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.
I have lived in the US southeast for a long time. Within that time, Jim Crow, made possible and extended for nearly a century by a North-South Democrat compromise, was largely broken by the shaming tactic of painting all of the inhabitants of a region as either racists or victims of racism. A noble goal reached through a vile tactic which was effective when the south was some distant and isolated place to 75% of the US population.
Fast forward to today and the same tactic, “everyone who disagrees with me is a racist”, is once again in favor for activists. Lets see how it plays out when the “racists” are not some strange terrible people we will likely never meet and living in a different region, but instead our own family members and neighbors.
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” — Saul Alinsky
I can’t imagine why a region which has high rates of white poverty would laugh off a self-important rich white liberal who comes along to inform all the Walmart workers of how privileged they are.
The take away from this latest Guardian article is, don’t read the Guardian.
Most people don’t. From this kind of narrow minded piece which is so typical of Guardian output, it is easy to understand why the Guardian is in financial trouble.
Just ignore them.
Until they open up and allow those, whose views are different from their own column space to contribute, don’t support them in any way whatsoever.
If they do not open up debate they will continue to decline, just like their broadcasting partner the BBC will continue to decline.
If they imagine, people like Monbiot and his ilk, will save them from ignominious insignificance, they are sadly deluded.
There are endless alternative sources of stories and factual reports available today on line, use them, and let the Guardian know you have stopped clicking on or taking the hard copy option.
Sure there is a crisis, a climate SCIENCE crisis.
There seems to be this common trait amongst these activists. They are all about having a conversation, a dialogue, but when it strays from repetition of scripture then they need to investigate the strange phenomenon.
Am i the only one who read her article and didn’t see anything in it that was climete related except for several bland unsupported assertions that whatever environmental ill she was discussing would only be made worse by climate change? Not even “has been made worse by climate change”.
Here in rural Eastern Virginia we are unbelievers; we have online access to the State of Virginia temperature records which have not been normalized by the fictioneers at NOAA. Hence we see that it is no warmer now than it was thirty years ago or sixty years ago and that it was yet warmer in the 1930s. But that’s factual information and doesn’t count. Who was it said “don’t confuse me with facts, my mind’s made up”?
I saw she dragged out the old nonsense about Norfolk (about sixty miles away so how could us rubes know anything about it) being one of the most flood prone areas due to climate change which hasn’t actually happened. A journalist interested in facts could have dug out information viz:
Much of Norfolk was built on filled swamp which has been compacting for centuries. Also groundwater depletion has been so severe that earth has subsided and there is saltwater intrusion as far as Sandston VA. Norfolk is on the edge of a huge asteroid crater which is still slowly filling in – down hill wasting occurs under water too. She might also have learned that the whole area is subject to sinking as a result of isostatic rebound. more pesky facts!
I guess I’ll have to be sent to a re-education camp to unlearn everything I learned at university about Math, Physics, Earth Sciences (physical Geography, Climatology & Geology etc) and learn to believe neofascist propaganda instead.
Maybe she should have ‘criss-crossed’ the region in April & May this year-when it was still cold or atleast not hot, in most of the USA including the south.. that might make the ‘denialism’ more understandable then visiting in August when it’s ‘blistering’. and ofcource she thisks ‘blistering’ temps in the deep south in the middle of summer indicated ‘climate change’.
Funny how it’s never those pesky Chinese or Indians or Africans. They are the ones wanting build coal power plants.