‘Avocado Politics’ The Emerging Dominant Reactionary Nimbyism Taking Over English Rural Local Government Politics

You see this across the whole of the South East – Local Politicians Describing themselves as ‘Green’ opposing all major development on Greenfield Sites as ‘climate unfriendly’ but without offering any positive framework as to where development must go. Lets be clear this isn’t progressive, its right wing, reactionary pulling up the drawbridge politics.

Nils Gilman has the perfect term

Unfortunately…embracing a catastrophic view of climate risk — including the threat of creating massive numbers of climate refugees and migrants — is unlikely to provoke “progressive” responses on the Right, but rather quite the opposite. In particular, while the rhetoric of “environmental emergency” may inspire efforts to protect broad-based populations, it may also drive hoarding by the powerful and the exclusion of out-groups. In other words, the barriers that people may want to build to adapt to the realities of rising temperatures may include not only seawalls to hold back the rising tides, but also border walls to hold back the flood of humans fleeing the consequences of climate change, restricting economic development opportunities to white people, or perhaps even outright advocacy of genocide.

This prospect is what for the last decade I have been calling, less descriptively than predictively, “Avocado Politics”: green on the outside but brown(shirt) at the cor

You can see this in places like South Oxfordshire and Uttlesford, reported many times on this blog. You can see it in the leader of Wokingham, district threatening to wave his willy in front of parliament.

He even has a reading list

For folks interested in the growth of "avocado politics," here's a list of recent reporting on (the growth of) this phenomenon:
1: https://t.co/4O24BimdCG
2: https://t.co/Y5uGj0CRiX
3: https://t.co/pBBiJfV7bc
4: https://t.co/yS3LD2uMgD
cc @stewartbrand https://t.co/2EUcHhKmS9

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) March 5, 2019