As price of olive oil soars, chainsaw-wielding thieves target Mediterranean’s century-old trees
apnews.com
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.
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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.
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?
Depends who is doing the stealing and who is doing the fencing on their behalf.
What does it depend on?
The quality of your legal team and the number of friends you've got at the local PD / regulatory agencies.
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.
And its easier to take your wallet if I stab you to death, first.
Do you defend and justify murder, so long as the killer makes sure to loot the body after?
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.
Unemployment is over 10% and was over 20% in 2015, poverty is over 20%, farms are fucking expensive, these people are better off than a big chunk of the population.
So anyone's who's even just a little bit better off than you is fair game? If you have a bicycle but your neighbor has two then you can freely steal his bicycle?
In a fair system the neighbor wouldn't have more than one bike if not everyone can have more than one bike.
Heck, that's the way children are raised with their siblings but as soon as we reach a certain age it's like people just forget what they taught their kids for years.
I disagree with that is what we teach kids, we actually teach them essentially the opposite. This helps them, especially when young, to understand why someone else may receive a gift (it's their birthday) but they do not.
In general, I think that you are in line with Cynicism, but I am unsure how theft fits in to that view. It seems very possible with their general adherence to having as few possessions as possible and a general disregard for shame. We need our Cynic!
Man, good luck managing your children if one of them has a bunch of stuff and the other doesn't.
Youve never seen a farm in person, huh
I live next to a bunch of them actually, there's a crisis because no one can start working in that field because land is too expensive. Farmers are poor in the sense that they don't make much a year, they're fucking rich once they sell the land they've owned for the past 40 years.
So you are excited that these farmers are now forced to sell to a big corpo farm conglomerate, since their crop has been killed off and wont make ends meet for 3-5 years?
You sound positively giddy about more consolidation of wealth. Like youre eager for more poverty.
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.
Oh man, I've got bad news about farmers then 😂 You just not have went out in the country much!
I am a farmer, dipshit.
Well then, do you feel bad about all the shit leaking down in aquifers from you field? Or heck, directly into rivers in some cases!
How about all the people living around fields getting poisoned by roundup and other chemical shit?
Lets not forget all the centuries old trees that got cut down so you can grow soy to feed cows or corn to produce ethanol for gas while being subsidized by the government because that's the only way the production is viable.
Farmers aren't angels either.
We grow entirely organic, but the attempt at guilt tripping a stranger is very cute. (Thats actually not the only way production is viable, btw, we arent subsidized at all.)
Did you forget youre defending thieves who killed off the farmers livelihood?
"I'm the exception so everyone's ok 👍"
"My gotcha to shut someone up backfired, so I will pretend I meant it generally, as if it justifies killing other peoples livelihoods 👍"
There are shops in rural parts of Greece.
There's a major difference between a "shop" and Target
The thieves are. Next question.
To be fair, olive trees only take 2-3 years to mature, so they're fairly easy to replace.
Just the fact that they'd do that is terrible, though.
No, an olive tree may give you an olive at 3 years. One. A hundred year old olive tree gives thousands and thousands. It's really not replaceable.
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.