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.
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.
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.
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It’s a person’s entire life’s work you dick.
Pretty sure if you go to Greece and ask around, you won’t find anyone who remembers 2000 years ago
There are shops in rural parts of Greece.
There’s a major difference between a “shop” and Target
The thieves are. Next question.
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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.
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And why do gangs exist? Let’s go back to my first comment to try and figure that out… Oh, that’s right, social problems. Thanks for agreeing with me 👍
It kinda seems like you think burning someones house and job down is justified if you steal while doing it
Its like you dont even actually understand what the societal issues are, you just overheard an adult say something kind of like that once.
Because it’s easier to make money when you steal and have no costs than it is to build an orchard and work it.
Do you think the Mafia was just like “we’ll stop doing crime when we’re not poor anymore?”
If I leave a $50 bill on the table at a cafe or the library and go to the bathroom it’s not going to be there when I get back, someone will have taken it. It’s not because they were poor, it’s because someone could do so without consequences.
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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.
that’s not how you make olive oil
Right, that’s how you steal lumber. Price of hardwood is high. I picked a randomly searched site, and see 1/2" X 8 1/8" X 39 3/4" for $81.16 https://www.bellforestproducts.com/olivewood/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Warehouse break-ins, dilution of premium oil with inferior product, and falsification of shipping data are on the rise in olive-growing heartlands of Greece, Spain and Italy.
The crimes mean fewer olives for growers already contending with high production costs and climate change that has brought warmer winters, major flooding and more intense forest fires.
“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.
That includes Christos Bekas, who was among the farmers at Papachristou’s mill who were dumping their crop into stainless steel loading bins, untying sacks and tipping over tall wicker baskets from the back of their pickup trucks.
The regional agricultural association issued a plea for police assistance following reports that 100 olive trees were destroyed or seriously damaged in a single incident last month.
The original article contains 728 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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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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Eh, just don’t go and make an organization dedicated to certifying olive oil… that’s actually effective. There have been several big stories about much of the oil you find in a store being either rancid or at best a mixture of olive oil and something else.
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rancid
It’s my understanding that light makes oil go rancid.
All those pretty clear bottles are destroying their contents lol
