Wow. What not to do: make a point about climate change by trampling on a fragile, restricted, ancient artwork.
http://www.ancient-origins.net/
Peru says it will sue activists from the environmental pressure group Greenpeace after they placed a banner next to the Nazca Lines heritage site.
The activists entered a restricted area next to the ancient ground markings depicting a hummingbird and laid down letters advocating renewable energy.
Peru is currently hosting the UN climate summit in its capital, Lima.
So Greenpeace rewards Peru by stomping on the Nazca lines, where people are not allowed to walk. What will they do next, have a rave in the Lascaux caves? Build a campfire at Stonehenge? Skateboard all over Machu Picchu?
Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian deputy culture minister, said Peru would file charges of “attacking archaeological monuments” against the activists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Italy and Spain.
He said the Nazca Lines, which are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 years old, were “absolutely fragile”.
“You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years,” he said.
The lines, depicting animals, stylised plants and imaginary figures were declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1994.
“They haven’t touched the hummingbird figure but now we have an additional figure created by the footsteps of these people,” Mr Castillo told local radio.
The activists entered a “strictly prohibited” area beside the figure of a hummingbird, the culture ministry said. They laid big yellow cloth letters reading: “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.” The message was intended for delegates from 190 countries at the UN climate talks being held in Lima.
Castillo said no one, not even presidents and cabinet ministers, was allowed where the activists had gone without authorisation and anyone who received permission must wear special shoes.
They didn’t wear special shoes. You can see that in the photos – they’re wearing ordinary trainers, with all the ridges and bumps that trainers have.
For more on the Nazca lines, there are pictures and links at latinamericanstudies.org.
A perfect example of what’s wrong with groups like Greenpeace.
That seems equivalent to the kind of thing PETA would do. I think of Greenpeace as being a bit more savvy.
Probably a stupid idea, but from what I can see, they didn’t damage or even come close to damaging the actual lines.
I also have to wonder if the reaction would be so vigorous if the banner had been hung from St. Peters, the Dome of the Rock or the Western Wall.
Cheers,
Jeff
Greenpeace used to be a lot more savvy; they haven’t been for many years now. As with a number of activist organizations, the people with lots of time on their hands because they don’t bother to spend time thinking things through have been taking over.
Hence we get things like Greenpeace helping conspiracy theorist groups in the Philippines trash a research farm that was growing ‘golden rice’, a GMO rice that produces beta-carotene to help prevent vitamin A deficiencies. This is one of the best-known cases of GMOs being used for purely good purposes, designed to be given away as seed stock to prevent millions of child deaths, and they still helped trash it.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/26/golden_rice_attack_in_philippines_anti_gmo_activists_lie_about_protest_and.html
It might be possible to stay, hard to estimate from the photos, most of 20′ away from the lines lay the banners out, snap the shot, and back away without inflicting any significant damage. That isn’t to say they took precautions to maintain a safe distance but it seems possible. It would be interesting to hear their side of it.
The site is closed; people aren’t allowed to walk on it at all. I don’ think anybody gets to decide “well we won’t hurt it as long as we don’t step on the lines” and barge in anyway.
St. Peters, the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall are not closed to visitors, although they are all somewhat restricted. The proper analogy would be Machu Picchu or Stonehenge or Lascaux, and my reaction certainly would be the same. I think any irreplaceable ancient site that has been closed to visitors to protect it from erosion and traffic damage should be respected. Greenpeace had no earthly business invading the site.
Somebody call Greenpeace and clue them in about Photoshop.
Looks shopped. Are you sure that’s real?
I hope it’s shopped.
@ #7: I feel it’s obvious they already know. In the 1st photo I call Photoshop™. The image is much too regular and sharply defined for the locale and apparent surface conditions. I doubt Greenpeace is capable of such precision and subtlety. The colors are too evenly saturated to have been applied to bare ground. Further, the sentiment of the “logo” is far too woo-woo even for Greenpeace. I call simple fraud.
As an aside to #4, we’ve been (regionally sometimes and globally most lately) eating GMO food for more than 10,000 years.
It’s shopped. Badly.
I loaded it into photoshop, yanked the contrast up and the brightness down: there are no jpeg artifacts in the letters and they’re completely evenly lit, which you would not get from pieces of cloth on ground – you’d barely be able to get that with paint on a primed board surface. Also, the edges of the letters are evenly and consistently anti-aliased. Pieces of cloth would not be algorithmically anti-aliased; cameras don’t record true-type fonts. 😉
In my foolish youth, I gave actual money to Greenpeace. Then they occupied the Brent Spar oil storage facility, as a protest against Shell Oil’s plan for its safe disposal. They took a sample of its contents, which thanks to their dodgy methods wildly overstated the contamination and they dishonestly overstated the contents of the rig by two orders of magnitude. They demanded a far more dangerous method of disposal be used, although they did not themselves personally volunteer to expose themselves to that danger (leaving that to the workers who would have to carry it out). And best of all, for their own political reasons they didn’t want to annoy Exxon – the co-owners of the rig with Shell. So, having taken some photographers with them to the rig, they were careful to cover up any Exxxon logos that might appear in photos.
They’re lower than PETA in my estimation, and have been for over 20 years. This is just another bit of data to back up that conclusion.
Well, Greenpeace have apologised so, shopped or not, it seems that they did it.
An article by The Express shows more pictures, including one on the ground of them placing the letters (and maybe that outline around each letter explains the apparent anti-aliasing? I don’t know…) but I can’t see whether they’re definitely in the same place.
I’m not really sure what I think of the stunt itself… I mean, I disapprove, but I disapprove because of the potential damage to ancient, fragile art that needs care and conservation…. kiiind of like the climate does… errrr, yeah. Maybe a poem would’ve been a better place for that metaphor, though?
Ah the irony of shouting loud and clear that the future is renewable while stomping on an unrenewable historic artefact. Yes, the past is not renewable.
…laying a message of hope… – they still felt the need to inject that self-pitying justification into the apology.
The future is renewable but heritage isn’t.
I’m no longer amazed or shocked that people — that governments — get more excited about human made artifacts than they do about the very surface of the world on which these artifacts sit. As a point of interest, I wonder how many people (in the Peruvian government or not) are aware of, much less get terribly exercised about these fun hummingbird facts (speaking of hummingbirds):
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_hummingbirds
Just to round out the hummingbird preview, see also this little article in the Guardian: Rare hummingbird faces extinction
And this offers an easily accessible introduction to an ever lengthening list of organisms that don’t exist anymore: Here’s Every Single Animal That Became Extinct In The Last 100 Years
The two critically endangered hummingbirds list above will be gone soon. Let’s not kid ourselves. The rest of the endangered species also list are not far behind them to be joined to the fantastically long list of species.
These individuals, just like the Western Black Rhino (gone a few years ago), Formosan Clouded Leopard, Pyrenean Ibex, Japanese Sea Lion, and on and on and on, with preferences and behaviors, who mated, ate, spent their days simply being and doing what they and their ancestors did for millennia — all are permanently obliterated. They don’t exist. They will never exist.
The activists should have taken backhoes to the field. Rub the paint off the fabulous Lascaux caves. Bulldoze the Pyramids. Humans have no inherent right to use the thin surface of this planet for their own exclusive use. There is a good chance that no one will be around to see artifacts like this in another couple hundred years anyway, unless mammals and reptiles and so forth can “evolve” a strategy for breathing carbon dioxide and methane.
@Amateur No. 15
I take your point: we are the virus and we ought to be more concerned about the planet than ancient artifacts, but willful destruction serves no valuable purpose.
Jeff
Species are no more permanent than human artifacts. 90% of species died at the Permian-Triassic boundary.
Bullshit. On two levels, moral and scientific. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and while the current anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases should cause genuine concern, carbon dioxide and methane are nowhere near concentrations that would prevent mammals and reptiles from breathing. Both are trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
No, humanity is not a virus, despite what you may have heard from a certain 90s sci-fi/action movie. We can and should aspire to do better. Environmentalism does not require misanthropy, nor is misanthropy helpful for advancing the cause of environmentalism. And no, defacing irreplaceable heritage sites is not helpful either.
Has anyone credibly asserted or demonstrated that damage was done? If not, then doesn’t this come down to breaking of a rule?
@lorn, 20
It is within the bounds of probability that you could let a bull loose in a china shop, and not have to pay for a single breakage.
Does that mean it’s ok to let bulls loose in china shops so long as they don’t break anything?
@Z, 18
My grasp on climate science is a bit tenuous, but isn’t the problem basically down to vegetation? Most large animals could deal with a few degrees temperature drift and severe weather, but a warm period before the spring properly begins could cause plants to [do that thing they do at the start of spring] before a cold snap comes along and kills them off. I’d kind of been running with the impression that this was likely to be the (one of the?) major cause of climate-related extinctions?
@Amateur
@Athywren; Kitty Wrangler
Seriously, get a grip people. Let’s talk about the Triassic extinction event, thought to have been caused by a similar process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
Yes, we lost an amazing amount of species, but we literally didn’t lose every plant. Our atmosphere is going to get unbreathable from human actions? Please. Learn some biology. At a moment like this, I want to channel Ian Malcolm.
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3376836-jurassic-park
@EnlightenmentLiberal, 22
I’m not sure what I’m meant to be getting a grip on? I wasn’t saying that all plants will die, but it kind of seems to me that some plants will, and, since plants are the base of every (or maybe nearly every?) food chain, that would have effects down the rest of any chain that relied on those particular plants. If that’s wrong, fine, correct me… but that’s why I was asking the question, rather than running around the place screaming that the end is nigh.
@Athywren
No, please do run around screaming the end is nigh. I misunderstood what you wrote. My apologies. The end may be nigh for human civilization, and for lots and lots species.
We’re not going to kill all animals though by global warming. We’re not going to kill all humans either.
However, we might kill a lot of humans through global warming. Perhaps even most. If those methane deposits go and if that causes the world to warms by 10 C, then we will have problems.