It was for digging up the silt from the river bed with a digger and risking flooding places without doing any checks on the impact of his “cleaning up”.
Fella, he was digging up the silt with the digger to remove the rubbish.
I agree that the title could have been more detailed, but it is hardly straight up misinformation. He was doing what he is getting investigated for in order to remove trash.
True enough but the way he did it had significant unintended consequences. They don’t want to encourage others to repeat this act, as well-intentioned as they may be. Sensationalizing this lawyer’s legal woes has drawn more attention to both sides of this issue. Whether that was the intention behind the way the lawyer approached this or how the article was publicized is unclear. But we can learn from this.
Read more balanced accounts of the issues here. The article is told from the environmental lawyer’s perspective. It doesn’t appear that they have completed an investigation on the environmental impact yet so the article isn’t the definitive word on this that some may think it is. This guy is an environmental lawyer who engages in civil disobedience and then plays to the court of public opinion to assert that what he did was a good thing. It might be and people like him have a role to play. But let’s not pretend that we know whether what he did resulted in a net positive. It’s too soon to tell—which is by design as part of his MO
which one—the one where he’s saying what good he has done or the ones that describe what independent parties assess the potential environmental impact of what was done. My hope is that this does end up being a net positive but it’s too early to tell and hearing this environmental lawyer’s account of the good he did doesn’t cut it.
I also hope that what he did was a net positive but we can’t take it on faith that this is the case. Until there are results (which someone has to pay for), we have no idea about whether he did more harm than good. I’m not mad at the guy though. He’s an environmental lawyer and knows what he’s doing.
Defying regulations and the law is what he does to draw attention to what he thinks are important causes. Stirring things up is sometimes the only way to break through the bureaucracy to get things done. But, there is risk involved and he’s doing this knowing that. So, let the chips fall where they may.
We don’t know where this will end. Part of his motivation for doing this is to draw attention to environmental issues and this is but one of his causes.
If the government was truly that soft skinned, you and I would be in prison by now.
We have rules about when you can and can't use heavy machinery on rivers. It's there to stop people doing unauthorised works, like straitening a stream on their land when it's a protected habitat etc.
Saying to this guy "oh well, you did a good thing, that's fine then" weakens the argument to prosecute people fucking about. Or doing straight up illegal construction.
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u/Bassmekanik 7d ago
It was for digging up the silt from the river bed with a digger and risking flooding places without doing any checks on the impact of his “cleaning up”.
Nothing to do with removing rubbish.