Living with nature

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.

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