Engineered Hate: This is How It Happened to Me.

None of this is unplanned. None of this is 'normal'.

I found friends. Good friends, who liked me, praised me, wanted to ‘help’ me. Eager to tell me about how involvement in the environmental movement would rock my world. So I said, tell me about it. Three years later I considered myself fully educated. I’d talked to hundreds of people, read all the scary literature, gone to frightening lectures, and with only a little distance, believed it all just might be possible. We were in the Sixth Great Extinction. We only had Ten Years Left.

And then, being properly trained, I started to ask questions. And the moment I did, all my lovely new friends turned on me. My utility to them was that I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s. Not me. I was disposable.

I pushed. I started to talk to foresters, miners, government officials, think tank people, mayors of small towns, farmers. I grew used to people driving into my driveway and getting out of their cars brandishing books and regulations, who would then walk me though through those regulations, showing me how they were being ruined. Their small town? Ruined. Their farms? Ruined.

Not one of the country people I talked to, and I spoke to ten thousand, had anything but a restorative attitude to their resource, farm, mine or forest. Not. One. But I’d sit in a small town mayor’s office deep into Washington state, she walking me through the latest requirement from Fish and Wildlife, saying. “How can I do this?” She’d say. “I have to do this, but if I do, people will starve.”
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/engineered-hate-this-is-how-it-happened-081