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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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There is also an environmental/industrialisation angle (the ideal of ruralised life in Florida and the reality of ersatz parades and lawns).

This is way apart from your point and so I’m sorry, but Florida has a really interesting dynamic, where conservationists and ranchers have teamed up against urban/suburban development.

Florida has a huge influx of people (1000/day, they say), and is a very hot market for developers. Ranchers tend to preserve Florida as at least it was since the Spanish arrived 500 years ago and started herding cattle there. The open spaces can still hold a lot of biodiversity and provide some important ecosystem services (especially regarding water filtration and runoff) for the population. Thus, ranchers and environmentalists have teamed up.

This unlikely association (tending to fall on opposite sides of heated debates elsewhere) formed a coalition that effectively advocated for a long time for the Florida Wildlife Corridor to be signed into law, which it finally was last year.

https://archive.ph/NbUu4

As a blue tribe biologist whose forays across the United States often lead into red tribe lands, Florida conservation issues were the place where I saw most blue-red cooperation of anywhere I’ve been. Working alongside cowboys and wealthy city conservatives buying ranches to hold them against development to be part of the FWC, a very bold conservation proposal (biggest conservation corridor in the country) made by blue tribe conservationists, negotiated with red tribe ranchers, and signed into law by a conservative government, it was an interesting dynamic.

An article on this:

https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/11/florida-ranch-habitat-conservation

Yeah this is talked about in the doc, mostly in regards to a) water usage and b) conflict between the two sets of people. Thanks for the extra detail.

I wonder to degree such cooperation is rare, even in cases where some blue-aligned and red-factions agree, due to one tribe thinking that granting the other a victory legitimizes an "enemy" which one doesn't think should be permitted to exist. A sort of Cordon sanitaire.

Also if such tendency is more common in red or Blue tribe.

Environmentalist groups tend to have a much wider focus than just conservation, e.g. the Sierra Club and Union advocacy, that excludes Red Tribe conservationists that would much rather work with Red Tribe conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited (who are a 800lb gorilla of domestic conservation because of this.)

Overall, it is white progressives, not right-wingers, who constitute the most intolerant group in America, and who are also far more likely to eschew contacts with political opponents than any group.

https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/#Losing_a_Friend_over_Politics

Data point of one, but when Texas was debating legalizing the use of poison for feral hog control, deep red triber hunting groups and fairly blue tribe environmental groups stood together on the losing side against it.

That sounds more like a classic Baptists-and-Bootleggers situation: the environmentalists were probably concerned about the impact the poison would have on the rest of the local biosphere/food-chain/w.e., and the hunters, as per that one meme about the AR-15, were fine just shooting the things to keep their numbers down (and get some food in the process).

Not that I'm criticizing this alliance, mind you, I think those are both defensible reasons to oppose that measure.

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