The trio who sprayed the sacred monument of Stonehenge with orange paint were acquitted of causing a public nuisance by a jury. They have been interviewed by the obviously sympathetic Guardian. One of the acquitted “protestors”, who is apparently studying ecology at Masters level is reported thusly:
If it was universally agreed that we should be pursuing every possible action to stop the climate crisis, we wouldn’t be needing to protest this. And by very virtue of the fact that it’s not universally agreed, there will be someone, somewhere who disagrees. That’s the case in any matter that needs to be protested. The idea that that is then a crime is quite scary.
Is your head spinning? Mine is. Let’s try to decode it. It seems to look something like this:
Because not absolutely everyone, (and presumably every government), in the world agrees that we should be doing absolutely everything to deliver a certain result on a certain matter, anyone who thinks we should is entitled to “protest”. Wow. If she thought that through she might realise that that implies an awful lot of orange paint being thrown about. This is the short-circuiting of the democratic protest characteristic of eco-activists, here expressed in a remarkably pure, (and unthinking form).
Personally, while I do accept that there is a problem with climate change, (though I also note that fossil fuels are going to run out anyway), I do think that the idea of democracy is a little more grown-up than “anyone who doesn’t agree with anything can throw orange paint at Britain’s most sacred monument”.