Friday's nationwide farmer protest will likely offer sloganeering and feed distrust, writes Rod Oram. What's needed are real leadership and climate action.
“Howl of a Protest” rallies around the country on Friday were always going to be strong on passions and long on slogans. Prior emails to help people paint their placards included:
- No utes No gas stoves No cows and sheep Just pine trees
- “Climate emergency” Have another five days sick pay Have another holiday
- Ruminants evolved 90 million years ago Responsible for climate change? Joke!
- Social welfare for foreigners Just plant trees
Slogans like these might offer a speck or two of partial truth. But they inflame passions, kill debate, deepen distrust and compound confusion.
Yet, we need constructive discourse and action to put many things right. Because the way we – like the rest of humanity – run things now does a great deal of damage to our economy, society, culture, environment and climate.
Moreover, every challenge is complex and many are interdependent. For example, similar economic distortions drive climate change, make farming unsustainable and ensure housing is unaffordable for many.
Yet, we can turn those linkages to our advantage if we create and deliver solutions that provide multiple benefits.
For example, we must deeply change our transport systems, and likewise the what, where and how we build homes. Together, those will improve the quality and affordability of urban living, while reducing climate-changing emissions.
Similarly, a big rethink of farming systems will increase their resilience, the value of their products and their contribution to the restoration of ecosystems; and will reduce their climate-changing emissions.
To achieve all those goals and more, we need to get our heads around myriad problems and solutions. We – and the rest of humanity -- have to deal with a speed, scale and complexity of change humankind has never come within cooee of before.
Being a small nation helps. We should be able to get people together to build a better future. To do so we need many new tools ranging from more direct and responsive democracy to more empowering ways to learn and to earn a living.
The rest of this column deals with only one aspect. How do we achieve some common sense of the issues, so we can take some common actions to tackle them, and thus generate some common wealth to share from our success?
Achieving such commonality across society is phenomenally difficult, particularly when the issues are so complex, full of conflicts, long-term and seemingly quite abstract. Our co-crises of climate breakdown and ecosystem degradation are extreme examples of that.
Yet, down through history societies have improved their rate of success by finding ways to build understanding of their gnarly tasks. Two ways are to seek out and support committed and inspirational leaders; and to express our hopes and fears, our learning and action, through our culture and art.
We’re finding many such leaders, here and around the world, among our young people. They are fighting for their future and their enduring wellbeing, while many older people are fighting to hang on to their current but unsustainable wellbeing.
Here’s a vivid insight into the intelligence and determination of such young leaders. It comes from the World Economic Forum’s latest annual global risk assessment. This ranks a vast range of economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological risks by the likelihood of them happening and the impact if they did.
In the following charts, the WEF then asked its younger members – its Global Shapers Community – and its older members – its Multistakeholders – to give their own assessments of the likelihood of risk and impact. Their different understanding of the world is startling. The young leaders see far greater danger and opportunity, compared with the older leaders. My money is on the young leaders. Where's yours?
We have plenty of such perspicacious and ambitious young people such as the members of Generation Zero who conceived, launched and led the campaign for the Zero Carbon Act in 2016. It became law in 2019 and is now the legislative framework driving our response to co-crises of climate and ecosystems.
Similarly committed and talented are our school-age leaders who drove New Zealand’s contribution to the global School Strike for Climate movement. The biggest of their demonstrations, on September 20, 2019 saw some 170,000 people young and old take to the streets around the country, making it one of the largest public demonstrations ever in New Zealand. This documentary, High Tide Don’t Hide, which premiered recently at this year’s Doc Edge Festival, tells their story.
As for our culture and art – the second source of insight and inspiration to help us navigate through these immense challenges – I will offer just a few examples now, then return to this rich and fascinating subject some time in the future.
Living with the climate crisis - Voices from Aotearoa offers 14 writers in a small book published last November by BWB Texts.
Scorchers is a collection of climate fiction by Australasian writers, published last year by Steam Press.
Wellington City Library has a helpful list of climate books; as does Goodreads’ list of NZ climate fiction.
Fiction has long helped us to understand and respond to real life, and climate fiction is a particularly powerful sub-genre. One of the best recent examples globally is The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. And Claire Armistead, a British journalist and author, offered this recent review of the category internationally.
So, come on...let's pull together for progress.
