Wynn Bruce, 50, of Boulder, Colo., died after setting himself on fire outside the Supreme Court on April 22, in an apparent climate protest action. He didn’t run toward the nearby fountain outside the Supreme Court. He didn’t cry out in pain. The fire consuming Wynn Bruce’s body raged for 60 seconds Friday before it was extinguished by police, and he remained still, sitting upright on the court’s famous marble plaza, his legs stretched in front of him.
Douglas said that he spoke to Wynn about three or four days before his death and that he seemed fine. They had a fairly ordinary conversation, he said, and Wynn gave no indication about a new plan to kill himself.Still, he said: “Everybody gets to decide for themselves about how their end of life is going to take place. I honor that. I honor that. I respect him for it.”
“I don’t think you can look at Wynn’s act and see just one thing,” said Morgan Stanfield, 48, who became friends with Bruce through Boulder’scommunity. “A person can be suffering profoundly and also be enormously courageous. They can be doing something to ease their own pain, and they can be doing something at the same time that they believe is going to genuinely change the world in a profound way. And for me, that is the only way that I can see this and have it make any sense at all.
“We were portaging, and Wynn said to me, ‘I can’t make it,’ ” he recalled. “So, I looked at him and said, ‘You have to.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I can’t make it without you.’ Of course, we made it. That night, at the campfire, that was special. We’d made it together.”He went to Hernando High School in Brooksville, just north of Tampa.
Bruce told her that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury in the car accident. As a result, he couldn’t drive a car and struggled to learn new skills quickly. He enjoyed contact improvisational dance classes, a nonrhythmic spontaneous form of movement that Bruce’s friends said is popular among Buddhists in Boulder.
“The practices that Wynn did were things like meditation on wishing well being for others and imagining taking in their suffering into himself and breathing out light and happiness toward them,” Stanfield said. She was struck by his “sweetness and guilelessness and intelligence.” At COP26, countries will be asked to cut emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Climate reporter Sarah Kaplan explains why that's unlikely.