Most of us were unaware that Stonehenge was considered by environmentalists at Just Stop Oil (JSO) as a symbol of how the use of hydrocarbons was destroying the planet. The monument sits on Salisbury Plain, the closest thing the Brits have to real prairies, out in the open and visible for miles. It is part of what archaeologists call the Wessex monuments and has been designated, along with several other nearby Neolithic structures, as a World Heritage Site.Stonehenge has long attracted visitors, some of whom in the past made off with souvenir chips knocked off the large sarsen stones (a hard variety of limestone) or the smaller bluestones that comprise the fabric of the structure. Over the past several hundred years more than a few persons have added their initials and the date of their visit to the prehistoric and enigmatic inscriptions that have decorated the stones for thousands of years.My first visit to Stonehenge was nearly fifty years ago. Until 1977, visitors could walk inside the stone circle; you could approach the massive trilithons in the middle and take a picture. Nowadays there is a single strand of rope around the perimeter of the monument that is intended to keep visitors a few feet away. There are a few elderly guards around as well.Stonehenge and the nearby monuments have been intensely studied since the seventeenth century by antiquarians, then by archaeologists, and occasionally by astronomers and even political scientists (including me.)Last week the stones had two other visitors, Niamh Lynch, a female Oxford undergraduate and president of the Oxford Ornithological Student Society, and Rajan Naidu, an elderly man from Birmingham who was reported to be a Quaker of south Asian heritage. These two attacked Stonehenge using modified fire extinguishers to spray the outside stones with an orange paint made of corn flour, dye and water.The attack took place around noon the day prior to the summer solstice, an event that has been celebrated one way or another, and with many long interruptions, for nearly five millennia. The druids who conduct the current solstice festival, which dates from the 1970s, were alarmed at the attack. One of them called Lynch and Naidu “dirty scum” and added “this is a temple, not a publicity stunt.” Another druid laid a curse upon their heads.The two were quickly arrested by the Wiltshire police after their activities were interrupted by Stonehenge guides and ordinary visitors. All the action was captured on video. Lynch and Naidu were charged with criminal damage, deterring an individual from engaging in a lawful activity, and damaging an ancient monument. The perps are facing up to two years jail time. They were soon released on bail.The event raised several interesting questions.Just Stop Oil, which (so to speak) sponsored the attack, said that they “decorated” Stonehenge in support of a demand that the UK “end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.”About the same time another JSO team cut the wire at Stanstead airport and decorated a couple of jets that they thought (wrongly) belongs to enviro-celeb Taylor Swift. Her Eras Tour requires her to fly from venue to venue burning hectare-equivalents of rain forest every hour aloft. The irony of targeting Swift’s transport was at least mildly amusing.JSO also claimed that the paint was harmless and would wash away in the next rain, of which there has been a great deal this summer. So, they really didn’t mean to harm the stones despite their symbolic weight as expressions of environmental degradation and capitalist rapacity. Perhaps the druid was right: it was just a publicity stunt.Well, not quite. It seems that the paint significantly harmed a rare lichen, of which 79 different species can be found growing directly on the stones, not in dirt. Lichens grow slowly, mostly because rocks are pretty much devoid of accessible nutrients.Tim Daw, a local farmer, carried out an experiment. He mixed corn flour, food dye and water and painted half a small sarsen stone. He then washed the paint off the stone. On the unpainted sarsen, little black dots — lichens— were visible. On the painted and washed stone they had been replaced by coloured corn flour. One British wag said that harming lichens was the latest crime against nature.Decorating Stonehenge was not the first effort of environmentalists to raise awareness about their anxieties regarding a non-existent climate crisis. Recently a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers and the Mona Lisa were redecorated with soup. And, of course, the other day His Majesty’s portrait was redecorated by some animal rights activists.Most of this activity has been counterproductive in the sense that ordinary people have not been galvanized into panic by either hectoring or by pointless stunts. The pragmatic uselessness of the paint attack (except for its effect on lichens) led J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter and anti-trans fame, to suggest that JSO was in fact “funded by Big Oil.”This was not even a serious protest. It was just an effort at barbaric cultural destruction by entitled narcissists. After the two ran out of paint spray they sat down on the ground in front of their work for a photo-op, clearly content with their achievement.We should probably stipulate that persons such as Lynch and Naidu really do think they are saving the planet, which suggests they are not simply deluded or in need of some accurate climatological information. Brimming with faith and fervour, it is at least understandable the JSO and other climate activists are so often described as being filled with religious zeal.Apart from being an insult to religion, this description is inaccurate. In Victorian times, lawyers described as morally insane individuals who were not crazy but who did bad things knowing perfectly well they were bad. Crazy people couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong; the morally insane could but didn’t care. Today, in political science at least, we speak of such persons as spiritually rather then psychologically disordered.One last question: why orange paint? Unless orange has some esoteric significance to the enviro cult of which normal people are unaware, the connection seems to be an anticipation of an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit. Remember that iconic picture of Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault in orange after he was arrested for his 2001 stunt at the CN Tower in Toronto?A final observation: there is a kind of continuum of stupidity from the CN Tower caper to the Stonehenge event. Neither Lynch nor Naidu is (yet) a minister of the Crown. Their actions at Stonehenge however do provide a comparable context to make sense of the clownish ministerial antics of Guilbeault.
