2019 was a bad year for Australia. Floods, unspeakable drought and now extensive wildfires. As a former city girl, I hear a lot of despair among my urban friends and connections as to how it has come to this. I hear frustration over why the Greens, a party that isn’t even driving policy, are being blamed for these fires. Many urban people do not understand the sometimes high level of hostility to “green-ness” in rural areas. I’m going to make it clear up front that I’m the kind of leftie greenie that gets relentlessly hammered in rural media and social forums, and that I am green voter (always reluctantly and always only because it seems like the least bad alternative). However I want in this blog post to unpack the idea of “green-ness” and why it is struggling to gain traction across huge areas of Australia. If you are rural greenie farmer, I’m not talking about you. You are a rare and special breed. Please continue.
When you hear a rural person talking about greenies or the greens, they probably mean something like this: greenies are people who tell other people how to live in the environment without the experience of living in it themselves. They often live in urban areas. Greenies tell people what trees can and can’t be grown or cut down, how to manage pest plants and animals, how to use water, where to put fences, what constitutes animal cruelty etc. Greenies tell you that the businesses that are the backbone of your community are bad and need to go, and say that they will “help you” transition to something better. Greenies at worst think that rural people are uneducated and at best that they need to be helped to see a better way. Greenies apply policy and ideas that come from outside and disregard the lived experience and knowledge of the people who, day to day, are getting their hands dirty actually doing it.
The challenging thing that needs to be understood is that these are all entirely reasonable perceptions. 13 years ago we moved to a rural community, where I started working for Landcare. Landcare is a community based environmental movement. Primarily, it works on private land and therefore much of the work the organisation does is about assisting people to manage their land for better environmental and economic outcomes. Working with Landcare fundamentally changed my understanding about farmers, and about green principles and values.
At a basic level, I quickly learnt how unrealistic and absurd much of our environmental policy is. It’s easier, for example, to declare a plantation, plant a monoculture and clearfell it than it is to select harvest native timber in a sustainable and potentially regenerative way. At a more challenging level, I learnt that rural people are constantly making difficult ethical decisions based on real life conditions. An example local to me can be found in the issue of 1080 baiting.
1080 is a poison used to control pest animals. Because it is so dangerous, use of 1080 baits is highly controlled to minimise off target impacts. Nobody likes using it, but use it they do. Farmers use it, especially during calving or lambing time, to stop newly born animals being eaten, sometimes taken before their mother has even finished birthing them. Farmers are not monsters and scenes like this can be deeply distressing. Where I live, 1080 is currently being used as part of a conservation program to control the foxes that humans introduced in an effort to restore the populations of endangered native species. 1080 is sometimes used in post fire situations as well, when the populations of cats and foxes typically explode placing even greater pressure on native species. Death by 1080 can be a truly terrible thing, something most people would not want to inflict on any animal. But the foxes, a problem which we created, need to be controlled. The notion that in this kind of terrain this could be done through approaches such as contraception or exclusion fencing (the alternative suggested by PETA) is so absurd as to be honestly laughable, like trying to hold back the tide with a piece of string. Until you are here in place, though, it is almost impossible to navigate the practical and ethical implications around the management of pest animals.
To draw what is perhaps a long and controversial bow, you can think of it like this. Women do, and always should, advocate for reproductive freedom. It is women who understand that choosing procreation is a matter of life and death. It is women who must bear the consequences. It is women who stare the bloody and inherently dangerous reality of birth in the face and must decide if the creation of life is possible. The notion that men should legislate this is offensive and absurd. They have literally no experience in the matter. For rural people to be told how they should live in nature by people who do not live in nature is a similar thing.
The environment for rural people is real and present. It is not something that happens “out there” that you may visit or worry about or want to preserve from threats that are both immediate and existential. It is something that lives and breathes all around and has immediate and apparent impacts on you, your family and your community. Rural people are managing and responding to the environment all the time. And it’s difficult, and it’s messy. We tell private landholders that we need them to manage their properties for what we tell them is overall environmental benefit, but we expect them to bear the financial cost. Some people can afford to transition to better management but the economics for many farmers, which are policy and market driven, makes it financially profoundly risky to invest in these processes.
Living in rural communities is hard. Some rural communities exist on the brink of collapse and criticism of people’s practices and views when they are trying to hold their businesses and families and communities together is a violence. In the triage of life, these immediate needs will nearly always be more important than poorly defined existential threats.
Living with nature is bloody difficult. It takes theories and ideas and tests them against the coalface of real-life conditions. These real-life conditions are complex systems, both natural and cultural. They can only be learnt by operating them, and that is what rural people do day in and day out. None of this is to say that Australia doesn’t need huge improvement in our environmental and agricultural policy and practice. The State of Queensland alone clears land at a comparable rate to the Brazilian Amazon. Of the 1.5% of species known to have gone extinct, 35% of them are Australian. Much of our agricultural practice is profoundly unsuited to our climate conditions and if we continue to grow our export market potential we will likely destroy and desertify an already fragile continent.
These are things that (we) greenies care about and so we should. They are important in all manner of ways. And this is not to promote the farmer as hero myth (there’s a whole other blog in that), because mismanagement is rife, huge swathes of country are being appallingly mismanaged and conservative resistance to change is real, highly problematic and potentially dangerous. Do not, however, expect to speak with authority about the management of the environment and nature to people who live in if you have not lived in it yourself. Understand that the Greens as a political party is primarily an urban brand and that while their voter base rests in and responds primarily to the urban electorates where they have traction they will probably struggle to speak to rural people. Understand that pitching big picture problems like climate change may struggle to gain ground against the immediate experience of living in nature.
This piece is written really only to give people one possible answer to the vexed question of why, as a gross generalisation, rural people aren’t greenies. Personally, I don’t know how we move ahead. But I do hope to perhaps shed light on why people who live in and work in the environment do not feel that the various green movements are a natural home for them, and are perhaps even hostile places. I suppose it all just come down to listening, all of us, to eachother.