They should countersue

The EA are nothing but a money collecting scheme at this point, they’re toothless to deal with actual polluters, but demand huge fees for granting any small abstraction license, and massive fines for this kind of bullshit. The whole agency is a farce

Removing silt sounds sus. Weed too to a point.

What a bunch of assholes.

Reading the comments on this story a few days ago on .world was depressing AF.

The thread was full of justifications for prosecution; they shouldn't have used a digger, and they could have done more damage than good, and they should have let the authorities do it, blah blah blah

Clearly none of them had read that it had been an ongoing campaign that knew what they were doing and had appealed to the authorities several times. Just straight to justifying authorities criminalisation of public good.

Here's a video from Channel 4 to give a better visual of what they did: https://youtu.be/Kj9Hvdzu_zw

“Local busybody appalled to learn rules also apply to them”