SPATA, Greece (AP) — In an olive grove on the outskirts of Athens, grower Konstantinos Markou pushes aside the shoots of new growth to reveal the stump of a tree — a roughly 150-year-old specimen, he said, that was among 15 cut down on his neighbor’s land by thieves eager to turn it into money.
What short sighted idiots. Chopping down a tree to steal the fruit? Our species is its own Great Filter.
The very last line stuck out to me:
Are the thieves to blame or the system in which they live in that’s full of social inequality? 🤔 Maybe it’s not the person with the chainsaw that’s killing their history.
People may be driven to steal because of horrible circumstances… But they still choose what to steal.
If these guys were just knocking over a Target, I’d agree with you.
Kinda hard to steal in a target in a rural part of Greece 👍
Killing century old things isnt justified because youre rural 👍
Its practically tradition. People have been robbing antiquities from the Mediterranean for centuries.
I think the people cutting down 150 year old tress are pretty clearly the ones to blame for cutting down 150 year old trees.
They wouldn’t be cutting them if Greece didn’t have a poverty rate of 20% and wasn’t one of the poorest country in the European Union. We can blame them all we want, if we were faced with the choice between not stealing or eating we wouldn’t be any better than them.
You’re missing the point that they are cutting down the tree, giving them only one harvest from it, instead of just taking the olives and letting the tree live. The thieves are not only stealing the current harvest, but ensuring that there will be no more harvests. If you’re gonna steal to survive, you don’t burn everything to the ground in the process. It literally hurts themselves.
What about the people paying them to do it?
That’s a tough one … I think I’ll go with they’re all culpable.
So what’s the remedy?
What’s the remedy when anyone steals anything?
Depends who is doing the stealing and who is doing the fencing on their behalf.