I’ve written about Greenpeace before and it’s safe to say I’m not their greatest fan. However their latest self serving publicity stunt is a whole new level of stupid even for them. To “send a message” to the world leaders that they aren’t doing enough to tackle “climate change” they decided it would be a jolly wheeze to vandalize the Nasca lines a UNESCO world heritage site and a very delicate environment. The Guardian has a excellent bit of excuse making for this bunch of vandals, who decide to have 20 people carrying large rucksacks climb up onto the site in the dark wearing normal shoes to lay out a huge banner. According to Peru this week Greenpeace say that no damage was done as the banner didn’t touch the lines themselves. Which to put things in terms Greenpeace idiots can understand is a bit like saying “we didn’t damage the river, we just clear felled the flood plain”. Even on the sympathetic Guardian video you can see that they left marks where they walked and even more where they left their bags.
In the picture above ( via Reddit the lines of the removed text are very clear on the plain as is the scuffed up area where the bags were left. The damage done even before the banner was removed is obvious in this picture where the Greenpeace hooligans are still on the site.
That it was Greenpeace that caused the damage and where they left the bags carrying that banner and all the stones they used to weigh it down can be quite clearly seen in this footage from EuroNews:
Despite this apologists are claiming that the damage was done by other people, even though Greenpeace say they removed the banner, or that a 4×4 must have come along because the damage is more obvious in some photo’s than others – which is kind of how the whole Nazca line things work they’re quite sensitive to angle. The existence of some other party coming along latter and causing the damage is invented entirely out of whole cloth by these apologists. Removing things almost always causes more damage than putting them in place, and just try removing a tea towel from a try of sand without disturbing the sand, no matter how closely you put it down.
Hopefully Peru will prosecute though that won’t repair the damage done to an environment where “a footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years”. Even if this imagined third party did remove the banner and for reasons best known to themselves Greenpeace haven’t mentioned that they left the banner there for someone else to clean up:
This is an area so sensitive that no-one gets to visit it without special permission, which Greenpeace didn’t have.
This is an area so sensitive you have to wear special shoes, which Greenpeace didn’t.
Putting down the banner and dumping their bags containing the banner and specially brought in stone damaged the area even before they left.
So not content with endangering themselves or other people for a publicity stunt the vandals at Greenpeace have willfully and irreparably damaged a unique and fragile environment for a few column inches about renewable energies. If the environment has friends like this it really doesn’t need enemies.
