These islands;
the remnant peaks of a lost continent,
roof of an old world, molten droppings
from earth's bowels, gone cold;
ribbed with rock, resisting the sea's corrosion
for an age, and an age to come
- A.R.D. Fairburn
In precious few words, Rex Fairburn described Aotearoa New Zealand as it was, islands, forests and mountains against the sea, and captured perhaps the twin sense of both foreboding and promise that both Maori and European settlers felt when, after their long sea journeys by waka and ship, they set eyes on the land for the first time. This land, these islands, that began on that day the transformation of Polynesians into Maori, and later, Europeans into Pakeha and kiwis. And perhaps, the same feeling that greets tourists and returning kiwis alike when after a long air journey, the horizon still rolls back to reveal a similar sight, over two thousand years later. Promise, opportunity, and maybe still, that vague sense of foreboding that things - especially the land - here are still quite different to where one might have come from.
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This is the blog I've been meaning to write for ten years or more, the unfinished project, the back of the envelope musings, and the countless discussions with friends and colleagues on one particular topic - the future of this nation in an age of challenges, constraints and clear environmental limits. Fossil fuel depletion, climate change, an aging population, the possibility of rising global instability.
The resiliency and sustainability, of our people, our systems that sustain us, our politics, and our environment. In other words, the future planning and implementation that as a nation, we just do not undertake any more (although we once did, a topic I intend to explore in some depth).
I do not think that I am alone when I say that I feel less proud about this nation and more concerned about its future than I once was. There's a sense of drifting, the she'll be right, have another beer, it'll all work out in the end attitude that both sums up the best and worst of kiwis. The frustrating component of this is that in a medium sized democracy with a relatively homogenous society, few of our problems are truly intractable.
One particular problem - some say predicament - concerns me the most - that of fossil fuels, over half of which we import, and what we do, when we either choose as a nation, paraphrasing Fatih Birol, former chief of the International Energy Agency, to leave oil, or the oil starts to leave us. It's not a small problem, because, as this blog will discuss, energy defines the range of the possible, and system changes take time and money, and usually a decent dose of leadership as well. New Zealand currently takes even the most basic plans to deal with this reality and all the myriad other changes that we can either grapple with, get ahead of, or have forced upon us.
What I intend to explore, over the weeks and months to come, is the situation New Zealand is in, and attempt, in the best possible way that one blogger can, to scope out a pathway to something better. I'm far from alone in this, much has been written in print and online on all of these challenges and issues. I do wonder often though, if enough lessons from history have been applied in all those future scenarios. This country hasn't existed for very long, but it's been around for long enough to have developed ingrained patterns of behaviour, of thinking, and of voting. Those patterns are reinforced and reproduced with media narrative, and they define and constrain our future.
A human decision, on anything, let alone future plans, is always a mixture of the cultural/political, the economic, and the technical. It is common for belief in a technically brilliant solution to trump analysis of the cultural/political consequences of this. The history of rail in New Zealand is a case in point. The counter point is that what might be well supported by a majority of the people, and which is technically feasible, may prove to be economically unviable in a small, open trading nation. Dare I say it, this might just be where the intensive component of dairy industry is heading, and along with it, a fair proportion of the country's foreign exchange.
The interplay between the cultural/political, the economic, and the technical components of a scheme, plan, idea of project is often missed, but within it, I hypothesise, lie many of the answers to some of the failed plans in New Zealand's past to deal with our looming challenges, most of which were known and understood decades ago.
Depressing? Hardly. New Zealand is a remarkable nation with resilient, practical well-educated people, a small population relative to its resource base, a stable society, and surrounded by the defendable border of a thousand mile moat. Some options that were available to us in the past are no longer available, but there are many that still are. The past guides us too - this was a land settled before we started digging up and pumping bottled sunlight (coal, oil and gas), and in that lies many lessons.
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The poem above has its point. Those settlers came to a new land, with new hope and promise. But there are no new lands on this planet left, nowhere where we can truly start afresh. The horizons are known. Does this scare us, or do we accept it, and recognise that challenges, and that working for a better future within a known realm is much more than taming a wild land?
My theory, perhaps a forlorn hope, is that the challenge of preparing New Zealand for the future should be thought of in a same way, with the same zeal, that those early settlers set about their tasks. A sustainable, resilient society that understands its resource base. The land is far from fresh and pristine, but there is still enough to play with, enough possibility inherent within the country, to not discount it.
And so, that brings us to the title of the blog - the New Zealand Project / Ko Te Kaupapa O Aotearoa. To provide an equal dose of both hope, and reality, and in the process perhaps guide or help similar people who are also grappling with these issues, in their heads, or with their hands.
I intend to post here weekly and I welcome comments. Trolls will get the usual treatment of course.
I do not long for Sussex Downs,
or quaint old England's
quaint old towns
I dream of what may be
in Johnsonville,
or Geraldine
~Denis Glover
Peter Wilson
Ravensbourne, Dunedin
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