Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The recent State election in Queensland, Australia has thrown up some interesting voting patterns.
Votes for green leaning left wing candidates seem to have mostly concentrated in high density urban areas. The electorate of Maiwar in Brisbane, the one seat the Green Party seems likely to win, is one of the most heavily urbanised regions in Queensland.
Brisbane has beautiful green spaces, such as a lovely strip of parkland along stretches of the Brisbane River – but these green spaces are mostly carefully manicured and well tended gardens.
Outside these managed gardens, the natural environment in Queensland can be brutal. The lush coastal bushland especially is dripping with threats to human health, ranging from deadly paralysis ticks, to snakes ranging from the relatively harmless green tree snakes to deadly browns and taipans. If you go more than a few hundred miles north of the Capital, there’s a real chance of meeting a crocodile, vicious, highly intelligent ambush apex predators which usually kill by dragging their prey underwater and holding them until they drown. In Australia crocodiles can grow up to 6m (18ft), more than big enough to kill a human.
And of course there are a range of lesser pests like vicious biting horse flies and vast clouds of mosquitoes which occasionally transmit debilitating chronic diseases such as Ross River Fever.
Away from the carefully manicured town gardens, the Queensland bush is not your friend – its a vicious fast growing source of sometimes life threatening pests, which has to be fought on a regular basis to stop it overrunning parts of your yard or farm which you care about.
Support for the climate skeptic One Nation Party was stronger away from manicured urban areas. Though One Nation may not win any seats, they won a substantial share of the vote in many electorates, over 30% in some areas.
Amongst other things, One Nation campaigned on a platform of liberating farmers from onerous restrictions imposed by city based greens. People who have daily contact with the true face of the tropical Queensland bush almost universally rejected green party candidates.
My question – are green supporters mostly people who have an utterly romanticised view of nature? People who rarely come into contact with the real thing?
Does this observation match your experience in your state or country?
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Cities have outlived their purpose. They are simply dormitories for parasites these days.
“My question – are green supporters mostly people who have an utterly romanticised view of nature? People who rarely come into contact with the real thing?
Does this observation match your experience in your state or country?”
The real thing in the US is quite different than the real thing in Oz. Unless you venture into grizzly country, or go snorkeling in places where water moccasins live, the dire threats to life and limb from wildlife are not there, or for the most part, are easily avoided. The wildlife in inner cities is far, far more dangerous. Many greens are nature lovers and spend a lot of time there. But for the most part it’s a luxurious experience (in comparison to Oz), where, for example, you drive to the river in your SUV, kayak down the river outfitted with expensive gear that makes the trip easy, drive to a restaurant to recharge and then back home to your safe space. While immersed in nature, there is virtually no threat from wildlife.
However, many urban people are clueless about nature and tend to vote Democrat, but most can’t be considered green by any means. But rural non-greens tend to vote Republican, so the same principle is at work that you described.
I would add that most greens who like to spend time in nature, do so as recreation from blue collar jobs. To a large degree they have no clue about clearing/grading land, raising crops/livestock, managing land, hunting, etc. Two entirely different things. The latter IMO tends to make one more of a realist.
I used to think they won in areas where there was a lot of mental illness, but your theory is OK too.
Correlation or causation?
In England, yep. Sums it up. We don’t have any real threats to life & limb in our fauna. A few unfortunate people die after anaphylactic responses to wasp or bee stings. We’ve only one venomous snake, the Adder or Viper, who’s bite is alleged to be more akin to a wasp’s sting.
However, the Greens are all a bunch of city kids, have never visited a farm, believe that we’d all be happy & live longer, healthier lives if we would just go vegan, wear natural fibres & at the worst, drive an EV. They believe without any doubts, everything Greenpi$$ & Fraud$ of the Earth tell them.
There are only two animals (not bacteria or viruses please note) that are really dangerous i. e. humans and malaria plasmodia.
Pretty easy to continually spook them in a quick grab digital age-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/scientists-say-intensifying-heatwaves-will-soon-make-australian-cities-‘uninhabitable’/ar-BBFLMto
and those that actually produce the wealth are noticing they’re getting increasingly detached from the reality of what produces their lifestyle-
http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/mining-must-compete-with-the-allure-of-facebook-and-google-says-gold-miner-20171123-gzrhl6.html
I might add that ‘climate scientists say’ seems to come from Dr Elizabeth Hanna of ANU presumably here-
https://theconversation.com/profiles/liz-hanna-18032
and note “She swapped a clinical career in in Intensive Care to health protection, environmental health and climate change”, yada, yada, as you do because there’s clearly more tax bucks and kudos in preaching than doing nowadays-
http://www.climatemediacentre.org.au/spokespeople/president-of-the-climate-and-health-alliance-caha/
Wow you track down a presumed ‘climate scientist that says’ in a typical media scary puff piece and you come up with-
http://www.climatemediacentre.org.au/about/
“We connect journalists to compelling yarns, trusted voices and fresh opinion – fast!”
So take your pick if you’re in need of one of these compelling yarnists-
http://www.climatemediacentre.org.au/spokespeople/
The correlation is that leftists mainly infest large cities, and leftists are heavily invested in the global warming nonsense.
Here in Canada we have two tribes, urban and rural. To tell which tribe someone belongs to, just mention the word moonshadow. Rurals know that on a bright moonlit night you can easily see your shadow. Urbans, who live their entire lives surrounded by street lighting, will ask you where they can download their songs.
Alternatively, you can mention the word deer. Urbans will think Bambi or lords of the forest, depending on which television shows they watch. Rurals will think freezer fillers or traffic hazards, depending on where and when you meet them.
Greens are an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. It is a political philosophy about a return to Nature, a philosophy unsullied by the bias that tends to creep in when you actually know something about the subject.
I am sure you have plenty of this same thing in Canada. I went to a grizzly bear information meeting conducted by the state of Wyoming. The meeting was in Laramie and therefore way too close to the highly urban Colorado front range. Every remark was in some way pointed at avoiding the eventual need to kill grizzly bears. The presenter was very adroit in avoiding direct confrontation but in a back handed way he said categorically there is no way the grizzly bear can reoccupy it’s original range: it would take several million bison and you would have to get rid of all the people. That was followed by a brief sputter in the room. The truth sometimes must be spoken, sputter or not.
I wrote a couple of blog entries on this a while back as it relates to the urbanites voting biases and the narrow vertical they push in their self obsessed interests under the guise of saving the planet via renewables and so on. It’s a fascinating take on physical reality, denial and self interest – the opposite of their righteous talk. I don’t think they understand scale. A grain of sand and a 50 ton boulder seem to have the same importance to them – simply words connected by action verbs. As Alice said, “Feed your Head”. Real world STEM not required in that world.
https://notonmywatch.com/?p=1151
https://notonmywatch.com/?p=1185
Eric Worrall: “Does this observation match your experience in your state or country?”
Absolutely! I’ve been saying this for years! Those who spend time in the harsh, impersonal natural world quickly lose their sense of mankind’s power and influence. The more time you spend outside, the more the natural cycles and wide variation are ingrained in you. The more experience you have, the less rare events seem novel and unusual. The more years you spend outside, the more you begin to understand nature’s resilience and ability to adapt to changing conditions.
I’ve spent about three thousand nights in a tent in the Canadian wilderness and this experience, perhaps more than my science training, has given me the background to dismiss so much nonsense from city folks prattling on about what a tenths of a degree is supposedly doing to the natural world.
Urban dwellers are used to dealing with people, and know how people work. Threats, wheedling, attractive fantasies, and bribes are their tools. In the country, people have to deal with nature; threatening, wheedling, bribing, or fantasizing do not work on storms.
As you might expect, people outside of cities have a more realistic knowledge of the natural world. They may be conservationists, but they seldom are Greens.
“Threats, wheedling, attractive fantasies, and bribes are their tools.” – city slickers ; )
Yes Eric, having lived in a remote bush mountain area on a sizeable property for 20 years, along with a scattered community, I shake my head in disdain about the preposterous notions that city based greenies have about the bush.
It’s clear that none of them ever spend time in remote bush areas away from mobile phone coverage.
Given where they prefer to live, they should rename themselves The Greys.
Yep, Michael Berkman is currently employed as an environmental lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office, Queensland.
Specifically, he’s worked on the various ‘lawfare’ campaigns against the Adani coal mine project.
The Guardian reckons he’s also an environmental scientist.
https://www.edoqld.org.au/our_successes
Prior to that he was Principal Policy Officer, Office of Climate Change, Queensland Government.
He was interviewed on their ABC last night by Karina Carvalho.
At the end of the interview, Karina provided the disclaimer that Michael Berkman is the son of an ABC employee.
Gotta keep it in the family doncha know.
Jeez Raven ya want to be careful listening to that marxist station. Never know what crazy ideas might infect you.
No wonder unions have become less reliable voting blocks. At some point they have to look around.
I have a slightly different take on why the “green” vote is in the cities.
I think that urbanites are so disconnected from nature that there is some sort of deep feeling in the psyche (whether recognize or not) that there is something deeply wrong with their environment & that people are the cause – which is true of living in a big city. Thus also why they whole heartedly buy into CAGW – the meme fits the world they live in. And they feel helpless to change it (which is true) – so they need the government to rescue them.
As has been noted in many blog posts here, CAGW’ers tend to be anti-human, when you get down to the roots of their thinking. Again, living in the city, there are too many people. It is not natural. I think at some deep level they want less people , thus the anti-human tendencies. It’s like too many rats in cage – they start to eat their own.
In rural living, you need to be self-sufficient & you rely on your neighbors for help from time to time. People are an asset, not a problem. The government is not needed to rescue you. You are grounded in the land and know real problems vs. fabricated problems. You don’t have a deeply rooted feeling that something is wrong with the environment because you are not living in some sort of urban hellhole. You are surrounded by nature. Until very recently in human history, that is how everyone lived. That is how we evolved to live.
Just my 2 cents on the situation, having lived in both urban & rural settings over the years.
Insightful comment which makes me wonder if you can sort political leanings like that based on their ultimate holiday preference. I like the great Outback, no particular timetable and free camping under the stars but I’m well aware that scares the daylights out of many urbanites and they seem to prefer flying to far off urban destinations or closed resorts all booked and sorted. Loved motorcycling in my younger days too and naturally understood Pirsig’s, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance intuitively. Perish the thought you’d have wired music inside a helmet for company.
Yes indeed. Urban folk have minimal contact with the real natural world. Their ‘experience’ with it comes mostly from TV so they are easily and constantly duped.
And when you have a mass of people living in thermostatically controlled 22 C conditions, anything outside of that range is ‘extreme’ so they are very easily fooled into believing the ‘extreme weather’ line.
Its all part of the plan – Agenda 21 – to pack the sheep into easily controlled settings.
The Scottish Parliament is elected using the Additional Member System of proportional representation. There are 73 constituencies which elect one MSP each using the first-past-the-post electoral system. In addition there are 56 MSPs elected in eight Regions. These 56 are elected in such a way as to make the overall result fairly proportional. Elections have been held in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2016. The Scottish Green Party do not usually put up candidates in any of the 73 constituencies. In 1999 they won one seat. This was in Lothian Region which is dominated by Edinburgh, Scotland’s second largest city by population. In 2003 they won two seats, one in Lothian Region and one in Glasgow Region. Glasgow means ‘dear green place’ and it does indeed have several large parks. But it is Scotland’s largest city by population and is hardly known for its wild natural environment. Since 2003, Glasgow and Lothian have been the only Regions in Scotland to have elected a Green MSP in every election.
The Green MSP for Glasgow Region is Patrick Harvie. Harvie identifies as bi-sexual, if that has any relevance. He seems to spend as much time, if not more, talking about sex than about the environment. Do a Google search on his name and what comes up is mostly about sex.
climanrecon
The Greens must have changed their mind in Lewes constituency as the result on the BBC website has voting figures for Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour but no Green. Anyway, the absence of a Green candidate did not affect the result as the Conservative candidate increased her majority significantly from 1,083 to 5,508.
There are currently 6 Green MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament). There is no mention on their Wikipedia pages of having attended any University for four of them. One of the four was formerly a police officer and another was a ‘writer and researcher’. Patrick Harvie attended Manchester Metropolitan University but there is no mention of the subjects he studied. Wightman has a degree in forestry. And Greer studied Psychology and Politics but left University before graduating. Most of them (the six) seem to have spent most, if not all, of their working lives working for lobbying groups.
In Germany city folk embrace the return of the wolves, the sheep farmers have mixed feelings to say the very least. In the Netherlands farmers and their wives have protested against the annual starving of domesticated bovine (Heck cattle) and equally domesticated equine (Konik horses) in an undersized “natural environment” ( a man made semi-wetland (in the 60-ties where previously was a brackish sea), with insufficient feed and no predators which under the The Hague government pastoral doctrine is the apex of nature and for which negligence any farmer would be fined or prosecuted. Since the reintroduction of the European Beaver (castor) caused a headache in the defense of the dykes in the Netherlands and the reintroduction of the European Hamster (cricetus) cost a fortune (some 100.000 USD per specimen -for a rodent IUCN “least concern”-) thank goodness our regional government is unanimously opposed to a reintroduction of the otter (lutra) in Europe’s most densely populated country with the busiest railway and highway traffic.
Sounds stange. Beaver dams can certainly cause flooding but beavers only tunnel when building lodges, and if a dyke is so weak that it can be undermined by a beaver lodge, then it needed strengthening anyhow.
I live in Brisbane and the Greens were pretty smart this campaign. They hardly mentioned environmental policy. Instead they focused on kicking big business out of politics, and attacking the liberal party and one nation. BTW I’m not trying to defend Greens, they put the mental in environmentalist
I have a friend (ex-green) who thinks the same. He says that being a green nowadays is not a matter of politics, it’s a diagnosis.
In British Columbia, Canada, the only 3 Green party candidates come from the urban areas – with all of them from Vancouver Island and surrounds. So. They must think their tree-lined streets constitute nature… However, the 96% of the province that is reliant upon reality and resource development/management is overwhelmingly supportive of the only party which at best, can be described as not obstructive to resource development. Unfortunately, when I say 96%, I mean 96% of the land mass of the provinc, not 96% of the people… The majority of the people live in the densely populated SW corner of the province and do not vote in favour of any party which supports resource development – despite being intense consumers of resources!
The disconnect between people in urban areas and the reality of what sustains their lifestyle is increasingly more and more depressing.
I think you got a bit carried away about the perils of Queensland north of Brisbane. I lived 1,000 ks north of Brisbane for eight years and visited the north often after that and never encountered any of those nasties you describe.
The Greens recently easily won a by-election for the Victorian inner Melbourne seat of Northcote. This seat has been held by the Labor Party since being created over 100 years ago. Victoria currently has a Socialist Left, Labor government, with extremist policies on Green issues like renewables and social and gender manipulation. Obviously not extreme enough for the inner city concrete Greens though.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/greens-labor-battle-for-the-seat-of-northcote/news-story/c86c6031082b6990cfed9d2f1cb23b24
Wow- looks like the lefties gave the Conservatives and the racist-wackjob party a damn good dicking.
One Nation out-polled the Greens by 40%…..
Amazing result for a small party trying to establish itself……..
Only the LNP got pounded….. totally justified, because they no longer represent conservatives.
but hey, don’t let facts get in the way of your mindless rant.
Who’s ranting? I’m ecstatic! The One Nation nutters have managed to depress the LNP vote so much so that they’re on track to lose 8 to 9 seats. That really is something for an opposition party and really the worst possible outcome for the LNP. At least if One Nation got one seat the public would see what a useless bunch of nutjobs they are. This way their mind boggling incompetence will at least not be on show until the next election. Personally I can’t wait until Labour fulfills their progressive agenda next term with a majority in their own right!
One Nation will have at least one member, Greens probably NONE.
Katter maybe three !
ALP may not get enough seats to form a majority.
The rascist wackjob party dick themselves, they don’t need anyone’s help.