I grew up out in the sticks. Real countryside. Deep-tree territory. Part of my childhood was spent in Austria’s Waldviertel—the “Wood Quarter”—a full quarter of Lower Austria, the country’s largest region and one dense with old forests and older silence.
Back then, few things beat roaming the woods. Hunting mushrooms for my mother to turn into soups and stews that tasted like autumn. Building treehouses with splintery boards and crooked nails. Damming up creeks with mud and sticks, launching junk-made boats and watching them wobble down the stream. If I was lucky, they made it to the river—where I usually lost them, along with some piece of my heart.
I’ve loved nature since I was a boy. That’s never changed. No matter where I’ve lived, I’ve always found a way out—out of cities, out of screens, out into the forgotten greenspace most people dismiss as boring. That’s where life happens quietly. That’s where truth doesn’t need a caption.
And then I look at the so-called environmentalists of today. Influencers with tripods, shrieking about the climate while standing in curated meadows, desperate for likes. They don’t want nature. They want content. They don’t love the Earth—they love the algorithm. They wouldn’t recognize a real forest if you shoved their face into the underbrush and left them overnight.
They are creatures of the city. Self-styled prophets of a biosphere they neither understand nor inhabit.It’s time the real environmentalists took the reins back. The ones who know the land not from brochures but from bruises and nettle stings. The ones who went outside before it was trendy, and stayed out long after the cameras left.
https://empoweringamerica.org/reclaiming-environmentalism-from-the-climate-extremists/