Extinction Rebellion Protests

Ive had them pretty well everywhere ive lived in the countryside. They all want to turn the countryside into a pretty museum piece as a lovely backdrop for where they live and complain all the time about tractors on the roads and harvesters working late into the night in summer and cows mooing sheep baaaing the smell of farm animals and manure.
They fail to realise the only reason the countryside looks pretty like it does is because its worked by farmers as the rural industry it is.

If it was managed without farm animals it would just prairie landscape of cereal and veg crops and to manage those efficiently with large machines would mean losing hedgerows.

I remember years ago some agri uni greenie come to the Hebrides telling farmers they were doing it all wrong not using or managing the Machair properly - the ancient wild flower and grass meadows that provide feed for farm animals when harvested in summer and a rich breeding ground for birds and insects. She soon left lol,the Machair are protected now and managed how theyve always been.

When I lived in rural somerset I met loads just like Cris mentioned who moaned about the tractors,muddy roads and church bells , yet they were stupid enough to buy a house in the country.

Common sense is often a quality of the common person !!

The latest is the protesters are voluntarily ending their protest at 5pm tomorrow, and have already left two of the sites.
It's not Easter Holidays any more is it?

At least youve pointed out one thing i knew already Boaty,that theres no point being on a forum discussing anything.
Except the weather and whats for tea...

I have mixed feelings about the protests; I can understand people being unhappy about the disruption but equally wonder what it will take to make people 'wake up' and make the necessary changes? And I also wonder if people can make the necessary changes now, because our infrastructure can make it difficult to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Some areas don't have any local shops any more, or if they do they're trendy deli type places that are quite expensive. Supermarkets cover everything in plastic; I've been making a big effort to go plastic free recently and it's almost impossible to do that if you shop in a supermarket - and a lot of people either don't have alternatives nearby or because they're working 40 plus hours a week and have kids/dog/elderly parents to look after need to be able to grab all their shopping in one go and chuck it all in the back of the car. I'd love to see eco friendly supermarkets - everything you need under one roof but everything in reusable packing or something that will biodegrade quickly. But for that you would need government changes to force the big companies to change the way they do things - and no doubt people will moan about higher prices if that becomes a factor as well. I'm not sure if individual efforts are going to be enough. There still seems to be a big disconnect between what needs to be done and having enough people able/willing to do it.

I've been looking into medicinal cannabis recently, very interesting and a lot of groups campaigning for people to be able to use cannabis medically and/or recreationally without having to go through a doctor or any sort of government source, and there were pics up on Facebook about the 420 get togethers, where people openly smoke in public places. There was one in Hyde park at the same time that the extinction rebellion protests were going on and the rubbish the 420 group left behind was horrifying. It just struck me as a good example of the disconnect between different processes - you have a large group of people who want to legalise a plant - who have so little respect for the environment they need to grow the plant that they can't even be arsed to put their rubbish in the bin, never mind not create it in the first place. I just don't know what needs to be done to get people making those connections, other than governments basically just banning anything that's damaging so that companies are forced to change what they do and people just have to suck it up. But I can imagine the outrage it would cause; there's a petition going at the minute asking McDonalds to change their straws back from paper ones to plastic ones because the paper ones go soggy and people don't like them. It just seems beyond some people to focus on bigger issues and I think that's a very hard problem to overcome x

Yes that's what I heard as well, although I also heard that the pics of all the rubbish left by the 420 thing were being put up with people claiming it was extinction rebellion that had made all the mess!  I'm like a grumbling old mad person about rubbish, I genuinely can't understand why people can't put things in a bin.  We went to the supermarket today, only a ten minute walk but the amount of rubbish just lying around is bonkers.