Stonehenge covered in powder paint by Just Stop Oil protesters - BBC News
Stonehenge covered in powder paint by Just Stop Oil protesters - BBC News
The move comes the day before celebrations for the Summer Solstice.
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Lots of people seem to hate this and I do on some level get it. I'd be happy to talk about whether its a winning strategy or what alternatives there are (I'm not sure personally its the optimum form of activism)
What I would say is the evidence suggests:
- General public do seem to hate this stuff.
- There is a relatively little spill over from the organisation to the wider issue (as in people think these guys are idiots but don't link to climate change or environmentalism more generally).
- It is evidenced to increase the saliance and perceived importance of climate change I.e. people hate them but spend more time thinking climate change is serious than before.
Lastly, what I would say is from my own visceral reaction to the Van Gogh painting: I felt a huge and sudden feeling of cultural loss. That something of our heritage was at risk and we may lose it and initially I was angry and sad but I realised that we are routinely doing this everyday with lost species. Heritage we haven't even been able to document yet. All that is to say it maybe we have a discussion about what the best activism is and who we need to influence and how (I think we need to do better than just think we need everyone on side) but what we shouldn't do is entertain for a moment that the scale of this action isn't proportional and valid to what we face. We are hurtling towards a cliff edge and some people still have their foot on the accelerator. This is the equivalent of worrying about a vase in the boot. I want to save it too but at the moment we are endangering it more through business as usual than through some cornflour.
Good post. To be honest, when I found out that nothing they did was real, I came to appreciate them. But I don't understand why we prop up fossil fuel in the first place.
It has a lot to do with money and technology. By the time we were able to have electric vehicles, oil companies were loaded and companies like to make money. So they spend money to lobby and keep themselves entrenched. Throw in some good feel bullshit to placate a simple majority of the people and that brings us to today.
If what they do was real it would have a much bigger impact.
I have a small issue with the analogy of lost things: throughout history, many things have been lost, living and nonliving, through both action and inaction. It is the nature of our impermanent existence.
But vandalizing our works of art servers our ties to the past and what they might tell us. Yes, we are currently accelerating the loss of species, but they will continue to come and go, regardless of our input. These links, however, can never be recovered. They are intrinsically unique, and their value to humanity is not something they have a right to gamble in a game of political chicken (because let's be honest, it all boils down to governments' responses to the current crisis).
And if this is truly an effort to draw parallels with our impending doom, it's inelegant and ineffective, and I wish they'd put more effort towards actually doing something that makes the polluters want to change, instead of just pissing people off only to get lost in the next bombastic news story.
but they will continue to come and go, regardless of our input
I'm not quite sure you understand the problem with climate change. It's not that "they" will come and go, it's that WE will only go. There's no "coming" back with any reasonable immediacy. Or were you arguing that the stones wouldn't be there for exhibition by the jellyfish that would be the only thing left living in the oceans?
Now, it is my opinion that when Brawndo finally pushes the climate over the tipping point and life as we know it takes its final breath, that natural selection will do what it has always done and though life will change, it will persist in some form. So were humans able to outlast this foreboding obstacle and humanity persists, then so be it, but I honestly doubt they'll give a shit about fucking stonehenge. If there were some life lessons from the past that only stonehenge can communicate, then it has obviously failed.
Sorry for delay I wanted to take the time to respond to you properly because I've probably thought similar to you at some point in my life and I want to explain how understanding what is happening has shifted that.
Yes, you are right the analogy isn't perfect. Loss is part of change and change is a permenant. You are right that species and human history and culture has gone through both action and inaction from humans. My comment was about my own realisation that I (and probably wider society) was guilty of placing reverance and value too much on the human artifacts and not on the incredible natural history (the web of life that we all rely on) that we are losing. I looked at my feelings of potential loss about Van Gogh and questioned why I didn't feel that way about our natural history and living beings we are losing daily and could stop destroying if we wanted to. So, you are right that losing the links to our human past would be tragic and we should try and preserve it* but the same is as true if not more true of our natural history. We are not separate from the climate and ecological systems we've evolved and developed in and whilst we could survive without links to our human history being disconnected from our natural heritage causes a number or mental and physical harms (the science is only just really beginning to understand these connections) and ultimately we rely on (e.g. food and clean air).
What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here. I realise, unfortunately, its an emotive term and I mean this in the way denial is talked about with respect to grief (which is what climate change is about to be honest coping with loss). You say that things always come and go and will regardless of our level of action. Whilst that is a truism it misses an important understanding of what's happening. We are not just losing a few species or ecosystems here we are actually drastically changing the ratio of the rate of which things come and go. I.e. we are massively upping the rate at which things go whilst also limiting the rate at which they can come. Even this is an understatement unfortunately because what we are actually doing is pulling so hard on so many strands of the web of the life (Earth's natural living systems) that the web itself is at risk of coming apart. Earth's living system as a whole is as far as we know intrinsically unique to the whole universe and if we don't manage to stem this collapse all those intrinsically unique human artifacts will likely be lost or in the worst case there won't be much life to reflect on it. Its worth once again reiterating that the risk they took to the rocks was mindblowingly low espcially relative to other risks.
On their strategy I agree this is where there is room to start having a discussion about Just Stop Oils actions but we can't do that I don't think unless we start with the acknowledgement that their assessment of the stakes is valid and correct and that if effective their action (and tbh action that took real non trivial risk with Stonehenge) would be overwhelming worth it.
For what its worth I do think their theory of change is flawed and their self-care of their activists is lacking but if their aim is solely to keep climate change on the agenda with more people pushing for change they are succeeding (people hate them whilst they think about climate change and spend time on the internet and in person discussing climate change and what should and shouldn't be done). The flaw I think is that they believe in an idealised vision of democracy where change happens when enough ordinary people want it whereas the reality is that public pressure is only one component of change espciaily when an issue is as complex and "spinnable" as climate change.
This is already too long so I won't go into it but I also don't think this issue boils down to a game of political chicken with governments. One of the challenges is the climate change is so sprawling and complex it brings up challenges to across lots if different scales and disciplines. The solutions are fundamental to our human story not just small technocrat shifts. There is no area of human activity that isn't upturned by climate change and that ibudes archeology and anthropology.
Finally, if you are interested in learning about where I and others are coming from and the scale of our problems and challenges I recommend the following books:
- The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. This covers human history and we have created meaning and how it links with the environment and interconnects with the current issues we face
- Inflamed: deep medicine and he anatomy of injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Whilst not directly about climate change it does talk about how interconnected our health is with natural systems and how failure of connection to them leads to amoung other thing inflammation and disease.
- The climate book by Greta Thunberg. I haven't actually read this but I know a number of the experts involved in areas that overlap with mine and I trust them. It might be guilty of focussing on the technical aspects of the issues rather than the human stories I think are more important which is why place it lower.
- There's a lot of discussion to be had about Stonehenge particularly and how its been prioritised to be "preserved" at the cost and neglect of the surrounding archaeology. It also sad that none of the discussion and worry about potential risk to it covered the fact that the government is pushing ahead with sacrificing the wider site to car culture ( big underground new road, believing in the myth that more lanes stop traffic rather than the opposite). If we truly cared about that era of British and global history we would doing a lot more than "preserving" a few rocks which the Victorian moved about and romanticised anyway.
What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here.
Unfortunately, Lemmy is not a good medium for nuanced discussion. I assure you that I was not articulating climate denialism, just that we need to take a step back and realize that saving our links to history is greater than humanity itself (in my opinion). Humanity may not survive this catastrophe, and I would rather think that some future species on this blue marble finds proof that we lived and were more than a bunch of stupid apes; and perhaps, they could even learn from our mistakes and successes.
I agree, though, that their assessment of the problem is valid; I would just rather see them punching at the actual polluters, rather than flailing at humanity. And in fact, they used money they raised from this stunt to be able to paint Taylor Swift's private jet. That's something I can sort of support, though they still haven't taken any steps towards painting the private jet of an oil tycoon, for example.
Like we all get it—the pollution is bad, but Taylor Swift isn't directly responsible for manufacturing jet fuel. Taylor Swift isn't responsible for lobbying governments to slow walk the transition to other energy sources. I want to see them use their effort to make headlines, because some rich oil magnate's mansion is now orange (or whatever).
People need to be reminded that not only is the oil bad, but these specific people producing it are the villains making sure we get off of it too late. The act needs to encompass that full message, and so far, I feel like they're only getting one piece and expecting the public to fill in the blanks—a big ask for average people who aren't that engaged.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Take care.