This was meant to be a post about #howlofaprotest and it kind of still is. I was going to talk about the collapse of the National Party as a driver of farmer unrest who are feeling the weight of the vacuum where there should be political power, and how the left still thinks we can safely ignore and laugh at ute protestors because god Jacinda right is on our side. And I kind of am still saying that.
Because I saw this,
Full Reuters piece here. Whatever finely balanced truth of that particular situation, there are a million others that can easily be put up in its place (so please spare me the reductionist rearranging of the deck chairs).
And here’s the list of Groundswell NZ’s demands (PDF), basically a short inventory of self-serving, climate and ecology denying rhetoric that seems to be saying that farmers can be trusted to do the right things. Despite the evidence. Not even going to unpack that, because All the right words on climate have already been said.
Let me summarise. Climate change is here now, not some distant future for the grandkids to worry about. So is ecological collapse. Life on earth is at serious risk in our lifetimes if we don’t take radical action now.
Let the farmers howl*. I’m more interested in what the people who understand the climate and ecology crises are doing. All the people criticising farmers and ute-owners today, how much are we willing to change our own lives to save life on earth? Or is it just other people that should be making sacrifices and cognitive shifts?
There’s a bit of ironic schadenfreude, hoisted on all our own petards here. The protest’s punchline appears to be no farmers/no food. But the industrial farming model being fought for here is a massive part of why in the end even New Zealand will have food shortages. Yes in New Zealand we want the cheap food the global supply chain serves up and that farmers enable. We’re less concerned about the poor countries that will starve first, and we’ve yet to connect the dots around our own footprints being part of the mass flamingo deaths on the other side of the world.
Farmers aren’t the problem here, they’re the mirror New Zealand is holding up to itself. We say we want change, despite the evidence.
*shout out to the farmers who are doing the right things, and the ones who are moving in the right direction. My apologies for talking about farmers as if a single group, but the hour is getting late.
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