Wai not?

This week, the government announced a new target to have 90 per cent of New Zealand's lakes and rivers reach ‘swimmable’ water quality standards by 2040 – up from 72 per cent now. Critics have said they’re just shifting the goalposts for defining a river as ‘swimmable’.

Personally, on a quick dip into news items, I got lost among the figures bandied round, with the news item above saying “the target will be based on meeting the water quality standard at least 80 per cent of the time”. While Nick Smith on National Radio defended criticism that people stood a 1 in 20 chance of getting sick in some swimmable rivers, by saying that that was only 15 per cent of the time (in those rivers). People were confusing percentiles with medians, he said.

Personally, being a purist and Idealist, never mind percentiles and medians. Why not keep our goals simple, go the whole hog, and live up to our “100% pure” brand name. From my heartland, Waikato-Tainui iwi‘s vision for the Waikato River is one of complete restoration. Their Environmental Plan, Te Ture Whaimana o Te Awa o Waikato, seeks “The restoration of water quality within the Waikato River so that it is safe for people to swim in and take food from over its entire length.”

Why not? I say. Why shouldn’t our rivers and streams all be restored to such a state as to provide vitality and sustenance to people. They’re meant to provide us with food and water, not discharge channels. We were designed to live in harmony with the earth. Though we have strayed far from the course, I believe it is possible – and necessary – to strive for that harmony again.

In the meantime, I’m off to take a dip in my local river – the Hutt/Te Awa Kairangi, in the lowest category of ‘swimmable’. Never mind, I’ll just keep my head above water.

What's in a name?

My very first blog in this series was about naming places, and the significance and meaning of place names. The past few weeks I've been learning with work colleagues a waiata relating to Te Whanganui a Tara (Wellington Harbour). From the perspective of someone sitting on Mātairangi (Mt Victoria), it names and relates stories about some of the harbour's features - locating them through Maori genealogies and histories.

It got me talking to a friend this week about Māori and Pākehā placenames round Wellington. The Maori names are generally more colourful and have a rich story around them - when you find out what they was. It also seemed to be more relevant to the place.

But I realised that even European names that seemed bland or largely irrelevant to the feature so named, started to speak volumes about aspects of the European/Pākehā relationship to the land in question. For instance, Somes and Ward Islands in the middle of the harbour take their name after Joseph Somes and John Ward, London-based governor and secretary respectively of the New Zealand Company - which bought the islands and other land around Wellington from Te Ati Awa in September 1839.

Those same two islands bear the names Matiu and Mākaro, after daughters or nieces of the Māori explorer Kupe, said to be the first person to visit these shores. However, as far as I know, Somes and Ward never visited the country, preferring instead to make their profits from those lured by the promises of the Company. But Somes, Ward and others' foreign and purely financial interest in the land leaves its legacy in their name on our islands - even after being handed back to Māori.

However, after sounding that discordant note, I leave you with an electronic version of the waiata we were learning, Noho Ake Au, by PAO. (We didn't sing it like this.)

A Tale of Two Pams - Surviving in Suburbia

Common Unity Gardens, Epuni, Lower Hutt

Years ago in a nearby suburb in Lower Hutt, a woman named Pam started out doing preserves and soaps and selling them on a small-scale. By the time I met her she was running sustainability workshops and had transformed her perhaps-slightly-more-than-a-quarter-acre into a mini urban farm: growing veges and flowers in every available outdoor space, including the road berm; while also housing several varieties of ducks, hens and a couple of beehives out the front. It was – in actuality – ‘The Good Life’ (for those who may remember the British ‘70s comedy in which Tom and Barbara Good transformed their urban backyard in suburban London into a not quite model example of self-sufficiency.

This week, our city of Lower Hutt was visited by another Pam, this one being Pam Warhurst from Incredible Edible Todmorton, where a group of dedicated but fun-loving volunteers has transformed their north England town in the last eight years to one full of ‘edible landscapes’ – the good life on an urban scale. They describe themselves as “passionate people working together for a world where all share responsibility for the future wellbeing of our planet and ourselves. We aim to provide access to good local food for all, through working together; learning – from field to classroom to kitchen; and supporting local business.

Pam Warhurst is the founder. She said she was motivated by “a complete lack of leadership” around for building a world that our children could actually live in. So she got together with others to start “doing stuff around food”. They planted food wherever they could – on public parks, roadside berms, community spaces. Sometimes they’d ask permission sometimes not. They would also share their skills for preparing, preserving and cooking healthy local food.

At an informal gathering in Lower Hutt this week, she shared what she’d learnt and also heard from community initiatives in the Hutt Valley, Wellington and the Kapiti Coast. Appropriately enough, the event was held at Common Unity gardens based at Epuni School - providing a place for growing and preparing good, healthy local food for children and their families, in the heart of the Hutt Valley.

For Pam, it’s all about coming together round a place and over food. “You connect through food, it stimulates conversations with neighbours,” she said.

Other key messages:

Four types of people you need:
· someone who knows how the system works (authorities, etc);
· a networker, someone who knows where resources/other people/connections are;
· someone who understands gardening;
· a good communicator: someone who can tell the stories regularly and share.

Four basic principles for activities: Fun, fast, simple and cheap.

On action:
We know what we need to do to provide a sustainable, healthy world.
Don’t wait for the system to say you can do it. Don’t wait for experts or reports, just go ahead and do it. Sometimes you ask permission, sometimes you don’t.
Make it up as you go along.
Be positive and not negative. 

On building community:
Think: what do you know? what can you share?
Everyone has a gift to share in their own local community or situation. Each of us is a piece of a jig-saw. We’re all part of the solution.
Support local businesses – it keeps the local economy turning over.
Make the connections that aren’t the normal connections.’
Village thinking considers the needs of the children
If you do the right stuff, it will attract people.

In the general discussion, people shared about how it is preparing our children for the future – provide them with gardening skills, cooking skills, preserving food skills, hunting and catching their own food. Bees and beekeeping also came in for a heavy focus, with backyard beehive making underway in Alicetown using recycled timber and old real estate signs. Someone shared their large ‘honey pot’ harvested from just a three-month old hive.

Finally, some key survival tips from Pam:
· Have a laugh along the way.
· Celebrate.
· Make it look beautiful.
· Tell your stories.

See more:

Waitangi weekend - Amid a jumble of rocks

My 'weekly' blog has started out more 'monthly' this year - but, hey, it's summer and the sun is still shining . Who'd be on a computer? Mmmmm.

Below, some musings from Waitangi Day, when I based myself among some rocks surplus to river stopbank requisitioning.

Amid a jumble of rocks

No standing stones are these,

no ordered sacrifice

or tribute to a Higher Being.

No, just a jumble of rocks,

a random collection of jagged edge greywacke

and lumpy, disfigured amalgam.

Like New Zealanders,

thrown together in a new society,

randomly clumped together.

Sharp edges and hardness,

still working out

how to fit together.

Tackling the sacred cow

Chancing upon this colonial artwork by William Strutt at Te Papa, depicting Taranaki Māori chasing off settlers’ cattle in 1861,* prompts some questions about our country’s ‘sacred cow’. I’m not talking about a beast that we won’t slaughter, but rather the beasts we do slaughter – and other environmental sacrifices – made to feed the great God Mammon, aka export earnings

It’s almost sacrilegious to question our dependence on dairy exports as the key driver of our economy – but isn’t the increasing pollution of our waterways and atmosphere arising from the intensification of dairy a signal that perhaps we’ve gone too far and need to look at other ways to do dairy and agriculture – or even go further and question: what is the best use of this particular bit of land?

SAFE’s highlighting of cruelty to bobby calves merged into a wider challenge to the ethics and morality of separating newborn male calves from their mothers, to feed our appetites for milk and dairy. But most of the concern was about the threat to our dairy export industry.

This topic – apart from the fact that I enjoy my milk and cheese so much – makes me doubly uncomfortable, because my father was part of the dairy industry all his working life. In fact, when he arrived in New Zealand from the Netherlands in 1954 he began work in a cheese factory in Taranaki – ironically on Parihaka Day (5 November).

Thirty years later, I also came to be living in Taranaki for a couple of years. Working for South Taranaki District Council, my wages would have been partly paid by the rates from local dairy farmers.

But only recently have I come to appreciate – and question – our huge reliance on dairy industry and the environmental impact it has – unnecessarily in my view.

And Māori ‘difficulties’ with dairying are not only historical: the Parihaka community on the western slopes of Taranaki still face the loss of traditional tuna (eel) and piharau (lamprey) sources due to stream diversion and other practices from neighbouring dairy farms.

The Māori depicted in William Strutt’s painting were only defending their lands to protect their own wellbeing and local livelihood. Perhaps things may have been better if they had succeeded. The dominant view that ‘we need dairy for our national livelihood’ is only one perspective. There are two sides to a coin, and many angles on any particular story.

Te Papa’s notes on William Strutt’s painting (painted in 1861) interestingly observes that, “Strutt heightens the action by placing us, the viewers, with the group of Māori – an unusual vantage point.”

* The oil painting by William Strutt is entitled: “View of Mt Egmont/Taranaki, taken from New Plymouth, with Maori driving off settlers’ cattle, 1861.” It was painted from sketches he made in 1855-56, after hearing about the land wars that broke out in the 1860s.

Flag the referendum – let’s save our country

I see red over this one – I’m not voting in the first flag referendum – and will vote for the status quo in the second. I’d like to see a new flag for Aotearoa, but one based on more of a consensus and genuine sense of who we are. There are more important tangible things to sort out – like decent housing and incomes for all, the nature of sovereignty, and climate change.

Ironic that this flag-waving exercise should be happening right at the time the world needs to set aside national interests and negotiate a global climate change agreement that will protect us all. A useful diversion from a global forum where New Zealand can’t hold its head high.

First thoughts are usually the best, so why not go with the original flag of New Zealand – the one chosen by the United Tribes of New Zealand in 1834 to signal New Zealand-origin boats, and used at their Declaration of Independence of New Zealand in 1835.

Or, as Brian Rudman said, let the tino rangatiratanga flag fly boldly as the national flag for all of us:

It has the red and black halves representing the creation myth, and a central white koru representing the unfolding of new life, renewal and hope. It also has the wow factor. 

In a public submission process in 2009, this flag got 80 per cent of the vote as a national Maori flag.

The four, now five, flags up for consideration against our current Southern Cross, don’t meet design considerations for being a true flag – they are more logos than brands. Listen to typeface designer Kris Sowersby on this interview with Kim Hill (at 47.30 mins in) on how the de facto ‘client-designer relationship’ was skewed by a signalled preference for a silver fern at the start. ‘We may get the flag we deserve,’ he concludes.

The flag debate is an expensive side-show – and devisive, as factions try to promote their particular bit of cloth or – like the RSA – battle hard to save what we have.

I met someone a few weeks ago who wanted to promote a strong national identity based on being a genuine protector of the environment and defender against climate change. This would be  ‘living up to our brand on the world stage’ she said; not just promoting ‘clean, green New Zealand’ as an increasingly tarnished image. This is what we need to focus on – work out, together, as much as possible – what kind of nation are we; who do we really want to be? Then decide on a flag represents that identity.

This is the nation that first gave women the vote, introduced comprehensive social welfare to support the dignity of all its people in the 1930s, protested against French nuclear tests in the Pacific, and told the United States to keep their nuclear weapons at home when visiting.

Where is our world leadership when it comes to the single biggest long-term threat facing the planet – climate change? A half-hearted commitment to cut our emissions by 11 percent on 1990 levels.

Be part of history – work and stand for a fair nation, and for a fair climate.

Some things never change

My first home - Huirau Road

At the beginning of the year, I visited the place where I was born (well, the place I first lived in after being born at the hospital – the usual location for entering this world in our modern society). My first home was a white house at the corner of Huirau Rd, just south of Turua on the Hauraki Plains. Fifty years later, the area hadn’t changed a bit in any substantial way from when I lived there, apart from some fresh paint on some of the houses, and one or two newer ones down the road. Even the old, small dairy factory across the road – abandoned even when we lived there in the mid-1960s – still sported a turquoise green door (ok, fresher paint) that always remained in my memory from that time. My father actually worked as a dairy chemist at the big, new, massive Kerepehi factory some kilometres away.

My reason for going this year was to visit the Dalmatian farmer across the road and down the way from our old place – whose youngest son had been my first friend. I visited with my friend, and we chatted over lunch with him, his Dad, and middle brother, who now ran the family dairy farm. It was oddly reassuring, that even within our radically transformed dairy industry, some things have never changed. That a family business is still in the family, and that the Dalmatian farmer, at 92, was still gardening and growing grapes at the back of his house, even if wasn’t working the farm any more.

And after all these years, I learnt that he had actually worked in a bitumen mine back in then Yugoslavia (now Croatia) – he’d never wanted to be a farmer. It was family machinations here in New Zealand that led to him becoming a dairy farmer on Huirau Rd shortly before my parents moved there in 1962. In their European tradition, family land was family land – you wouldn’t sell the family farm just to buy a bigger and better one. You’d keep the land in the family, to pass to future generations. He was keeping this tradition alive, even for his family land back ‘home’: when he and his youngest son (my friend), visited Croatia a couple of years ago, he sorted out the titles for four blocks of land to retain there – one for each of his sons living in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This was the second 92-year old European I had spoken to within a couple of weeks whose ‘tradition’ was to keep family land in the family, rather than trade up for a bigger dairy farm. The other had come from Austria – and had farmed in the Karaka area of south Auckland – though he had to sell up when he stopped dairying, as no one in the family wanted to keep it.

Nothing may have changed at Huirau Rd, but down the way, the old Kerepehi site reflects the new world: a Chinese company has bought the property to make ice-cream for export back to the Chinese market. It signals some of the ironies of life: that while “some things never change”, “the times are [still] a changin’ ”.

It may mean nothing to you, but that little place on Huirau Rd is where I was born, and deep in my psyche, the Hauraki Plains is ‘home’.

Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu

Although it is small, it is precious