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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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I really blew it, didn’t I?
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I mean, maybe you could have been a better role model when she was young, but also, she never really had a chance. This is what our celebrity culture does to people.
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So what you’re saying is: Everything is society’s fault, and we as individuals never need to take responsibility for anything?
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Uh, no. Not exactly. I was just saying that.
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Yeah. I like that. I didn’t do anything wrong because I can’t do anything wrong because we’re all just products of our environment, bouncing around like marbles in the game of Hungry Hungry Hippos that is our random and cruel universe.
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Wait, no, that’s not even what I’m saying …
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Yeah. It’s not my fault. It’s society. Everything is because of society. Hooray! Everything is meaningless! Nothing I do has consequence!
In the case where people are poor enough that it’s the kind of choice they have to resort to to live? Heck yeah society is the issue.
Most of the thefts are branches. When an entire tree is cut down, the thieves typically cut it up and load the pieces into a pickup truck, selling the wood to lumber yards or firewood vendors and taking the olives to an oil mill.
“The (robbers) look for heavily loaded branches and they cut them,” said Neilos Papachristou, who runs an olive mill and nearby grove in a fourth-generation family business. “So, not only do they steal our olives, but they cause the tree serious harm. It takes 4-5 years for it to return to normal.”
These are gangs killing and damaging trees to sell oil without any costs. This isn’t Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family.
They’re actually making it more expensive to buy olive oil.
