseded all he had to say. No one seemed to be listening, to understand how dire the state of the climate really had become.

“Growth sounds good,” he said later, citing the documentary Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet and the doughnut economic model. “Plants grow; people grow; but you wouldn’t want to grow to 12 feet tall, would you? Plants don’t want to grow so quickly that they break. Eventually, growth needs to stabilize.”

Once he joined Declare Emergency, the depression and frustration he was feeling started to wane. Martin was one of the 13 activists who blocked the DC Beltway on Colesville Road for July 4th, 2022, finally galvanized that he was making a difference by demanding President Biden declare a climate emergency. Realizing how much more press this event received (3 million views through Fox, by his account) Martin decided to make the ultimate sacrifice: throwing paint on a work of art at the National Gallery in Washington.

“Oh! Here’s a group that has a plan…” he recalled of that time. “Taking action and supporting the Declare Emergency campaign goes a long way in healing the stress and isolation I was feeling by having nobody listening to what I was trying to put out there.”

At 4am on April 27th, the day of the protest, Martin woke up in a panic, trying to be brave.

“The monkey mind starts churning,” he recalled. “…Believe me, I’ve been conflict-averse my whole life…[but] if the climate situation is so bad, how come no one is doing anything about it?”

So many things could go wrong. What if he was stopped before he could finish? What if it didn’t get any publicity? What if the whole thing was a failure? The conversation wouldn’t be started. It would be as bad as back home in Raleigh, but with much more dire individual consequences.

Nevertheless, the museum is a “sacred space,” particularly detached from the natural world. In this sense, the disconnect makes it the perfect place to defend the forests and oceans the U.S. government has forgotten, and demand their reintegration into human day-to-day life for our own safety.

By 6:30am, he had outlined his points. He recorded a not-yet-released testimonial in the metro shortly thereafter, explaining his motivations and the main climate concerns that remained top of mind.

Unlike the young and fresh activists in England gambling on the future, Martin was gambling on his past. He a clean record, and had rarely spoken in public. This seismic event was probably the riskiest thing he had ever done. Still he saw no alternative.

“My boys understand what I’m doing this for, but they certainly don’t want me to get hurt or go to jail. But our Declare Emergency campaign is about making sacrifices, because this is how serious the problem is. We need more bodies on the line. We demonstrate that we need people’s attention this crisis.”

Everything was last minute. Martin had never met his partner, 53-year-old Joanna Smith, and they realized that the paint would have to be smeared rather than stenciled, hence the metaphorically blood and oil-stained hands. They walked in as discreetly as possible, trying not to draw attention so they would have ample time to complete their mission.

After what felt like an eternity of anticipation, Martin and Smith politely and apologetically completed their protest.

The rush of adrenaline took over…as did satisfaction.

“Even the security guards were staring and watching, wanting to know what the fuss was all about,” Martin recalled with pride. “I couldn’t have picked a better thing to say.”

During the Colesville protest, Martin had also experienced the pride and enthusiasm of the security, who he felt were thanking him.

Looking back at that incident, “It really hit me in the gut that, ‘Wow, this is a community service’…Not everyone feels entitled to risk like that.”

With the United States’ unique set of climate challenges such as bipartisanship and mass incarceration, with greenwashing and “unhinged” economic development, Martin drew inspiration from the Civil Rights movement (rather than the suffragettes) and believes his bravery was a rare way to fight the system, hopefully for its ultimate improvement.

Martin feels he is “an ordinary person who did something extraordinary to get the word out,” and is ready to face the legal ramifications. He and Smith have an arraignment on May 25th, and expect their court date to be in either June or July.

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