Just Stop Oil via AP

On this platform dedicated to environmental and conservation topics, purposeful stone alteration has appeared in our pages exactly once before. Environmental vandalism, likewise. I appreciate this essay by Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, about a recent act of environmental vandalism:

Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge

Climate protests should be pro-humanity.

They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. just stop oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it. As the cloud clears, the orange stains remain, soaked into the ancient sarsen stone.

A video of Wednesday’s act of vandalism, posted by an X account devoted to Stonehenge, has accumulated more than 30 million views. The camps have coalesced as you’d expect: Conservative and moderate voices have reacted with outrage, while left-leaning environmentalists have argued that critics should be more concerned about the state of the planet than a bit of plant-based coloring that was easily removed. If I have to pick a side, I’m with the gentlemen wielding the washable dye. (I am an environmental-studies professor, after all.) But the protest left me frustrated: yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message…

Read the whole essay here.