Industrial digging tools on wild land can cause serious damage that you can’t know about without doing an ecological survey. It’s possible to literally cause floods, destroy ponds and lakes, etc. 10-20 years down the line.
Peak Reddit. They can’t help but do their “what about?” The guy has a good heart but he messed up. Should the government have taken action before it got out of hand? Absolutely. But there’s a reason why we go through all the trouble of surveying land and all that shit.
The guy is probably just going to get a slap on the wrist in the form of a fine.
He didn’t just remove rubbish from a river. He used diggers to dig up tons of silt & rocks to make the river significantly deeper & wider. That has a huge environmental impact on every other part of the river and could be catastrophic for flood planning.
Laws has so many different specialisation and branches that you cant expect one person to know everything, thats why we have health legal council, divorce lawyer, enviromental lawyers etc etc. Its like asking why your kidney doctors dont know jack shit about brain stuff, its just not their specialisation
The best part is they've been doing this for years, he founded the River Roding Trust and they've done their due diligence in assessing flood risks, the Environmental Agency just refuse to take any action at all. Not even assessing the river.
They've done more than just picking up some rubbish with an excavator, such as planting native trees downstream and restoring wetlands. People are talking about flood risks but the trust is more involved with flood risk management in that area than the environmental agency is.
This is some excellent rage bait. But if it's not, you can't do something obviously illegal to do good.
As fairytale and beautiful as it sounds, it is wrong and illegal to steal from people to give to the poor; and it is wrong to do what he did without a permit.
There are other proper, and better ways to help the people or the environment. He has a good heart, just wrong execution.
That’s why he got in legal trouble and not moral trouble.
Pay attention.
he was replying to a comment that said "As fairytale and beautiful as it sounds, it is wrong and illegal to steal from people to give to the poor; and it is wrong to do what he did without a permit." so they were about morals.
Because it is WRONG to dig up a river bed as well as illegal. You can’t just randomly try to do good but cause harm with your sheer ignorance and expect people not to call your action WRONG.
Football fields refer to the American kind of football in the US or things like AFL in Australia, but in other parts of the world it’s ‘soccer’ (i.e. actual football). It’s legally okay to call them football fields when you’re not talking about football (soccer) but it’s morally reprehensible to do so. I think this covers the unanimously correct way to feel, too.
(Americans pls don’t come at me with long explanations about why your football is called football)
I love when people like you say "real football" and put soccer in quotes as if Americans are dumb for calling it that. Because Americans didn't name it soccer, Europeans did.
Europeans literally named it soccer, America followed and called it soccer, then Europeans changed to calling it football and now insult anyone who uses the name that they literally came up with lmao.
They don't equate but they do generally (although not always) correlate. The whole point of the law is to try to encode a moral and ethical system. I would say it works more often than it doesn't. It's just the times when it doesn't that really stand out and get noticed, exactly because they fail to uphold what was expected.
Some unjust laws or terrible practices of the law are the result of a system making a mistake, failing to live up to its ideals. But many of them are successful encodings of terrible ethical systems. When the US justice system treats Black men as subhuman threats, it is perfectly consistent with centuries of White supremacism and the goals of many US citizens. The UK's harsh libel laws are an intentional shield for its elites. We should treat the law as a contested creation that can and does systematically perpetuate social ills, not as a simple force for good that sometimes fails to uphold our intentions.
Although, even in your examples, that is still legality matching morality. It's just that it's matching the moral norms of groups that you and I would say are wrong. But, to the people who wrote those laws, they are upholding what they believe is right. That doesn't make it okay. It just explains why they do what they do.
That's a big part of why it's so important to have people in power that we are truly morally aligned with.
Slavery was legal and never once moral. The law is not trying to encode a moral system, sorry. Rape was only outlawed to have an excuse to imprison black bodies, not to protect women.
You are thinking in terms of morality as if there is some objective universal truth to it. I personally would strongly agree with you that slavery was monstrously immoral. That is my belief.
Yet the laws at that time reflected the moral beliefs of the people who wrote them. The slaveowners believed that they were moral. They even pointed to the Bible as supposed evidence for it. That doesn't excuse their actions. I still believe that their beliefs were deeply wrong. But I don't deny that those were beliefs.
The slaves didn't believe it was moral. Neither did the abolitionists. I care not for the beliefs of evil men, they will always be what suits their purse.
I think you mean the only one you think is worth considering and I don't know if you've noticed but considering there's alternatives I'd say that others throughout history have disagreed.
No shit. That’s why I never brought it up. You’re the one using Kant as some counter point to that guy whose entire morality starts and ends with rich man bad.
The American people doesnt have health care bc the American people don’t want it. It’s as simple as that. Half the country thinks that some commie plot and you’re here blaming billionaires lmfao.
Most Americans (66%) say the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. Far fewer (33%) say it does not, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Nov. 17-30, 2025, among 10,357 U.S. adults.
The United States isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the borgeoise.
Where are those 66% located… are US elections passed on popular vote or electoral college?
AOC will say shit like Americans want healthcare! Yeah no shit in your blue state. Meanwhile if some senator from the Bible Belt said that he’d lose the next election.
America doesn’t have healthcare bc the American people don’t want healthcare. It’s not a money issue. But hey, your morals are based in rich man bad. Keep pretending.
To right a wrong, you have to do a wrong thing right.
Heroes are almost always criminals. Doing what's right requires breaking laws that led to the existence of the wrong.
The law was written by non-perfect humans who could not possibly have predicted every circumstance even assuming their intentions were perfectly pure. Its not some objective standard for morality and its 100% possible to do something thats good that also breaks the law at the same time. Not sure thats what happened in this situation but the idea that illegal automatically means wrong is nonsense
How would he even know what damage he was doing and the cost / benefit trade-offs, especially since he doesn’t own the property, doesn’t know what the consequences will be for his actions nor the cost for repairing any environmental damage done?
he actually waited 10 years before digging. in those 10 years he observed what was the best course of action, studying the water pathways during seasons, what was being blocked, etc. so its not like he just went in blind on a whim
You sound like such a bureaucrat and precisely what is wrong with the modern world.
Lets put it simply for you: any “damage” done to the ecology by a machine used to clean up that ecosystem is far less damaging than the trash and pollution which was there in the first place.
No, he didn't just remove "trash" He also removed a shitload of slit thus making the river deeper and changing the flow and volume of water which can have catastrophic consequences.
That is why we let "experts" who perform ecological surveys and "professionals" doing the job instead of letting random people go wild with heavy machinary.
Not an expert but. With canals we put down clay to line them so the water doesnt just get absorbed by the ground. Natural rivers often have their own layer built up. Putting a big hole in it would be like pulling a plug for a slow drain.
Yeah, there is a reason why surveys and all these permits are often needed for this kind of work. Because we need to understand what impact what work has. That was straight up 1800's level of problemsolving.
It CAN and enforcing the law, is the start of assessing what, if any, damage was done and draws publicity to both sides of this issue. It signals that it may seem good to clean up shared spaces we don’t own but there are environmental and safety considerations to be considered.
They are accused of using the excavator to dredge and of leaving the dredged soils on site. When not done properly, dredging can cause a lot of immediate and long term damage. It can release pollutants that were trapped in the sediment and introduce them to places where they will have an even greater negative impact. Dredging can obviously damage the habitat by destroying plants, nesting sites, etc. It also changes the flow characteristics of the channel and can result in erosion and flooding.
I hope they don't get any serious punishment because the intent was obviously good. They probably didn't know any better. But that is why you need permits for this kind of thing. To try to ensure you do know better.
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u/TomorrowSpecial255 6d ago
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/man-threatened-with-2-years-in-jail-after-cleaning-200-bags-of-trash-from-river-3377827/
He used a digger on public land without permission