A Green Wave is coming this November, the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land.
But no more. Politics, like Newton’s third law of physics, is about action and reaction. While President Trump tries to prop up the dying and dirty coal industry with taxpayer subsidies, the outdoor recreation industry has been roaring along. It is a $374-billion-a-year economy, by the government’s own calculation, and more than twice that size by private estimates.
That’s more than mining, oil, gas and logging combined. And yet, the centerpiece of a clean and growing industry is under attack by a president with a robber baron view of the natural world.
LINK (via: The New York Times)
We have similar problems in my country, Britain – lots of people wanting to save wildlife and fine landscape, but, in our case, with a very powerful, landowning and often big bucks, bred-to-blast high-volume bird-shooting interests few going all out to discredit and silence them and generally run them off what historically and traditionally has been their patch (well, “our patch” – the Cosa Nostra British, particularly English, Countryside, to be healthily non-po-faced and irreverent about it).
In times of uncertainty and change, we Brits tend to gather in numbers in London’s Hyde Park, once to see public executions at nearby Tyburn Gate or to riot for cheap bread, later to see the Stones for free in 1969, then the pre-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd the following year etc. And now, I saw during the week, The Peoples Walk For Wildlife is doing the same – as here:
https://twitter.com/ChrisGPackham
For what it’s worth, as Buffalo Springfield once brilliantly sang back in the “hooray for our side”, “so much resistance from behind”, “nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong” 1960s….
High time both hooraying sides stopped fighting among ourselves and started getting it right, or we’ll no longer have the things that please us all somehow yet have to go to silly, destructive, never-ending, social and political, personal and collective, name-calling war about.
The clock is ticking.