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:
Markou, the grower, said of the tree-cutting. “You kill your own history here.”
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.
I think the people cutting down 150 year old tress are pretty clearly the ones to blame for cutting down 150 year old trees.
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?
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.
Much quicker to cut them down and load them to harvest later than to harvest in the field and risk getting caught.
They aren’t stealing food to eat. They’re stealing someone else’s livelihood and damaging those trees so much that they could take years to bear fruit again. Some of the trees are being cut down completely, taken away, and sold for firewood. How would you feel if someone stole your only means of providing for yourself and your family? I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t be saying, “oh it isn’t their fault. Unemployment is high. That’s okay that I can’t feed my children anymore.”
I’m not saying they’re stealing them to eat, they’re stealing them to make money to be able to eat.
Freaking hell, people keep talking about the rich being the issue, well that’s what it looks like when you take from them, your can’t eat their money, you sure can buy food with it.
How do you know olive oil farmers are rich? I know a few farmers here in the US and they are not rich. Most of them are barely making it. Most actually work a job on top of farming because farming doesn’t cut it on its own. What if stealing their olive trees breaks them financially? What are they supposed to do then? Go steal someone else’s livelihood? Your logic is fundamentally flawed.
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 👍
There are shops in rural parts of Greece.
There’s a major difference between a “shop” and Target
The thieves are. Next question.
Use whatever wood bits that are left to fashion a few stakes and do what stakes do to the people who cut them down.
Sure. That’s poaching, overfishing, clearcutting, and every other natural resource that is exploited into oblivion or causes environmental destruction for a profit.
The way you phrase this like you found me to be arguing in favor of those things confuses me.
I was agreeing with you and expounding on the problem.
Gotcha. Have a good day.
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If you’re really interested in doing the research, there’s an entire black economy on bootleg olive oil and the mafia is a big part of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Italian organized crime is involved in this somehow.
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