Stonehenge

As many of you know, Stonehenge was painted with removable paint yesterday by climate activists. I learned about this from a friend’s texts right before going into a Zoom discussion about Platonic topics, so I wasn’t able to react to the news until a bit later, and I’ve now read the Wild Hunt comments and a few others discussing this.

This is a copy of the email that I sent to Just Stop Oil this morning — the group has contact information available on its website. In the email, I first established my connections to climate activism (an ingroup identification pitch) and gave additional personal context (religion) before drawing on that commonality to offer my critique of their actions and the way their actions damage their relationships with other communities that care about what is happening to the planet. Honestly, I don’t know why they’re not targeting the people who actually create most of the emissions because we have tons of data and research on the who of this.

Happy Solstice,

I am a long-time donator to climate causes, such as the Climate Emergency Fund and the Clean Air Task Force. In addition, I did canvassing for Clean Water Action when I was a college student for one summer back in the mid-2000s. I grew up in the American Pagan community and am a polytheist.

I am raising a point of concern about the Stonehenge desecration that was committed yesterday. As you may know from learning about the history of the environmental movement, many early environmental activists are elders in our pagan and polytheist communities (such as Starhawk), and in fact the movement wouldn’t be what it is today without our elders’ actions decades ago. Despite our smaller size as a community, we have had a big impact on environmental movements, in other words. What you did at Stonehenge is alienating to the community and is like desecrating a mosque, synagogue, temple, or church — especially since Googling the arrested individuals indicates that neither of them is a member of the Pagan community — especially considering our close ties to the environmental movement as a whole. Your media comments about Stonehenge minimize its status as a sacred site, maybe because you know that’s a line that you should not cross. You also did this the literal day before a holy day.

When I was almost 18, I visited Stonehenge while in the UK with my mom and sisters. We went at dawn, and it was beautiful. A lot has changed in the nearly two decades since, and in recent years, a lot of people into pop spirituality have created litter and trash after major holidays. We are very critical of that situation, too. Please make better decisions.

Thank you for reading my email, and I wish you all of the blessings of the Gods on this day.

Sincerely,
Kaye

Why did I approach the situation in this way? Because being friendly to other people works. Aesop has the fable of the wind and the sun — bluster, ostracism, and alienation just make people dig their heels in and do not lead to a behavior change. (Seriously. According to peer-reviewed research, that never works unless cultivating a cultish environment of fear is your goal or your goal is wanting to see someone maximally suffer rather than work towards behavior change/resolution. Not even the daimons in Tartarus do that.) There were a few places in the email where I wasn’t sure of what tone I should take — the final two sentences of the second paragraph and the final sentence of the third — but being friendly and being a pushover are not the same thing, so I decided to risk it. If the email does not help, those will likely be the fracture points unless they think I’m being sarcastic about the blessings, which I am not.

I also emailed the Climate Emergency Fund, which gives grants to climate activists (as I don’t know if Just Stop Oil is currently applying for grants from them; it applied once a few years ago, I think(?)), and the content of that email was different — I needed to express my donor concerns.

Happy Solstice, and I wish you all the blessings of the season.