How Progressives Provoked the Farmers’ Protests
And How We Can Win Farmers Back
This is the web version of my first newsletter dispatch. Subscribe below to receive the next one in your inbox.
If the last European election was defined by climate activists, this election is likely to be defined by farmers protesting against the very climate policies that we helped win five years ago.
We need to be honest with ourselves about why farmers are protesting.
Growing up in rural Scotland, I would often spend my weekends on the farms of my friends, driving quadbikes around or otherwise being a nuisance. I was not a farmer, but the reality of farmers was ever-present in my life until I left home. Since then, I have become a city boy, a climate activist, a zillenial cliché with a hooped earring and a polyamorous marriage, totally disconnected from the reality of rural communities until the tractors rolled into Brussels and woke me up with the blasting of their horns a few weeks ago.
(How fucking noisy are tractor horns btw? And why? In what situation does a tractor even need a horn??)
This literal wake-up call forced me to do something that is uncomfortable for me and the movement I am a part of - to reckon with the realities of the people who are pushing against our movement. This newsletter is guided by the reading I have done and the conversations I have had since, especially with Matías Rubio. The conversation with Matías was so interesting because he is a rare breed; a leftist who is becoming a farmer in Cantabria, Spain, and who is actively campaigning for climate action and the promotion of democratic participation processes with the movement La Bardal. He’s also pissed off with the climate movement and left-green parties. And let’s be honest with ourselves: Matías is not alone.
Most farmers hate us and our policies.
We need only look at the placards on their tractors or the demands they’re making. Or to listen to Matías’s depressing perspective:
I used to call myself a green but not anymore because I create conflicts and lose friends when I call myself a green. I go into a meeting and they say ‘Matías please tell me you’re not an ecologist’. Farmers, as well as leftists in rural areas, have been let down by left policy. Somehow we feel that we have to decide every day whether to prioritise the pure defence of green policies that come to us from the urban or try to build consensus and dialogue with rural communities. Why does it have to be one or the other?
Of course, far-right misinformation and industrial agriculture lobbying help to drive these protests. But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that we have left farmers behind. To quote Matías on the situation in Spain, “Extreme right parties are putting a lot of money into TikTok and reels that are not branded. There is a full team producing far-right videos talking about farming.” And this is not just online, as shown by the flags and emblems being waved by farmers from Flanders and Spain. There is a clear parallel to the climate protests five years ago which were a grassroots manifestation of fear and anger by young people, which leftists and Greens helped to drive and then profited from in the election that followed. This case is more dangerous, however, with the far-right using misinformation to fuel the fires of anger. “They say that they take wolves from the zoo and put it in our village. For many people, this is a fact.” The openness of people to believe such a conspiracy theory points to a much more simple truth - that people in rural areas feel left behind, and they are looking for someone to blame, which opens the door to far-right indoctrination. To quote, Matîas, “the far-right uses these protests to say that immigrants, homosexuals are the problem.”
But it doesn’t need to be like this. We can get farmers on board with the transition.
As leftists, we talk a lot about listening to the most affected and building bridges for those who are not yet part of the movement. In reality, however, we spend a great deal of time “policing the borders of our movement”, to quote Naomi Klein. Out of noble intentions, we impose a highly inaccessible language on our spaces and often push people out who make innocent, well-meaning infractions on our cultural practices, or who are not yet convinced of one particular strand of our complex intersectional demands. Of course, we should not abandon safe space policies, inclusive language, or our justice narrative. But we also need to have more patience to listen to the people who do not yet fully agree with us. Otherwise, we will perpetuate a culture that feels deeply hostile to everybody except the highly educated left.
Right now, as Greens and leftists, we are trying to force through the transition without farmers.
the people who, within most of Europe, are most exposed to the ravages of climate change. To quote Matías, “we are losing the collective intelligence of the local farmers, and we cannot have this transition without buy-in from the rural communities. Or, if we do, will it be as durable and resilient as we want it to be?”.
What we need is people to go into communities, organise carefully planned spaces and ask locals what is important to them in the language that they speak. Where there is local consensus, we need to listen to that and build from there. Then, we can have difficult conversations about the policies that can meet those needs while protecting life on earth. This is sort of what Matías is doing.
In other words, we need deep organising.
This is not an easy solution. Not only is this a time-consuming long-term strategy, but it is also challenging to build policies from the local level without falling into the trap of NIMBYism, where everybody thinks the change should happen but nobody wants to pay the price. For example, the local consensus in Matías’ community is that they need to control the local wolf population that is decimating so-called livestock. For good reason, wolves are a protected species at the European level so that would be illegal. I don’t have a solution to this. But that is kind of the point!
We will not come up with the correct policy solutions from Brussels. We need the sort of active, democratic engagement with farmers that Matías is doing. The alternative is to continue pushing farmers into the toxic embrace of the far-right.
News
Last Generation in Germany are launching as a political party for the EU election (a bold but bad idea imo) (article)
Activists deflating SUV tires are getting more coverage, which is unsurprisingly critical (article)
Books
Practical Radicals is a new book by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce making a case for how the left can do strategy better (interview with authors)
If We Burn is a new account of mass protests in the 2010s by Vincent Bevins (book review)
Knowledge
Know the communication trends to expect in 2024 (article)
How activists in Australia are fighting criminalisation (article)
Resources
Earth Talk podcast was just released by my pal Leo, interviewing those on the frontline of climate breakdown and the resistance against it (podcast)
The European Centre for Digital Action is launching Digital Progressive magazine and if you join the launch party, you might win a free copy (launch party sign up)
On Monday, I’ll host a discussion with international experts on frequent flyer programmes - an important pillar of the aviation industry’s deadly business model, which the climate movement could do well to chip away at (sign up)