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TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
I read an article today that really, really pissed me off. A bunch of Just Stop Oil protestors sprayed the rocks at Stonehenge with orange powder paint. I really hate this for a number of reasons. Seeing any great cultural piece of heritage be defaced should automatically make you angry. But I also hate the hypocrisy of it. You know that NONE of these people would justify doing this to some pyramid in Sudan or some Mayan temple in Mexico. Their warped ideas say that only pieces of cultural heritage from the "evil" western world are worth sacrificing. Ignoring the fact, of course, that Stonehenge was built thousands and thousands of years before colonialism was ever even a blink in the eye of anyone from Britain and was created by people who were as in tune with and respectful of the natural world as anyone out there.
As someone who is very worried about global heating to the point where I would call it my single driving force of concern in any and all political action, it also pisses me off because there are so many things that could get attention instead of a stunt like this. I'm not opposed to standing next to Stonehenge with signs and placards. I'm not even opposed to yelling at tourists and disturbing the peace with megaphones. I'm not opposed to refusing to move and disrupting whatever festivals and tourism are there at the site. Please, do not feel the need to be "civil." But all of those things could be done with great moral authority without defacing prehistoric monuments. Martin Luther King, Jr. never destroyed any artworks. Neither did Mahatma Gandhi. Of course the news cycle is partially to blame for these kinds of actions. These people are pressured to take the most extreme measures they can to get attention in the press. We have to stop sustaining that.
And what I hate most about these Just Stop Oil iconoclasts is that they justify the story that every right-wing pundit uses to prop up fossil fuel companies: climate activists are all part of an insane left-wing death cult that hates everything that we stand for in the western world. If you have read this site for even a bit, you should know that I think the single greatest threat and concern on the mind of anyone, politicians or otherwise, should be global heating, and that this should be something that unifies people in spite of any other political disagreement, in the same way a meteor hurling towards the earth would. The analogy is, of course, a bit simplistic. It would be more accurate if somehow that meteor were the driving force of our interconnected global economy and many people were being made very rich by its continued approach. But the fright and concern should come before any other political opinion.
But this is THE SAME human instinct that should be opposed to defacing ancient monuments. This seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me: The same part of you that feels sorrow and pain when you see a glacier melt should be the part of you that doesn't want to deface old monuments and paintings. Both of them sever us from our ancient ties to the earth and to our own history. These things get separated in the minds of modern westerners, but they shouldn't be. Our senses of beauty, of culture, and of history and heritage should be seen as an intertwined thing with our relation to the natural world. Saving the environment and saving ancient works of art should be part of the same thing: honoring where we came from and learning to come into greater contact with it.
For me then, true environmentalism is conservative. If you have a callous enough mind that you can see a megalithic structure that was built before the Egyptian pyramids and think "whatever, we can sacrifice that for getting attention on your movement," then you do not have the mindset of a true environmentalist. Most of the true lunatic left-wing "environmentalists" would probably sacrifice a megalith to save the environment one day and then a glacier to save the Gaza Strip the next. They use environmentalism to prop up their hatred of "the man," not the other way around. And this is deeply opposed to what a real environmentalist mindset should be about. That is because an environmentalism should really be a subset of a conservationalism. A conservationalist seeks to keep important ways of being in the world alive and honor their legacy and heritage. Does this mean trying our best to slow down and even reverse the unbelievable damage done to our climate? Of course. But it also means honoring what people before us held as sacred.
And the people most in touch with the natural world, like Native Americans, Japanese kannushi, tribes in the Amazon, and so on will tell you the same thing. I certainly never see any of them spraying shit on ancient works of art. That's because the idea that conservation of the natural world is to be divided from conservation of cultural heritage is a perverse idea of the modern west, and it leads to tragedies like this one. This is all the more upsetting to me because there is such a chance for this idea of conservation to be unifying. Everyone who is human hates seeing beautiful landscapes melt and decay. You could be a redneck in the US south and at the very least you'd be upset if pollution was destroying your prospects of hunting and fishing. Really, I think that if you are a "conservative," that is to say, someone who wants to conserve and assure the continuance of old ways of being in the world, being an "environmentalist" should follow as a matter of course. It's a pretty simple line of argument, really:
＊The traditional ways of life that I was brought up in are essentially connected to my environment.
＊If my environment dramatically heats up, the ways of life I was brought up in will be unable to be conserved.
＊I want to conserve the traditional ways of life that I was brought up in.
＊Therefore, I must try to keep the environment from dramatically heating up.
Most voters and politicians who oppose taking action to mitigate global heating are self-identified conservatives who tend to worry about their traditional ways of life disappearing (for good reasons). If you could get them to just realize the first of these four lines of argument, the rest would logically follow and there would be such an opportunity for unified action. If you really cared about the planet like I do, you would be desperately trying to show how environmentalism can be a conservative position so that the conservatives can at least meet on this point without having to agree with the rest of the progressive dogma. But instead of choosing this unifying message, "environmentalists" continue to alienate people with a conservative (that is, a conservationist) mindset and drive them back into the fold of fossil fuel propagandists. Good going, Just Stop Oil. I hope you shitheads get pounded in the ass in prison like you were a little English blonde girl by Mohammed-Aziz-Abdul-Ahmed-bin-Yusuf-ibn-Omar-Mustafa or whatever else the UK equivalent of Bubba is.