By Andrea Widburg
There’s a report of rampaging seagulls in Scotland. It resonates with me, so I’m sharing it with you. It’s a reminder that part of climate change madness stems from the fact that city dwellers (the ones who most fanatically embrace all leftist shibboleths) are completely removed from anything but curated nature or they truly hate humans.
So, here’s the story from the Daily Mail:
Seagulls are menacing coastal communities and major cities alike, sparking hundreds of complaints to councils the length and breadth of Scotland.
As the birds travel to new areas – increasingly inland – in search of food, we can reveal that nearly 700 complaints have been raised this year already, with the number surpassing last year’s total of around 600.
They include horrifying accounts of children left bloodied by the birds swooping on people and household pets and, while coastal communities are severely affected, complaints also include scores of revolting tales of the gulls feasting on rats in Scotland’s biggest city.
The birds, which are coming further inland to feed than ever before due to reducing fish numbers, are protected under law in Scotland, although special applications can be made to remove them if they pose a serious risk. (Emphasis mine.)
The story plays into my biases because I despise seagulls. I grew up in San Francisco, and my junior high school was two miles from the Pacific Ocean, as the seagull flies. Many kids littered the schoolyard at lunchtime, so the seagulls would brutally harass us for an hour, seizing our food and pecking at and pooping on us. Bats have been described as “rats with wings,” but so are seagulls.
I’m not stupid. I recognize that seagulls are incredibly graceful flyers and have an important role in the natural ecosystem. But I still dislike them intensely, and I feel for their Scottish victims.
The story’s also important because it highlights a few things about leftists.
For all of their climate madness, leftists reject the core survival idea that we must be stewards of nature. Overfishing the oceans will leave us without food. The aggressive seagulls, as they fly further inland, are harbingers of that problem.
Being a steward of nature doesn’t mean being a crazy climate changista. Indeed, it’s the opposite because it sees nature serving man and not vice versa.
Speaking of overfishing the oceans, it’s important to note that the worst practitioners of this are almost certainly Tim Walz’s beloved Chinese. If you’re familiar with the “Tragedy of the Commons,” it is they who are so greedy in the first instance that, soon, nothing will be left for anyone.
Resource depletion is a serious problem and needs to be addressed without the garbage of climate change floating around to impede the real issue.
The seagulls’ aggressiveness should also remind us that nature is red of tooth, claw, and beak. Yes, we can despoil one area (or species) or another, but nature will always reach out to compensate.
I first had this thought during a long-ago visit to Cartagena, Columbia. I found it a grim place because the people lacked the energy and resources to push back against the encroaching jungle. This taught me that containing nature to create habitable communities that favor people requires energy and money, something America once used to have.
I still have that thought daily now that I live in the Southeastern part of the U.S., a place with abundant rain and sunshine. The effort to keep water, plants, and animals from destroying my home never stops and is quite expensive.
Don’t get me started on my travails with squirrels, which are rats with fuzzy tails. I also keep a wary eye out for the ubiquitous alligators in my community. We don’t get the huge ones here, but they’re big enough to do damage to those who aren’t careful with themselves, their children, or their pets. Here, nature is part of the region’s charm, but it’s not friendly.
For those who live in America’s or Europe’s cities, nature is so distant that they have no idea just how unfriendly it is. As leftist cities decay, they’re becoming aware of the scourge of rats, and cockroaches are just a fact of life, but urban leftists have created gauzy, Disney-esque fantasies about the larger predators—e.g., coyotes, bears, lions, boars, wolves, etc. In communities that have started protecting these animals or stop pushing back against them, people are no longer safe:
- Coyote attacks toddler in Woodland Hills in broad daylight: attack captured on video (I know the neighborhood where this happened, and the coyotes are omnipresent and scary).
- Wild Boars Are Causing Havoc In Germany, But Humans Are Making It Worse (I love this COVID-era headline about it being people’s fault)
- Japan wants to make it easier to shoot bears as attacks rise
- Mountain lion attacks, kills pit bull in Sylmar neighborhood
We are having to relearn the same lessons our ancestors always knew: Wild animals and people cannot share the same spaces. It’s a zero-sum game.
When it comes to urban-dwelling leftists, they either don’t understand that it’s a zero-sum game, so they believe in some Arcadian fantasy of co-existence, or they’ve been so brainwashed with hatred against humankind that they want the advantage to go to the animals, with the humans sent to the abattoir. Just look at Kamala Harris’s climate director. She’s explained that she thinks it’s probably unethical to have children because of the climate. She’s not alone.
That seagull story touches on all of it. Instead of focusing on increasing our resources, leftists focus on the chimera of “climate change,” which allows them to redistribute wealth. Meanwhile, people who are naïve (or worse) insist that bears, boars, seagulls, and other beasties should have preference over humans, all in service of a fantasy about coexistence or because they really hate people (except for themselves, of course).