Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Guardian contributor Megan Mayhew Bergman has written a series of columns about why she thinks Southerners don’t get the climate crisis.
What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year
I crisscrossed a region – my own – that is mired in a culture of denial and delay. The conversation on the climate crisis has not changed fast enough.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Wed 7 Aug 2019 20.00 AEST…
I thought that Hurricane Florence might serve as a turning point in the conversation about the realities of climate change in a region still mired in a culture of denial and delay. After a year of research and reporting, I am not convinced that the conversation has changed fast enough, if much at all. Here in Beaufort, like Miami and Charleston, I encounter deniers, continued waterfront development, hurricane damage and blistering temperatures.
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I saw more of the south while reporting for this column than I ever saw in my 30 years of living there. My travel reinforced what I already knew: there is no one south. In 2019 it is multitudinous, diverse and still reckoning with its plantation economy and cruel social history. It has PhDs, evangelicals, Trump enthusiasts, environmentalists, artists and activists. It’s this very tension that has often made the south the genesis of social movements; one hopes it might happen again, and soon.
Social and environmental racism, income inequality and poverty are as present as they have ever been, and are only weaponized by climate change, as I reported from Virginia and Natchez, Mississippi.
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What does a better and more inclusive conversation look like? Non-traditional environmentalists can be critical allies in addressing the culture of climate change denial below the Mason-Dixon Line, like hunters in Arkansas and evangelical Christians in places like St Simons, Georgia. But too often, the perspectives and interests of frontline communities are ignored, further exacerbating the environmental racism so pervasive in the south.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/07/climate-change-us-south-what-i-learned-writing-about-for-a-year
One theme which continues to shock me is how intolerant many allegedly inclusive green liberals are. If you disagree with them about climate change, they say all sorts of vile things about your views and your culture, even if they grew up in that culture as Megan did.
“Environmental racism” ? Seriously?! If ever there was a pompous pre-set judgement of people this is it! No view except that of the author is acceptable- all others are intolerable and worthy of despicable name calling. Despite all the exposed lies, manipulation Bad, bad, bad, bad record on climate predictions these true believerse are intolerant to the point of disbelief.
The People of the South have strong “regional memory” reinforced by a robust oral and spoken tradition. Events of various kinds, including weather, are retold and passed on to succeeding generations, which when mixed with a natural skepticism, make it harder to convince folks that’s it’s hotter, wetter, more stormy, etc. now than in the past.
The Scientific Method requires more than conjecture or speculation. It requires Proof that is beyond reproach. My children and grandchildren, plus nieces, nephews, cousins, etc.(and friends) get that lesson from me (and others). Result: one becomes many.
“We do not need to hear another word from deniers, or cater to their anti-science position.”
So much for “conversation. What a moron, and hypocrite.
What race is the environment and how can one be racist towards it?
The left’s use of the race card is getting more and more absurd every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism
Most normal people call it being enviromentally responsible but the nutcase socialist left has to try to connect it back to big bad capitalists. If its bad it’s our fault and we must pay.
OH!
So it is cutting down the trees of those ethnically different from you and then doubling down by dumping your waste in the newly cleared location?
I was honestly wondering if was something like refusing to serve deciduous trees in bars and refusing conifers the vote.
(Don’t start me on those eucalyptus! Doing nothing all day except clogging the gutters and vandalising cars!)
As a lifelong Masshole and former Useful Idiot democrat I can state from experience that for decades southerners have been falsely portrayed as dumb racists by the globalist media; but in truth they know better than the rest of the country what’s going on under our noses. Some of the best citizen journalists are from the deep south and I had to get over my conditioned bigotry, hearing their lyrical drawl as dimwitted, to appreciate their stunning insights.
Everything is upside down. Malignant globalist forces have infiltrated the organs of power and the big lie rules. Smoke & mirrors. The Luciferian principle. Once we fully realize it, it will fall away. Only our belief maintains it. Cancer cells fool immune cells into accepting the illusion until it’s too late. But we still have time, borrowed time thanks to Super Immune Cell Trump.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
“Everything is upside down. Malignant globalist forces have infiltrated the organs of power and the big lie rules.”
That’s about the size of it. The Left has control of Society’s Megaphones the news media and entertainment media and they create a false reality in which they want all the rest of us to live.
No thanks. I prefer reality to delusion.
If you want to find racism and segregated neighborhoods, the best place to look is in the North.
Ignoring your own problems by attacking others is one the oldest traditions of the left.
Did the interwebs eat my post? I hate that. And I dispise elitist snobs looking down their noses at us po trash down heah in the deep souph.
Megan doesn’t get it – there IS NO “climate crisis.”
Michael
That was my question as well.
??? crazy with ideology and invented terms.
“Mega Mayhem” Bergman gives the impression of being a very frustrated person, like so many alarmists, who see their green utopia recede over the horizon. But fear not! Soon, from that same horizon, a saviour will emerge, when Greta sets forth from Plymoth.
Wouldn’t quantum physics speculation allow for parallel worlds? Mis Bergman is clearly living in one. Fiction writer…Bennington College Nuf said
/signed/ a Southerner living in the world we call ‘real’
Liberalism is a cult. They’re tolerant of everyone who agrees with them, and hate everyone else.
Because they are right. They are on the right side of history, and therefore anyone who disagrees with them is evil.
Fortunately, the Internet has let all the sane people see this, as it allows liberals to post their hatred to the world without censorship.
To the left tolerance means that black liberals cannot be questioned and black conservatives are traitors to their race.
It has always amused me to watch white liberals go around telling blacks and other minorities what they are supposed to believe and think.
Welcome to our world. Florida family since it was the original wild west.
I submit arrogant intellectuals are some of the most bigoted people I know.
She saw more of the South writing for her column than in 30 years living there? What did she do for thirty years? Walk about with a paper bag over her head perhaps?
I am only astonished that utter claptrap like this gets published even in the Grauniad.
I think she should apologise to the people of the South for as bigoted and prejudiced a piece of self-serving drivel as one could wish not to see. I’ve never been to the South of the USA but I simply don’t believe her monotyping of the people there.
Thank you for your eloquent and spot on assessment of this “journalist”. I have lived in the South Carolina for over 50 years. The vast majority of Southerners are gracious and considerate of others, even those we disagree with. We can be willfull and strongly independent at times, but are always willing to lend an ear or helping hand. But always remember what South Carolinian Christopher Gadsen said in 1778…”Don’t Tread on Me”
Similarly I have never been to East Anglia, but got close once, probably as close as she got to the situation she wrote about. I have lived (in 5 states) and traveled in the area of concern from Virginia to Texas since the 1950s. It is true that there has not been much discussion about climate change, hurricanes a lot. The south she wrongly concluded about has changed a lot, hurricanes not much, human adaptation to them a little better, but still a problem. Just went by a newly opened rebuilt motel on the water, floor level a little over a meter above sea level. No storm surge there from Harvey, but wind damage, other storms have flooded the area. She might do a piece on that sort of “unchanged” human behavior in North Carolina, it would be very useful.
From her column—- “Social and environmental racism, income inequality and poverty are as present as they have ever been, and are only weaponized by climate change, as I reported from Virginia and Natchez, Mississippi.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/07/climate-change-us-south-what-i-learned-writing-about-for-a-year
But then there is always dark chocolate.
https://www.healio.com/family-medicine/nutrition-and-fitness/news/online/%7Bbe1d2457-ae6f-41a1-9d8d-c5636a7a0016%7D/eating-dark-chocolate-may-reduce-depression-risk
“What did she do for thirty years? Walk about with a paper bag over her head perhaps?”
I wish Naomi Oreskes would but no, not this one:
Either way, I think this makes me a misogynistic environmental racist. Where can I collect my prize?
When somebody thinks so many regular people are crazy, the most logical reason is because the person evaluating is crazy.
Megan Mayhew Bergman did not get the memo. The race card has been totally played out.
Then people like her set up the “White Supremacist” card to keep the theme going, but that wore out quickly. “White Supremacist” really blew up when they used it on Candace Owens and Dr. Ben Carson.
Bad Move.
Now she tries the old grievance multiplier of “Intersectionality”, so we get absurdities like:
“Social and environmental racism”
“income inequality and poverty”
Of course, all of them are:
“weaponized by climate change”
Good Grief
The people and dawgs of the South are used to extreme weather:
“the culture of climate change denial below the Mason-Dixon Line”
Does the write know where the Mason-Dixon Line actually is ?
(Divides Pennsylvania from Delaware and Maryland)
Sitting just 100 or so miles South of the Line is the biggest aggregation of Climate Wachos East of the Mississippi.
Blistering temperatures?
Southeast US summers are less blistering now than they were 100 years ago…
David,
You obviously have included far too much data into your charts. It is deceptive to produce a chart that indicates virtually no warming since 1900. You need to append your 1900 – 1975 dataset and splice on low resolution proxy data from worm entrails found in sediment cores of dry lakebeds in Death Valley. Surely this would tease out the hidden signal and show the true horror of Human induced Global Climate Catastrophe.
/sarc
What is it with climate skeptics and this galling fascination with facts?
I spent my first 32 years living in the Midwest and the last 16 in the SE. Given my experiences here, I feel confident saying “a southern man don’t need her around anyhow”. 😉
If anything, it is cooler in the part of the South of the USA where I am now, than it was when my grandparents were born. 100F days are rare (had one yesterday for the first time in years). I am a born and raised Southerner and military brat, so I have lived in and visited other parts of the world. (NB, the Mason Dixon line separates the North (Pennsylvania) from the South (Maryland and Delaware). During the unpleasantness 150+ years ago, these were on the border. I understand they don’t want to acknowledge their Southern heritage.)
The modern Democrat party was born in the Old South, that is, Virginia; where John C. Calhoun and some Breckinridges got the “bright” idea of a natural aristocracy (where have we heard that one, before? 😉 ). The Democrat party in the USA has been the Party of Slavery, Dispossession, Theft and Death for nigh on 200 years. They haven’t changed a bit. Ol’ Jim wasn’t just a Southern thing (heard that from grandma many times, for she went North to work for a time). Jim was more formal here, yes; just like slavery beforehand. [As Ronald Reagan said, “It isn’t so much that my ‘liberal’ friends are ignorant; it is that so much they do ‘know’ isn’t so”, and that’s still true of them.
Environmental racism..I love it.
Seems that our progressive comrades did not take the Emperors New Clothes as a cautionary tale of Gullibility,vanity and false virtue.
The ramblings of this astonishingly self centred clown serve to remind me of two things.
1)The naked emperors are ugly.
2) A country and western ditty titled “I don’t look good naked anymore.
Of course she,the writer,might be right purely by accident.
The Song “Oh Susanna” indeed mocks the weather challenged and I believe it was written in the “Deep South”
The Grauniad is hanging on by its fingernails, its so desperate that its even willingly become a sort of Goebbelesque conduit for what HMG used to call ‘Public Information’ It’d not be too hard to think that if it carried articles that ran counter to the perceptions of its dwindling band of paying readers, its demise would be declared suicide.
Whilst it would be entertaining to imagine that the Guardian has the sort of influence once enjoyed by the likes of Pravda, or even Der Sturmer, the reality is that its a failing organ that will no doubt share the fate of the Morning Star and Daily Herald. 🙂
Ah yes, the great self-declared, enlightened few who come out to the “sticks” to help us “backwoods” hillbillies see the error of our ways. LOL!! In most liberal university settings, I’ve observed that education and common sense are inversely proportional.
Obviously the emotive journalists from the ever virtue signaling tax dodging periodical (see https://order-order.com/2012/11/26/the-guardians-offshore-secrets-guardian-media-group-still-operates-caymans-company/ ), never read any historical data about how hot it got in the 1930s, or how so many families were displaced (real climate/weather refugees) during those times. Here’s a tip Megan Mayhew Bergman, read John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and consider how those families survived the environmental and financial hard times of the 1930s.
Or read a more involved scientific analysis at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/migration-in-the-1930s-beyond-the-dust-bowl/ADC2D805788D4544098483858496AFAE
“Here’s a tip Megan Mayhew Bergman, read John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and consider how those families survived the environmental and financial hard times of the 1930s.”
Or she could go get herself a copy of all the weather headlines during the 1930’s. If she did she would see that tens of thousands of people were dying from extreme weather events during the 1930’s, all over the world.
Did tens of thousands of people die from extreme weather events over the last decade all over the world? No, the comparison of the numbers isn’t even close. The 1930’s were the most extreme decade of the 20th and 21st centuries by far.
I used to have a list of some weather headlines from the 1930’s. I’ll look around and see if I can find it.
The thing I took away from The Grapes of Wrath is that not one of the Joads ever did do a lick of work in that novel.
Did I miss it somewhere?
One must laugh at her faux moral outrage that it is hot in the South in the summer, due to all the racism and ignorance and climate change….etc. We need more writers like this to alienate leftists to win them over to our side as new skeptics.
Let us not forget these are people who get deeply angry if anyone suggests that “all lives matter”, if anyone says there are two genders, if anyone opines that it is a bad idea to let men decide one fine day to call themselves a woman and then compete against woman athletes, or if anyone points out that a baby is a human being before it is born.
IOW…these are not exactly rational people.
However, if we keep pointing out the hypocrisy and lack of rational thinking on the part of leftists, I think more and more people in the middle…the ones who decide the elections…may decide that voting for such people may not be such a great idea.
What the hell is environmental racism?
That is not even a thing…just some made up word package.
When the left wants to prevent conversation on something, they apply one or another appellations to the subject or to anyone who might disagree, and the word “racist” is hands down their favorite.
Like all of their epithets, the definition is as malleable as circumstances require.
Christianity? Not a race. Hate on Christians all you want.
Islam? Clearly a race. Even mentioning the religion or bringing up the subject can and often will get you branded, so watch it buddy!
Canada? Not a race. Say what you like about Canadians.
Mexico? Clearly a race. Suggesting we ought to enforce a border with that country is clearly as racist as a person can get…as of the day Donald Trump announced for President that is.
It means anything and everything.
And is not used in contexts where the usage is completely obscure, such as the term “environmental racism”.
As such, the word is now so overused as to be meaningless.
To me the word means one thing: A racist is a person that views the entire world through the lens of the color of a person’s skin.
Sorry, a typo that obscures what I was saying:
“And is NOW used in contexts…”
is what I meant to type.
Environmental racism is the belief that either poor people or factories need to move to wealthy neighborhoods.