On Thursday, British authorities charged a pair of climate change activists for vandalism Stonehengea prehistoric megalithic structure on a chalk plateau known as Salisbury Plain.

The authorities are loading Just Stop Oil, Rajan Naidu, 73, of Gosford Street, Birmingham, and Niamh Lynch, 20, of Norfolk Road, Bedford, with destroying or damaging a protected ancient monument and willfully or recklessly causing a public nuisance by the incident. Naidu and Lynch are accused of spraying orange powder paint on the iconic monuments on June 19. The pair are due to appear at Salisbury Magistrates’ Court on December 13 for their initial hearing.

“Fortunately, there appears to be no visible damage, but that by no means means that no harm has been done, from the very act of having to clean the stones to the distress caused to those for whom Stonehenge has spiritual significance.” English said. Heritage chief executive Nick Merriman said CNN.

Naidu and Lynch are not the first Just Stop Oil activists to go through the British criminal system. Activist Roger Hallam is serving a 5-year sentence to block traffic on London’s M25 in 2022. Speaking to Salon last month, Hallam argued that as we burn so many fossil fuels that we are overheating the planet, we are in a “complete crisis of the whole basis of how we make decisions and short term and the irrationality and immorality of these decisions’.

Another spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, climatologist Alex De Koning, said Salon in February that “if any of us are to survive the climate crisis, things must change. Yet the fossil fuel companies and those in power who have prospered from the broken system that got us into this mess refuse (to change). They fight. to keep himself at the top and use his considerable wealth and influence to repress whoever took him.”

Stonehenge is believed to have been built during the prehistoric era. It is composed of sarsens and bluestones, all aligned towards sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice.