A sad case of self-immolation with fossil fuels, to protest fossil fuels
A green activist who was a pioneering lawyer for gay and transgender rights — including in the infamous “Boys Don’t Cry” murder case — committed suicide by setting himself on fire Saturday morning in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Attorney David Buckel in 2006APIn a gruesome protest against the ecological destruction of the earth, David Buckel, 60, left behind a charred corpse and a typed suicide note that said he was burning himself to death using “fossil fuel” to reflect how mankind was likewise killing itself, police sources said.
He left the note behind in a manila envelope marked “To The Police,” recovered from inside a black metal push cart he discarded at the scene.
Passersby were horrified to see Buckel’s blackened, prone remains.
“It was just lying there, on its back, knees slightly bent like someone would lie on the sand at the beach,” said Irena Ryjova, 44, who rollerbladed past at around 7 a.m., less than an hour after the immolation.
…
More recently, he worked as an urban gardener and ecologist with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, helping run what he called the largest composting program in the country to use only renewable sources of energy.
“There’s no denying that sticking with renewable resources means a lot of elbow grease with pitchforks and shovels,” he wrote in a 2016 article on the garden website.
More here at the NYPost: https://nypost.com/2018/04/14/burned-body-inside-prospect-park-appears-to-be-suicide/
h/t to “Charles the moderator”
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What a waste. Climate alarmism seems more dangerous than the actual climate change. Green alarmists should answer for this.
Weird that he used fossil fuels to kill himself. Doesn’t that contribute to climate change he believed in? So, thanks for making it worse for the rest of us, I guess? Maybe i’m going to commit suicide by drinking too much water, thus showing to everyone how water is danger to us all.
Too many people and they are all= want want want.
If its not money they want, its things that they want you to do, or especially not do.
You have less and less control day by day by day.
e.g. Tony Blair, inside 10 years and while Prime Minister, tripled the size of the UK Statute Book.
Since it was created in 1215, Blair tripled the number of crimes you are able to commit
What Matt Ridley recently wrote about in his piece “The Censorious Society”
It is very stressful. Having all this technology watching you, recording everything you do, everything you say, who you say it to, everywhere you are, when you were there.
And if its not generating automatic fines for trivial offences it’s bombarding you either Doom & Gloom or appeals to buy endless junk junk and more junk.
Assuming suicide, what this guy did became his only way to regain control.
Like my younger brother back in 1987, although of course farmers as he was, along with doctors and veterinarians, are the Top Three groups of people who fall foul of suicide.
Wonder why that is…….
Fortunately, most people have worked out a way to handle the stress.
The use sugar
and booze
and cannabis
and opiates
and… Trash TV
and…..nicotine
and….. (what’s *your* poison? Coffee maybe)
and…… the Government Machine (scientists and doctors) say that that is good.
After all, we NEED glucose for ‘energy’ don’t we?
See all the tax revenue tobacco and booze create
And only folks who were gonna go nuts anyway use cannabis. yeah right
And booze is part of the mythical and wondrous Mediterranean Diet
What could possibly go wrong?
Age of first stroke— http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42871861
Loneliness— http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42887932
Opium— http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42452733
Sugar— https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/how-sugar-affects-your-body?
And then is half the world either pre, or actually, diabetic?
—– 2 thirds of Americans are. half of all Europeans and at least half the Chinese.
Look at the stress of managing *that* when you’re diagnosed positive
Is it any wonder that the only real growth industry in the Western World is- Healthcare.
and where was the healthcare system for this guy…..
He must have been very anxious and depressed,feeling that his ‘cry’ was not being listened to.
Being intelligent is no defence against suicide, in my area of work it is the intelligent and compassionate that kill themselves, more than the detached intelligent, with proportionate in response compassion.
At least, if one happens to be Christian, my comment to the over compassionate is
‘Even Christ took 40 days off, if its good enough for Christ, it should be good enough for you’.
The fear of climate change, an inevitability however caused, has made some of my acquaintances on the streets over anxious.
When mentally ill and ‘psychically processing information’, particularly the current obsession with climate change, they can become more dysfunctional.
Responses vary from putting solar panels on the roof to blowing up coal fired power stations, from those who can, putting them in a position of ‘control’ of the ‘problem’, so in that sense, rational decisions which are sane.
For the mentally ill and poor there is no easy way out.
The problems are beamed to them , especially by our SBS and ABC carriers on the news, with lots of graphic pictures on other subjects, people being washed away by climate change and gassed babies in Syria with the threat of war, to quote two items on tonight’s SBS news in Australia.
When someone commits suicide we have the obligatory ‘beyond blue’ contact details, as if this solves the underlying problems.
The graphic publicity keeps churning out.
This man was trying all he could to solve the problems he saw.
He gardened and no doubt, defended or prosecuted green ideals.
As such he was true to himself.
However it seems , no one he felt listened.
So he defined his life and himself as a response to what others thought of him.
He felt totally useless and life futile.
My thought and prayers are with him and those who he left behind.
The person who felt she could have just dropped in the day before, and all would be well.
The man who had a great job for him at the gardens that could help, but it never happened.
His mentors and friends who told him he was worthwhile, and he never felt that mattered.
For all of us who are diminished by his death.
This was someone who truly believed that humanity was close to committing suicide as a species. There would have been no way to dissuade him otherwise. He had a moral imperative to follow.
You have a similar issue with abortion – one side believes that not allowing abortion is a fundamental oppression of females, while the other believes that it’s murder of babies.
Similarly in war – one of your soldiers who charges up a hill at a machine-gun post, or falls on a grenade to save a comrade is considered a hero. One of the enemy who does the same is considered a fanatic.
The only way to avoid this strange human failing seems to involve having no morals at all. Like me….
Sad for his family and sad that he won’t helped with his low mental state.
Apparently sudden prayers make God jump……. The reality is we only get one life and he threw his away and left his family in torment and guilt….. undeserved imho. Green policies will not save the Earth but stopping Climate Change grants to money grabbing Warmistas would be good for this Climate Deniers soul…
Sad for his family and sad that he now won’t be helped with his low mental state.
Alarmist scaremongering works, as we can clearly see.
He was a truly brave man, leading by example…
Very sad that he felt so desolate. People are losing relatives and lifelong friends over politics and now their lives. He should have known at his age that things run in cycles and he did not need to protest in such an horrid fashion for his voice to be heard. Such a shame!
In his protest, he showed the usefulness of fossil fuels.
The really sad thing is that this guy gave up his life to make a statement that will be forgotten by Tuesday….as it should. A wasted gesture.
If there is life after death and he finally learns Global Warming is all a lie, he will be awfully annoyed.
This is the tragic but logical and predictable result of the self-hatred preached and proselytized by the irrational logic of the extreme environmentalists.
Well that’s one way to solve an non issue with permanent solution…. What a miserable, small minded man, so wrapped up in his own self importance that he gave no thought to those who would find his stupidly charred remains.
Wow. Just.. wow. You truly think and believe that?
When the pain in that man’s life was so much greater than the pain of setting himself on fire, doesn’t that tell you he was in a truly bad place? He needed professional help. I don’t know why he didn’t seek help, or why none was offered. But he was suffering in a way I can’t comprehend, and he choose this because it represented the least painful solution to his pain.
Let that sink in for a second: Setting himself on fire to burn to death was the least painful path.
I feel sadness for this. For him. For the failures of the mental health system that didn’t – or couldn’t – help. For the people who found his remains. For his family and friends. This is a tragedy. His beliefs and “side of the argument” don’t matter; his pain and suffering did.
“Wow. Just.. wow. You truly think and believe that?”
…
“Let that sink in for a second: Setting himself on fire to burn to death was the least painful path.”
Pain killer overdose. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Being executed for mass murder. Hell, shooting yourself in the head would be less painful.
He burned on Earth, he can burn in hell. And no, I feel no desire to feel compassion for someone who would use the force of government to lower my standard of living for false reasons. Useful idiots, while not knowing of the falsity of their knowledge, enable those who do, and still represent a clear and present danger to freedom.
You are making several assumptions, so I will also. When he felt the intense pain of his burning skin and he
could smell his own burning flesh, he could not breath anything but hot air devoid of oxygen, he experienced pain and fear like never before and he realized he had made a mistake.
“For the failures of the mental health system that didn’t – or couldn’t – help.”
Wut?
What is this “mental health system” you speak of, what is the failure you think it had? Is it supposed to know everyone’s state of mind, and to step in when there is a problem?
A creepy thought.
Why not do it in front of people or recording the event on Facebook live if your suicide is a protest? There is, of course, much more to this than meets the eye.
No sarcasm:
Sad. Very sad. Taking the reasoning that he left at it’s face–a demonstration. But the loss of the life, when he did so much to convince the world of the equal rights of humanity, regardless of “morality”….that’s just a tragedy.
Whatever mental condition, be it anger turned inwards, or ego—the sad part is, he suffered. Horrendously suffered in the manner he chose his death.
I guess it’s sad that anyone can be this stupid – stupid for believing that the Earth is doomed, stupid for believing that his suicide has any meaning (no one thinks suicide is a smart or normal thing to do). Of course, anyone who believes transgenders/gays are normal can probably believe most anything.
“Of course, anyone who believes transgenders/gays are normal can probably believe most anything.”
They too are insane.
ow, that brought back memories (not the self immolation but the park). I grew up on Prospect Park West, crossed it to go to Ebbets Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play, played baseball there often with my dad and uncles and brothers and later my high school friends, fished and road the peddle boats in the lake, got mugged, another time was beaten up and on another occasion had my life threatened. Starting with college, I became a country boy/man/old man.
When someone who means well does something like this, something that makes no sense to the rest of us, the excuses/reasons for it vary. The real reason is to have an ‘effect’ on “other’, whoever or whatever “other” may be, whether it was the war in Vietnam or the current ideology/cult of CAGWerism.
It is an entirely selfish thing to do, generated by anger turned inward. The “effect” is never what the suicide intended, nor have any of them ever seen the results or the real effects of what they did. It is the most selfish act possible.
The post about cults and how they warp the minds of their followers is on the money and I’m glad I read it. Cults feed on an emptiness in the souls of their targets.
My very real concern is that this may become more widespread, destroying the lives of people who could have done something worthwhile.
Now we will never know what this man could really have done with his life.
It is always difficult balancing the obligation to honor sacrifices for the greater good, with the need to guard against emulating needless self- immolation for an otherwise worthy cause. Media of all kinds — including social media — have a duty to limit the risk that any self-destructive symbolic act might prompt copy-cat gestures by others. We can, if we act wisely, walk that tightrope, and find ways to honor worthy goals, without encouraging more sensitive souls to deprive us of their essential gifts, in a world and at a time ever-more dominated by the more callous and less caring.
Let’s set examples for practical action on climate, that will make more sad, symbolic self-sacrifices unnecessary.
What is the worthy goal here? To cause billions of humans to die from exposure to the environment and starve to death on low nutrition low density farming?
He has done what we only ask of others, not necessarily to take your own life but to simply practice what you preach. If he so firmly believed in the evil done to the Earth by humans then he rightly removed himself as one of the causes.
One of the reasons why such suicide is wrong is that it is SELFISH & BULLYING with emotional blackmail
‘ Do what I say or I’ll smash your face in,
… oh I can’t do that, so I’m going to kill myself ..and that will be a punishment to YOU”
.. We should not give into such bullying
My commiseration to his relatives and friends, it’s pressure from the outside world that can drive people to such flawed logic.
He sent letters out to the NYT, among others:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/nyregion/david-buckel-dead-fire.html
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
What delusional, and completely backwards thinking. Fossil fuels have made our lives better, not worse, and pollution is less of a problem now in the US, in large part because of fossil fuels creating a vibrant economy which has the means to do things to reduce real pollution.
““Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.””
Nothing about global warming in that. He seems from that to be a fan of renewable energy for another reason—pollution.
largest composting program in the country
*********************************************************
well, he’s halfway there to being compost. toss him in the pile now rotate often nothing left in few weeks
Where will the first climate Jonestown tragedy occur? Perhaps Oakland or Berkeley or maybe the NYT building
I don’t want to be insensitive, but this might be the result of the endless headlines of doom and despair on top of someone’s depression.