Ribbon-Cutting the Sea Wall
It mocks performative climate resilience: powerful people celebrate an expensive engineered fix as proof of environmental responsibility while profiting from the destruction of the natural protection that would have worked better. The joke is that they are congratulating themselves for surviving dam
A single-panel editorial cartoon set at a luxury beachfront resort during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a towering new sea wall. In the foreground, grinning resort executives and local officials in hard hats and suits pose with oversized ceremonial scissors in front of a plaque reading something like 'Grand Opening: Resilience Wall' stamped with the resort’s green sustainability logo. Cameras flash as they cut the ribbon. The sea wall itself is absurdly polished and branded, like a corporate monument rather than infrastructure. Immediately behind them, the resort’s infinity pool is designed to mimic a vanishing shoreline, its far edge visually blending into the ocean as if the land is slipping away. To one side, relaxed tourists sip cocktails and take selfies, oblivious. In the background, cranes and bulldozers are clearing the last mangroves for new villa construction, with tree stumps and muddy tracks making clear that the natural coastal buffer was just removed. The ocean presses ominously against the wall, hinting that the celebration is really for a problem they helped create.