If you ever wanted to read about fake druids vs. environmental activists, now’s your chance.
Those stones will be suuuper useful to us after we died because our global ecosystem collapsed.
Maybe we should set up our own stones for explaining to future generations why we didnt do anything about climate change until it was too late.
I’m not sure how this helps though. These people can say to future generations, “well, we didn’t get people to stop using fossil fuels, but we did damage a 5000-year-old monument that was made long before anyone had the idea of burning fossil fuels to make people aware of a problem they were already aware of but powerless to do anything about.”
This isn’t going to stop oil companies from drilling for oil.
It reminds me of a friend of mine I used to follow elsewhere on social media. Every day, she would post pictures of ‘death row dogs’ in nearby shelters that were going to be euthanized. There was fuck all I could do about it. I already have two dogs, from shelters. I don’t have room for more and I couldn’t afford more. So all it did was make me feel like shit. Then she started posting photos with “too late” messages and I stopped following her.
How does that help?
Your example shows exactly what people are missing. Just because you did not have the capacity for more dogs doesnt mean that other people never got convinced to save one of those dogs. If those pictures convinced even just one person to adopt a dog, then it was worth the minor inconvienience that you had to go through.
Similarly the actual damage from this protest is slim to none (if they used the same stuff as usual that just washes away with water) and if it convinces somebody to get politically active for climate change then it was already worth it.
You thinking that you are powerless, shouldnt result in other people being forced to be powerless when they are not.
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A better way to propose your question is: out of all the millions of people on Earth who hear about these activities, will literally 0 of them take any meaningful action against climate change?
The likelihood of that quite small, suggesting a non-zero value. That non-zero value is likely to be smaller than the damages of water-washable paint.
I’m not advocating for anyone here, but I think that’s the calculus OP was suggesting, and it makes perfect sense to me.
If eye-rolling and annoyance produced greenhouse gases, then it might be a different story.
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but we did damage a 5000-year-old monument
As far as I could find out, they used orange cornflour that will just wash off the next time it rains. The most amount of damage anyone could seriously bring up was that it could harm/displace the lichen on the henge.
That’s not to say that I specifically condone the action, but it’s a lot less bad than this article makes it sound. It’s the same with the soup attack on one of van Gogh’s painting, which had protective glass on it. So far all the JSO actions targeting cultural/historical things (at least the ones that made it to the big news) have been done in a way that makes them sound awful at first hearing, but intentionally did not actually damage the targeted cultural/historical thing.
I think the biases of the journalist/news outlet/etc. are somewhat exposed by which parts they focus on and which they downplay or omit entirely.
I hope you’re right because this article says they used a spray can.
Also, orange dye can easily get into cracks in the rocks and stay there for a very long time. Especially if it displaces the lichens. That won’t make it collapse, so maybe ‘damage’ is not the right word, but this is potentially long-lasting vandalism which, as far as I can see, will have no effect on the actual problem.
I hope you’re right because this article says they used a spray can.
Which brings me back to the last point in my comment.
I also hope I’m right. The two times I looked into it (right after the attack and before writing my comment) both came up with that result. Also it seems that English Heritage came out today saying there was “No visible damage”.
As I said, I’m not writing to defend the action, just pointing out that the OP article is, willfully or not, omitting certain aspects that could make JSO look a little bit better.
Edit: Formatting
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How does that help?
We’re talking about it
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Normally I would say this damage was inappropriate. But, considering humanity is going to be eradicated in the next hundred years, give or take, I think maybe we should be doing more to slow that down.
FWIW this kind of alarmist talk only lets people write off your comment as hysterical. Humans are not going to go extinct in the next 100 years, Canada isnt going to become hotter than Arabia and become unlivable.
What we might (and even possibly the most likely scenario is to) get is wide scale societal breakdown, starvation of billions, mass migration of billions of those currently living in regions that become uninhabitable but dont starve, and the consequant resource wars that those entail. The future is bleak enough without making up even worse things that wont happen.
Would you like to make a wager?
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