this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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I have a lot of respect for Forest and Bird, but using highly emotional language like "destroy a pristine mountaintop and rip up the seafloor" and describing this as a "war on nature" make it much more difficult to take them seriously.
It is though. If they go through, it's destroying something we can't get back so someone can make money. Doesn't matter if later governments change their stance, those places will never be the same.
On the contrary, their language is accurate and describes exactly what is happening.
The fact that you don't think so I feel says more about your political leanings that it does about F&B.
Surely you can appreciate calling this a "war on nature" is a bit ridiculous.
Nobody is setting out to destroy nature, it's just less of a priority for them.
They know exactly what they are doing. They know they will destroy these places, and once they are gone we cannot get them back.
"Less of a priority" lol, they would cut down every last tree and pollute all the water if they could get away with it. This is so far beyond "different priorities" that it's not even funny.
"War on nature" is accurate.
I reckon if you allow someone's tone to dictate whether to take what they say seriously, you're doing yourself a disservice.
If someone is screaming about a house being on fire I'm going to look to see whether it is, not just think oh well they sound hysterical so it can't be true.
In your quotes they used the adjective "pristine", the colloquialism "rip up" and the metaphor "war".
But if you strip away that language the bare facts are that in that list are companies that quite literally destroyed a mountain in one case, destroyed seafloor, and various other highly destructive activities.
For example I see Oceana is on there, a company which bulldozed people's houses and shot a protestor in the Philippines and is always sniffing around Conservation land in New Zealand.
One of the things I really dislike about NZ politics is the amount of hyperbole and over the top language used, from both sides of the aisle, and I very quickly lose interest in what someone has to say if they talk like that.
If what you're saying is true, the truth of the matter is bad enough without them needing to exaggerate.
I'd call it an attempt to use persuasive/emoyive language, not an exaggeration.
I get what you're saying though, and I think I understand it. Not just in politics either. I don't like it when people seem to be telling me what to think - and in my career I always found it more effective to give people the facts and let them make up their own minds.
But, at the end of the day there is a factual reality and I think it would be a mistake to ignore it just because of how someone's opinion on it is delivered.
Forest and Bird is a conservation group, it's understandable they're upset - with this bill we're facing the very likely chance of extinction for some of our unique species e.g the rare frogs (which are super cool, have attributes that make them unique and unlike frogs in the rest of the world).
This isn't just coming from them either, bizarrely Shane Jones keeps saying stuff about how he doesn't care about frogs and they "must go" in his speeches in Parliament, so to me it's pretty obvious that Oceana or Bathurst is going to be allowed to mine Conservation land that is the rare frog habitat.