Mark Kenny | Climate protest at Ashes Test in Lord's joins long line of action improving conditions for others

Reprising an interruption of the World Snooker Championship in April, they attempted to disgorge orange powdered-dye on the pitch at the fabled home of cricket.

The crowd cheered their capture as if somehow, the sphere of sports entertainment should exist separately from species loss, toxic pollution and rapacious consumption.

Seven Sport's piercing news coverage explained: "England wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow has been hailed a hero and earned the praise of the British Prime Minister for carrying a protester off the field...".

A "hero"?

Such shallow dismissive critiques are the norm.

Viewers might have thought about any one of a thousand uncomfortable truths like the projection that by 2050, plastic in the world's oceans will outweigh the fish.

"These people will stop at absolutely nothing to stop all normal life from going ahead," huffed Nigel Farage after the snooker incident. Normal life? Priceless.

A few months back, members of Extinction Rebellion daubed the Adelaide offices of Santos and then suspended a protester from an overpass in the CBD.

SA Police overreacted closing the road, sparking claims that nurses and ambulances could not reach the nearby hospital. Lives could be lost. And so, an incendiary media narrative set the stage for a pitiable surrender in which the government passed an opposition bill in just minutes to enact the most severe disruption penalties in the country. A Labor government, whose movement arose from struggle, unlawful strike action, transformative social policy campaigns. This was the reforming party of Don Dunstan in the state which had led the world in granting women the right to stand for election as well as vote.

One-hundred-and-ten years ago, the same year that Canberra was officially named, a brave suffragette women stepped out onto a race track in Epsom, England, and tried to attach a flag to a galloping horse owned by the King called Anmer.

Branded an anarchist by some and martyr by others, Emily Wilding Davison, 40, died from her injuries. Fifteen years later, at the funeral of the most famous suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, the jockey who had been thrown from Anmer that day, laid a wreath to "the memory of Mrs Pankhurst and Miss Emily Davison".

Who would say now that female suffrage was an unjust or even radical cause? Or assert that any system calling itself a democracy could credibly say so without universal voting rights? But at the time, conservatives fought female inclusion like it threatened civilisation.

If comedy is tragedy, plus time, history is protest, plus time served. It marks the necessary, unseemly friction between the reality we confect, and the harms we compound to do so.

Many, perhaps most, political protests through history have turned out to be right. However discordant and illegal they were, such causes have often become so mainstream as to be defended by conservatives.

As PM, Tony Abbott took great pleasure in leading a chorus of his MPs in Parliament as he declared the Coalition to be "the best friend Medicare ever had". Previously they'd branded it socialism.

In trying to win government after the radical industrial relations marketism of John Howard, Abbott even embraced a return to a more Laborist IR framework declaring WorkChoices "dead, buried, and cremated".

Reactionary critics of an enshrined Voice to Parliament style themselves as protectors of a constitution. Yet most would depict the sonstitution itself as vague and risky left-wing madness if confronted with it afresh.

In fact it is hard to imagine federation getting up at all in the Balkanised media culture of the 21^st century in which envy, cowardice and division are so easily mobilised to crush hope and advance political careers.

When protestors invade sporting fields, block lanes on bridges, lower banners and glue themselves to things, they force us to think. Sure, there's the immediate inconvenience, but why not also consider their point. Ask why they risk injury, jail time, economic ruin and opprobrium.

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Might not our insistent compartmentalisation be the problem? Pretending sport operates in a discrete civic space is delusional, and dangerous.

History shows these moments of confronting reflection have been turning points. The salient thrusts that drove us painfully forward.

Two decades from now, those arrested for adopting extreme measures to awaken a lumpen population from its consumption - big houses, big cars, big coffees - might look a lot like Davison and Pankhurst. Or resemble local radicals such as building unionist, Jack Watkins, who warned ad nauseam about asbestos when nobody cared. He eventually carried some fake asbestos powder into state Parliament to get attention. Or Bob Brown, arrested when fighting the Gordon below Franklin dam. They were right and, what's more, nobody disputes it now. As were the 1960s opponents of conscription to the Vietnam War, bashed, insulted and criminalised for their courage.

It was that useless war which steeled Simon Crean to swim against the tide on Iraq in 2003.

The year Pankhurst died, 1928, Britain finally granted women the vote. People had disrupted events and broken laws to get there. Many were beaten, others died. They were called radicals, attention-seekers, even terrorists.

History will be kinder to the environmentalists than their ridiculers also.