Greenpeace Mars Peruvian Nazca Lines Site, Just in Case You've Never Heard of Renewable Energy
In connection with the UN Climate Change conference in Peru (Ronald Bailey writes about that here) Greenpeace activists marched across the off-limits Peruvian site of the world-famous Nazca Lines, near its iconic hummingbird, leaving foot marks which the Peruvian government says marred the site, in order to lay out huge yellow cloth reading "TIME FOR CHANGE The Future is Renewable Greenpeace."
The Nazca Lines are, as Washington Post aptly described them:
one of South America's most storied archeological wonders, a mysterious series of huge animal, human and plant symbols that were carefully etched into the ground between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago. Tourists typically view them from the air.
A Peruvian culture minister complained to the BBC that:
"You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years…They haven't touched the hummingbird figure but now we have an additional figure created by the footsteps of these people," Mr Castillo told local radio.
The Peruvian government is taking this seriously, threatening to press charges against the activists who stepped across the off-limits historical site so they could shout at the world, rather vaguely, via world media they knew their desecration would attract, about something the world knows plenty about already.
Did this embattled scrappy activist group have no other means to get their message out other than casual vandalism of a historical site and the accompanying "earned media"? Guess not with their meager total assets, according to their financial reports for 2013, of just 54 million euros.
