Things to just do, already
I’ve always been a bit of a homebody, but since the pandemic began I’ve diagnosed myself with something more serious: early onset curmudgeon syndrome.
While not an official medical term, I’ve decided my symptoms – grumbling, muttering, turning the lights out on Halloween to deter trick-or-treaters – display a level of crustiness not exactly befitting someone still under 60.
The problem with writing about climate change, especially climate change politics, is that it fosters curmudgeon tendencies.
Curbing climate change is hard, but as the years pile up without even the most seemingly basic steps being taken, it can start to make you mutter and shake your fist at the sky.
Things are brightening; I won’t deny it.
But, at least once a week, I find myself thinking, ‘‘Would it be so hard to put in planter boxes so kids can bike 10 blocks to school safely?’’ Or, ‘‘Does it take a genius to decide we should stop chopping down our old-growth forest?’’
This edition of The Forever Project is dedicated to some of the things we should just do, already.
One of them, as Charlie Mitchell beautifully explores in his cover story, is to stop hemming in our waterways. We know heavier rain and floods are coming. We know our wealth is tied up in property. Yet here we are, still blithely developing homes and businesses in the risk zone.
Likewise, as Olivia Wannan reports, it’s not easy winning hearts and minds over to the idea of transferring some of our road space to bikes (and walking, and scooting). But we could, just perhaps, get a little bit braver and faster after so many years of dithering.
I wrote about something I’ve been thinking about for more than a year now: New Zealand’s biggest stores of carbon, by far, are in our native trees and soil, yet we’re not protecting them as well as we could be. Collectively, this stored carbon vastly outweighs what we emit from our cars and industries. Yet pests are nibbling ancient forests, and, as I’ve reported on page 9, we’re losing carbon from some of our soils at an alarming rate. Just measuring the problem would be an excellent start.
One of the best ways to gain support for faster climate action is – and my curmudgeonly brain shudders to ask my fingers to type this – influencers. Not the ones on Instagram (though they’re welcome to help), but admired people in the community. Researchers have found that our climate attitudes are affected by people we see as leaders, which is why the emergence of farmers, chief executives and celebrity role models talking about climate action matters. Although New Zealand has screen and music stars speaking up, sports stars have been less vocal. Zoe¨ George launched a search and found some very cool sportspeople who fit the bill.
One more quick word about curmudgeons. We like to work alone – in my case, shut in a room with a screen.
The problem with this lone wolf mentality is that sometimes my ideas aren’t as good as they could be, and there’s no-one there to tell me. Thank goodness for email.
When I emailed Jeremy Olds and asked him if he’d make a cartoon for this edition, on the broad theme of ‘‘The next five years’’, he assumed I’d had a David Bowie song in mind. Actually, I was thinking in much more boring terms – about the fiveyearly emissions budgets laid out this month by the Climate Change Commission.
The Bowie song, Five Years, is vastly cooler, though – and it was released in 1972.
Sample lyric: ‘‘News guy wept and told us/ Earth was really dying/Cried so much his face was wet/Then I knew he was not lying.’’
I’ve been hypnotised by Bowie and his cheekbones singing the song to me on YouTube.
Jeremy’s email was only my second favourite of the past two months, though.
The best was from Carmen Parahi, Stuff’s Pou Tiaki editor. She and our colleague Kawe Roes had come up with a whakatauk¯ı for The Forever Project. It warmed my cantankerous heart and I hope you like it, too:
Poipoia te ao, popoia te ka¯ inga, poipoia te pa¯ harakeke
Look after the world, take care of the village, nurture the people