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Saturday, November 23, 2019

Chris Trotter: The Message From Messenger Park.


Coasters Turn Out In Droves: It’s precisely the widening gulf between those with actual experience of things like guns, chainsaws and drilling machines, and those who regulate their use, that accounts for the angry crowd at Greymouth’s Messenger Park on Sunday, 17 November 2019. In the rarefied atmosphere where decisions to shut down whole industries are made, hands-on experience is not only rare – it’s despised. What do workers know about anything?

THE NUMBERS WERE IMPRESSIVE. Indeed, it looked as is half the Coast had turned out to give this government a piece of its mind.

Many of those present wore their work-clothes. Lots of high-viz vests and brightly-coloured safety helmets – those universal signifiers of blue-collar labour – were on display. Hardly surprising. The West Coast has long celebrated its status as the birthplace of the New Zealand labour movement. Trade union historian, Bert Roth, dubbed its fiery founding fathers – Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb and Bob Semple – “Two-Gun Men from the West Coast”. Labour’s current MP, Damian O’Connor, has been called many things in his time, but a “Two-Gun Man” isn’t one of them!

About the only thing the modern Labour Party has to do with the region’s two-gun men is its grim determination to turn them all into One-Gun, or No-Gun, West Coasters.

It’s what makes law-abiding gun-owners so damned mad. Growing up with firearms invariably instils a strong ethic of care and responsibility in their users. Seeing up-close what a high-powered rifle can do to a deer or a pig makes sure of that. If the bureaucrats sipping coffee on Lambton Quay, most of whom have never fired a gun in their lives, understood that ethic, then they might be a little less fearful – and a lot less judgemental.

It’s precisely this widening gulf between those with actual experience of things like guns, chainsaws and drilling machines, and those who regulate their use, that accounts for the angry crowd at Greymouth’s Messenger Park. In the rarefied atmosphere where decisions to shut down whole industries are made, hands-on experience is not only rare – it’s despised. What do workers know about anything?

That’s the question isn’t it? What do workers know? The answer, of course, is “more than they think”.

For a start, they know that human-beings have been changing nature for millions of years. From the moment some brave ancestor pulled a burning branch from the edge of a blazing forest, our species ceased to be just another mammal. From chipping flint to smelting steel, humanity’s relentless drive to innovate and alter has granted it, in the solemn language of Genesis: “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

You don’t truly understand this truth until, using your own strength and skill, and the strength and skill of your workmates, you collectively transform your world. And that sort of truth: the knowledge you gain down in a mine or felling a tree: you won’t find in a book anywhere.

Workers know that all those people in the cities going on and on about “keeping the coal in the ground” don’t understand that without the high-quality coking-coal from places like the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, the world’s steel mills couldn’t function. Without steel there is no modern world. Without coking-coal we’re back in the Iron Age – cutting down whole forests to make the charcoal crucial to the smelting of iron and most other metals.

Workers know what civilisation is made of because they extract it every day.

Farmers are the same. They know what it takes to coax crops out of the ground. How much they are beholden to forces no human-being can ever truly tame or control. They also know what city dwellers pampering their pets in suburban bungalows do not. That the relationship between human-beings and animals has always been one of ruthless exploitation. As inescapable as it is irreducible: we consume them.

It’s a hard world – as hard as the callouses on the hands of those who work it. And there is precious little which the world is able to surrender to us without long and bitter struggle.

In the process of exploiting its plants, animals and minerals is humankind damaging this world? Are we ruining the atmosphere by wrenching from its bowels the fossil fuels that make our lives so much easier?  

The answer from the protesters of Messenger Park is “Yes.”, and “Yes.” And, unless we want to return to the day before that brave ancestor picked up that burning branch, they’re telling us to “get over it”. Nothing comes from nothing.

Nobody lives closer to Mother Nature than the people of the Coast.

It’s hard work.

Chris Trotter is a political commentator who blogs at bowalleyroad.blogspot.co.nz. This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star.

1 comment:

Green Genie said...

UN IPCC Scientist Blows Whistle on Lies About Climate, Sea Level
com/tech/environment/item/31472-un-ipcc-scientist-blows-whistle-on-un-climate-lies Feb 2019

Nils-Axel Mörner: Fiji ‘Flooding’ is Fake News
UN IPPC Whistleblower is a Science Realist from Sweden who surveyed modern and historical Fiji Sea Level and finds Sea Level constant since the Solar Maunder Minimum (Little Ice Age). He warns the deaf policy bloats that a Cooling is a Coming. Solar Activity and Sun barycentre Earth distance explain paleo temperatures, and evidence for exploding Nebulae bombardment by Cosmic Rays, while Ocean Plate Tectonic subsea and landmass Volcanic Activity, Ash and Sulfate, explain natural causes. Human caused pollution, the Hole in the Ozone, Fluorocarbon Uranium Gas Diffusion and Sulfate emissions drive third order effects on a Warming Effects on Climate. Record Highs and Record Lows the past 365 days are equally distributed in NOAA uniform data.. Coastal people are very smart. City dwellers tend to be followers of authority and few are dumb as posts yet intellectual pretenders.

What shocked the Whistleblower and all Climate Realists is the Lobbyist group-think at the UN IPPC, The IPPC Charter mandates one cause, CO2 fossil fuels rubbish; Classical Physics Climate Models are a Fools bargain.. Ted Turner’s UN Foundation $330,0000,0000 went to political influence lobbying according to CEO Tim Wirth statements; these are 2 AntiChrist of the Scientific Method. Trillions in bonds sales and energy restructuring fees to be sold by Goldman is the money that has captured Big Media, Academic and urban globalist politicians. CO2 is not a pollutant. Cosmic Rays will bring in low-level clouds with heavier precipitation.

Modern Quantum Physics,1905 Max Planck heat exchange equation is E=hv. CO2 in sunlight can no more raise temperatures than a cold water bottle can keep your feet warm. Flush then Vote the intellectual yet Idiots out. May the greening of the earth continue. Coral bleaching doesn’t exist off Cuba where the Organic Farming resumed in 1992. Sulfate is vital to Life and Coral Symbiots Reselience. Herbicides iinhibit transulfurization and Nitrogen excess overwhelm Corals off the Florida Keys and Australia’s GBR. Listen to the Coastal people.