14
CAN WE LEARN TO LIVE WITH OUR WORLD?
Anne Salmond
IN NEW ZEALAND, WE LIVE AT THE HEART of the world’s largest ocean. More than anything else, this has shaped our identity. Perhaps 80 million years ago, the islands of New Zealand floated away from Gondwana, evolving in isolation with their plants and animals.
Ecologist Jared Diamond has described New Zealand as the world’s smallest continent, or the world’s largest islands. For a biologist, he remarks, examining the New Zealand biota is the closest ‘we will get to the opportunity to study life on another planet’.1 Before the first human beings came ashore, living systems had been co-adapting here for millions of years, creating an extraordinary array of endemic species, including flightless birds, giant snails and walking bats. Over half of New Zealand’s species of plants and animals are found nowhere else in the world.2 As islands rose up out of the ocean, the ancestors of many of these creatures flew, floated or were blown ashore. They had to survive a long, difficult oceanic or airborne journey, and adapt to environments very different from their homelands. As they moved into new niches, this sparked rapid innovation and the emergence of new species.
It seems that something similar happened in the case of human beings. Our ancestors had to be bold and innovative to get here. In order to reach this remote archipelago, for instance, the ancestors of Māori had to invent blue-water sailing. When the first star navigators from island Polynesia landed about 700 years ago, New Zealand became the last significant land mass on earth to be found and settled by human beings.
The new arrivals had to quickly adapt to landscapes very different from their tropical island homelands. Far from being a static, steady-state ‘traditional’ society, Māori life was dynamic and rapidly changing. By the time that the first Europeans arrived in 1642, Māori had invented a new language, cosmology and art forms, fashioned new kinds of watercraft and buildings, and mastered new fibre, stone and agricultural technologies. Sometimes they made mistakes, setting fires that ran out of control and exploiting some local species to the point of extinction, including the moa, their best source of protein. Nevertheless, the rate of successful innovation was impressive. Different ways of life, products and ideas emerged in different parts of the country.3
According to Māori philosophy, land emerged out of the sea. As Teone Taare Tikao, a learned elder from Banks Peninsula in the South Island, remarked: ‘The ocean came into existence before anything else … It was the start of life in the universe. I believe this take (root) is correct, and that everything came from the water.’4 When new forms of life appeared, these included Rangi-nui the Sky Father and Papa-tūānuku the Earth Mother, a single ancestor, male and female. For many pō (eras of darkness), their children lived between them, cramped and frustrated. Weary of their confinement, they began to talk about separating their parents so that light could enter the world.
Although the wind-ancestor Tāwhiri-mātea disagreed with this plan, his older brothers ignored him. After many unsuccessful attempts, Tāne, ancestor of the forests, lay on his back and pushed up with his legs, forcing earth and sky apart.
As Rangi wept for Papa, his tears became rivers and lakes, and she sent up mists to greet him. Tormented by their grief, Tāwhiri-mātea flew into a fury and attacked his brothers with whirlwinds and tornadoes, smashing Tāne’s trees to splinters, driving Rongo and Haumia’s root crops underground and lashing Tangaroa, the sea god, into submission.
In the midst of this chaos, Tangaroa’s children fought with each other. When Ika-tere, the ancestor of fish, taunted his brother Tū-te-wanawana, the ancestor of lizards, saying, ‘You go inland, and be heaped up after fires in the fern!’ Tū-te-wanawana replied, ‘You go to sea, and be hung up in baskets of cooked food!’5 After this quarrel, they went their separate ways. Only Tū, the ancestor of people, stood tall in the face of Tāwhiri-mātea’s onslaught. For his bravery, he earned for his descendants the right to harvest his brothers’ offspring — birds, root crops, forest foods and trees, crayfish, shellfish and fish, although they had to ask the ancestors for permission. Later, one of Tū’s descendants, an ancestor named Maui, set off on a voyage with his brothers from the homeland, Hawaiki, to far southern waters, where he hauled up a great fish, Te Ika-a-Māui, the northern island of New Zealand. According to the eastern iwi (tribes), Maui’s canoe still lies on the top of Mt Hikurangi.
In Māori philosophy, all the world is a vast kin network (whakapapa), powered by hau — the wind that animates all forms of life in the cosmos. As the tohunga (expert) Nepia Pohuhu observed, ‘All things unfold their nature (tipu), live (ora), have form (āhua), whether trees, stones, birds, reptiles, fish, quadrupeds or human beings.’6 In this relational world, earth and sky, sea, stars, winds, people and other life forms are linked together, locked in reciprocal exchanges. When balance is achieved, the networks of relations in families, communities and ecosystems alike are in a state of ora or well-being — healthy, prosperous and in good heart. If reciprocity falters, however, entire networks and their members begin to fail and become mate (sick) — unhealthy and dysfunctional — a state that can apply to families, communities, forests, lakes, rivers and the ocean, as well as to individuals. In te ao Māori (the Māori world), space-time is a spiral — life returns to the ancestral source, then spins out into the future. This idea of a dynamic, relational cosmos is contemporary and futuristic, with patterns of complex networks and spirals also found in cutting-edge science.
Like the first Polynesian star navigators, the first Western explorers to arrive in New Zealand, Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain James Cook (1760–70), faced formidable challenges. In order to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach these remote islands, these European mariners also had to perfect the art of sailing for long periods over great distances. In 1769 when the Endeavour made its landfall on the east coast of New Zealand, the scientists on board thought that they had discovered Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Continent, fabled to be rich in gold, silver, pearls and spice, and with rajahs riding around on elephants. Instead it turned out to be my hometown of Gisborne.
At that time, life in Europe was also in a phase of explosive innovation. Modernity began in Europe in the 1760s, just as the Endeavour brought the first Europeans ashore in New Zealand. The Royal Society of London, which had sponsored Cook’s expedition, was at the forefront of the Enlightenment, a period characterised by philosophical innovation and many inventions in the arts, manufacturing, agriculture, governance and science.
The Endeavour carried a cargo of colliding cosmological ideas. These included the old mediaeval model of the Great Chain of Being, which presupposed a hierarchical cosmos — from God at the apex to angels and archangels, a divine monarch, the serried ranks of the aristocracy, commoners, barbarians, savages, animals, insects, plants and rocks. Those at the bottom of the Great Chain were expected to offer up tribute to those above them, who exercised top-down control. In the logic of the Great Chain of Being, a divine sovereign ruled over his or her people. Aristocrats ruled over commoners, civilised people over barbarians and savages, free citizens over slaves, men over women and children, and human beings over all other forms of life. On board the Endeavour, this form of order was mirrored in the ship’s chain of command, from captain to cabin boy; and in the Admiralty’s instructions to James Cook, ordering him to ‘take possession’ of any new land that he might discover. Today it is echoed in many corporate and bureaucratic structures, the dominion of the 1 per cent over the 99 per cent, and ‘Western’ and male exceptionalism (including the idea of ‘glass ceilings’ for women), for instance.
A second powerful framing device was Cartesian dualism. In the seventeenth century, when the French philosopher René Descartes proposed the thinking subject as guarantor of its own existence (cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am), a world was conjured up in which Mind was split from Matter (res cogitans vs res extensa), subject from object, culture from nature, the social from the physical sciences, and people from the environment.
In this way of knowing, one of the iconic patterns was the grid, which served to abstract, divide up and measure space, time and life forms, bringing them under control for practical purposes.7 Reality was transformed into bounded objects at different scales, which could then be counted, classified and commodified — the Order of Things, as Michel Foucault has called it.8 On board the Endeavour, this form of order was exemplified by Cook’s charts of the Pacific, gridded by latitude and longitude, in which islands were abstracted to their outlines; and the classification of plants and animals using Linnaean taxonomy. In the contemporary world its patterns are reflected in maps, surveys, spreadsheets, Outlook calendars, timesheets, balance sheets, and organisational charts, for instance.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Order of Things went viral. Many aspects of life were transformed — administration (with censuses, surveys, and bureaucracy), industry (with mechanisation and replicable processes), and science (with the use of instruments and quantification, the split between the sciences and the arts, and their fragmentation into different disciplines).9 As different dimensions of reality were divided up into bounded, standardised units — time, space, people, plants and animals — the world was transformed, a process that is still unfolding.
In relation to people, this cosmic framing laid the basis for ideas of ‘objectivity’ — knowledge based on detached observation, experiment and control — and contemporary capitalism, with its ideas of ownership of commodities and the autonomous, property-owning rights-bearing individual. In relation to land, it led to the development of surveying and maps, the enclosure movement, and other forms of agricultural ‘improvement’ that propelled many of our ancestors to New Zealand, where they applied these forms of order to the land.
The radical division between Nature and Culture and the hierarchical relation between them led to habits of mind that still rule much of our thinking and practice about relations between people and the environment. Nature and Culture are often seen as mutually antagonistic, so that people have to choose between the environment and their own interests; or Nature is viewed as a virginal Sleeping Beauty to be protected by hedges of thorns, lest Man should molest her. There is also the belief that humans are in charge of the cosmos, and if we damage other living systems, we can fix them; along with ideas such as ‘resource management’ and ‘ecosystem services’, based on the assumption that the world was created for human purposes.
Alongside the Order of Things in the Enlightenment, however, a third cosmic model saw the universe as a ‘web of life’ — complex, dynamic, interacting networks of relations and exchange between different forces and elements, including people, striving towards an always fragile equilibrium. Relational thinkers included the Comte de Buffon in France, Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley in England, many of those involved in the Scottish Enlightenment, and, later, the Humboldt brothers in Germany.10
Among other things, these ideas led to the French and American revolutions, the emancipation of slaves and women, anthropology, ecology and the environmental sciences. Participatory democracy, with its checks and balances, is based on Enlightenment philosophy. On board the Endeavour, this kind of thinking was reflected in the instructions given to James Cook by the Earl of Morton, the president of the Royal Society, which acknowledged the rights of Indigenous peoples to their own lands; and in the scientists’ accounts of the new landscapes they encountered, with their plants, animals and people. In contemporary science, one can see these forms of order reflected in the world wide web, in the science of complex networks and systems, and in the environmental sciences. This Order of Relations, as one might call it, also has strong resonances with Māori and Pacific cosmological ideas.
During the very first encounters between Māori and Europeans, then, both sides were riding the waves of rapid change. On both sides, they were fighting sailors, bold and inventive explorers who had mastered the art of exploring the Earth’s largest ocean, people who thought creatively about the world around them. Like the first Polynesian arrivals in Aotearoa, European migration fostered inventive, entrepreneurial ways of working, using limited resources to optimal effect. As our most famous scientist, Ernest Rutherford, said about his experiments to split the atom, ‘We didn’t have the money, so we had to think.’11
A desire to escape the old, encrusted hierarchies of Europe engendered an egalitarian spirit. Relational thinking from the Enlightenment informed the drafting of the Treaty of Waitangi, with its attempt to forge working relations between the Crown and the rangatira (chiefs). Like the early settlers from Polynesia, though, the early European settlers made adaptive mistakes. Again, old myths, including the Genesis creation story (in which God gave Adam and Eve ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’) and the Great Chain of Being, made it seem right that ‘civilised’ people should have dominion over local plants and animals — and people.
As the new settlers set about recreating familiar landscapes from ‘Home’, they introduced exotic plants and animals without much thought about how these would fit in with local ecosystems. Many indigenous species of animals lost their habitats, were preyed upon or hunted to extinction. Ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ led to the wholesale clearance of the bush, the drainage of swamps and wetlands, the creation of large swathes of grassland for pastoral farming, on steep, erodible hills as well as on foothills and plains.
During the very first encounters between Māori and Europeans, then, both sides were riding the waves of rapid change.
This illusion that the world was created to serve human beings, who are entitled to exploit it without limit, led to an array of environmental challenges: severe erosion; choking waterways and harbours; the discharge of pollutants into streams, rivers, lakes and harbours that struggle to survive these loadings of contaminants; the depletion of aquifers and waterways beyond sustainable limits; and catastrophic losses of biodiversity, for example. Farmers and foresters planted exotic trees to stabilise hillsides, to adorn local landscapes and as plantations for harvesting. After 80 million years of isolated evolution, indigenous species of trees were cut, burned and sprayed in a kind of arboreal ethnic cleansing — although mānuka and kānuka, for instance, can cleanse waterways and produce fine wood for furniture and pollen for special kinds of honey. Even today, remarkably little is known about the properties of many indigenous plants and animals.
Ideas of ‘improvement’ also applied to the tangata whenua (people of the land). Many European settlers assumed that as ‘civilised’ people, they were entitled to rule over Māori, instruct them in new ways of living, and purchase or take their land. This was understood as ‘progress’. When Māori resisted these assumptions, the clashes that followed came to a head in the Land Wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the confiscation of much Māori land, and the establishment of the Native Land Court, in which land was surveyed into gridded blocks with lists of ‘owners’, given a Crown title and sold, cutting across ancestral networks of land and sea use structured by kin relations and seasonal rhythms.12
While some Europeans (including Bishop Selwyn and Sir William Martin, formerly the first Chief Justice) protested against various breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, most settlers were eager to take control of the country. At this time, too, peasant farmers in Britain were losing their livelihoods with the enclosure of the commons, the seizure of the foreshore and seabed and the Highland clearances.13 Some of these people migrated to New Zealand, seeking a better life for themselves and their families on what had once been Māori land.
By the 1890s, many Māori feared that they were on a pathway to extinction, like their ancestral bird, the moa. In 1894, Kerehona, a Whanganui elder, lamented, ‘Our land is nearly all gone, and we, too, are a vanishing people, and will soon be like the moa, extinct [ka ngaro ā moa te iwi nei].’ He called upon one of his ancestors, Tutairoa, to bring the people together to face this existential threat: ‘All the taniwha (great chiefs) of this river of Whanganui come from this chief — all the great chiefs who have been heard of in this island, commencing at the source, even to the mouth of the river … Hence the saying, “A spliced rope, if broken, is made whole again”.’14
By the turn of the twentieth century, some European settlers and their descendants had come to sympathise with Kerehona’s lament. They worked with Māori leaders, including Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, to record Māori customs, establish museums to house taonga Māori (ancestral treasures) and weave Māori artistic motifs into local iconography. Concerned about the loss of native forest and the extinction of birds such as the huia, and inspired by their own ancestral love of land, leaders like Captain Val Sanderson fought to set aside reserves and national parks. Eventually, in the 1970s Māori and non-Māori forged alliances that led to the formation of the Waitangi Tribunal, as Māori struggled to regain their mana (prestige), their reo (language) and their land.
By the 1990s, when Kerehona’s Whanganui descendants appeared in front of the tribunal, they described their ancestral river as a ‘three-stranded rope’, binding together the upper, middle and lower river iwi — a motif expressed in carvings in Whanganui meeting houses,15 helping the different kin-groups to join forces in saving the river. Standing before the tribunal, Whanganui elders lamented the loss of their lands and the current state of their ancestral waterway, saying what this meant for the Whanganui people:
It was with huge sadness that we observed dead tuna [eels] and trout along the banks of our awa tupua [ancestral river]. The only thing that is in a state of growth is the algae and slime. Our river is stagnant and dying. The great river flows from the gathering of mountains to the sea. I am the river, the river is me. If I am the river and the river is me — then emphatically, I am dying.16
Environmental challenges in New Zealand
In a profound way, these clashes and exchanges between different forms of order and ways of living have shaped New Zealand landscapes, and the environmental challenges that confront us. Fly over the country, and you can see the intricate grids of the Order of Things laid out across the land — in the fenced paddocks, vineyards, cultivations and plantation forests of rural areas, and in the gridded patterns of urban sections. Although the grid may be disrupted by streams, rivers, mountains, valleys and beaches, in many towns and cities the valleys have been bulldozed flat and waterways buried underground. Ancestral Māori patterns in the landscape — stone walls and mounds, pits, ditches, ramparts and terraces — survive in places, although many of these have also been buried or razed. At the same time, large stretches of bush in national parks and reserves, mixed and organic farms and forms of urban development that work with land and sea mirror the Order of Relations with its complex networks.
After a series of recent reports by the Commissioner for the Environment and the Royal Society of New Zealand, however, it is clear that industrial patterns of forestry, farming and horticulture dominate contemporary land use in New Zealand. Based on monocultures of exotic plants and animals, these systems often override a rich variety of landscapes and seascapes, with their distinctive geology, climatic conditions, biota and water systems, and human communities. There are exceptions; in the wine industry, for instance, some producers are working with different landscapes, using organic methods and trying to match grape varieties to particular environments. Even here, though, industrial production is dominant.
The impacts of these kinds of land use are sobering. Before human arrival Aotearoa was a land of birds, with few mammalian predators.17 After only 750 years of human occupation, the introduction of the kurī (Polynesian dog) and kiore (Polynesian rat), followed by European dogs, cats, rats, mice, ferrets, stoats and opossums, about 80 per cent of New Zealand’s 168 species of native birds are in trouble, while a third are at risk of extinction.18 Much of the bush has been cleared, and grazing animals, including feral goats and deer, along with a rich variety of exotic weeds, are transforming the rest. Initiatives such as Predator Free New Zealand, which aims to eliminate keystone predators, and many other public and private restoration projects hold the promise of allowing endemic species to flourish — but without a concerted strategy and greater investment, this may be too little, too late.
The clearance of native bush for pasture and the harvesting of plantation forests has led to extensive erosion, with very high loadings of sediment in many waterways. In some steep hill country, erosion has stripped the topsoil,19 while on the flats many wetlands, considered the ‘kidneys’ of the catchments, have been drained.20 In addition, intensive dairy farming with imported feed, irrigation and fertiliser use, particularly in the Waikato and Hauraki districts and the east of the South Island, has degraded the environment both above and below ground, with nutrients (especially nitrogen) leaching into waterways and flowing into estuaries, wetlands and harbours.21 As a result of these activities, and the discharge of urban wastewater and industrial pollution, about 60 per cent of monitored waterways in New Zealand are no longer safe for swimming, while risks to human health from waterborne diseases are high. Some lakes are now so toxic that sheep and dogs have died after drinking in them,22 and three-quarters of native freshwater fish are at risk of extinction.23
It’s always costly and sometimes impossible to reverse this kind of damage — as New Zealanders are discovering with the Waikato River and the Rotorua Lakes, for example. This same process of ecological degradation is under way in the Hauraki Gulf. Again, an array of public and private initiatives by corporations, local bodies, community groups and government holds promise for the future, but these also require strategic coordination and smart thinking.
It’s possible, for instance, to support the planting or regeneration of native forests to sequester carbon and around waterways (especially if native birds are encouraged to do much of the work, with early plantings of berry- and fruit-bearing native trees in the headwaters and along the banks of streams and rivers). Mānuka honey harvesting and the extraction of biomedical products from native plants in the early phases, followed by carbon farming and, later, sustainable logging, have the potential to transform the economics of native forest and waterways restoration. At present, perhaps, too much of the investment is going into technological fixes, rather than seeking to transform the ways we think about and live with land, forests, rivers and the ocean. Given a focus on strategies with as many ecological co-benefits as possible, there is a real opportunity to transform the future for waterways, native bush and local communities in New Zealand.
In a country surrounded by sea, the state of the Pacific Ocean is also a matter of vital concern. Compared with land-based ecosystems, there are relatively few marine reserves around the coastlines of New Zealand.24 Vast gyres of plastic and other garbage swirl in the ocean, and many kinds of plastics find their way into the bodies of marine animals. As the seawater absorbs more carbon dioxide, it is becoming increasingly acidic, affecting the ability of zooplankton and shellfish to form shells.25 The discharge of sediment and forestry slash into the sea smothers shellfish beds, while overfishing and the by-catch of seabirds are not effectively regulated. As the ocean warms and rises, currents are shifting, with major impacts on deep water and coastal marine ecosystems, and on coastal and riverside settlements. These challenges to ocean health can in part be addressed by national initiatives, such as better controls on marine harvesting, the use of plastics, and run-off into the ocean, and by establishing more extensive marine reserves; but effective change will also require close co-operation with other countries, particularly other Pacific nations.
This is also true of climate change, which affects every other living system on Earth, from the air to freshwater, the land and the ocean.26 As the economist Lord Nicholas Stern has warned, with current rates of discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we’re playing Russian roulette with the planet,27 and the risks are existential — it couldn’t be more serious. For years, policy-makers in New Zealand have largely ignored the risks of climate change, still mesmerised by old myths that fly in the face of the findings of contemporary science — that we’re in charge of the Earth, which was created for human purposes, and that if we make mistakes, we can always fix them.
Among many young people and visionary leaders in the business community and in government, though, this is changing. New Zealand is now likely to establish a Climate Commission, with ambitious targets for carbon reduction. It is vital, however, to use systemic strategies that achieve lasting reductions while enhancing biodiversity, fostering healthy waterways and creating safe, rewarding jobs in resilient, successful communities. Mass plantings of exotic monoculture plantations, harvested on short cycles, are unlikely to meet these criteria, especially if these are owned offshore, and the profits are expatriated while many of the costs are borne by local staff, contractors, ratepayers and taxpayers.
In many ways, New Zealand is extremely well placed to think across scientific and political silos in tackling ‘wicked’ social and environmental challenges — a small-scale, intimate society with diverse ecosystems, a strong legacy of innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurial invention. After almost 250 years of shared history, a combination of Māori and Pacific ways of thinking, backed by a robust scientific tradition, makes it easier for New Zealanders to see themselves as a part of living systems, including the ocean, forests and waterways, and to recognise that these have their own rights to prosper, since our fates are tied together.
A recent example is Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, where for the first time in the world, a river was recognised as a legal being with rights of its own. There is nothing romantic or sentimental about this way of thinking, for as they say in the farming community, ‘Take care of the land, and the land will take care of you’; or in Māori, ‘Toi tū te whenua, whatungarongaro te tangata’ — ‘The land endures, while people come and go’.
It is possible that this kind of approach may be applied to other waterways across New Zealand, giving them legal rights to a state of ora (health, well-being). It may also apply to the ocean. There is no particular logic in using approaches evolved in continental Europe to govern the Pacific (such as the Exclusive Environmental Zone concept, which simply projects coastlines out into the ocean and tries to control what happens within these boundaries — which, of course, marine creatures such as whales, fish and seabirds do not recognise), when Pacific philosophies and strategies based on kinship with the sea and its inhabitants, combined with the latest science, might work better.28 We need ways of thinking in which the planet is our guardian, at least as much as the other way around, and in which people are seen as part of natural ecosystems.29
In New Zealand, we have a real chance to strive for lasting prosperity. In horticulture, viticulture, agriculture and forestry, the smartest producers are innovating high-value products, making the most of diverse landscapes while devising techniques that tread lightly on the land. Producers such as these enhance New Zealand’s ‘clean, green’ image as one of the world’s most beautiful countries, and a marvellous place to visit, do business in and raise your children. They enable people to enjoy good lives and jobs in the regions, and foster a delicious cuisine. A concerted effort to restore waterways and native forests across the country, transform farming and forestry and tackle climate change would do much to restore faith in the country’s ‘100% Pure’ global reputation.
At the same time, other creative Kiwis can draw upon a legacy of cultural innovation in fashion, film, music, architecture and design, visual and performing arts and writing, science, knowledge-rich manufacturing and IT. This makes New Zealand increasingly urbane, a country that celebrates diversity and reaches out to the world. The idea of a ‘fair go’ is another legacy worth fighting for. A wealthy country where many children go to school barefoot and hungry, die from third-world diseases, or are beaten and abused has lost its way. A world-class education system, on the other hand, can inspire a love of learning and share valuable knowledge, allowing people from all backgrounds to fulfil their potential.
As the World Bank reported recently, those nations that are more egalitarian are also more prosperous and happy.30 Sustainability is not just about human relations with the natural world. It’s as much — even more — about our relations with each other. To quote the UN Sustainable Development Goals, sustainability is about people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships.31 At the same time, tackling these global challenges requires open, informed debate. A healthy democracy promotes a free flow of ideas, allowing people to understand the world they live in, to contribute to the country they inhabit and to help shape the future.
From the outset, our ancestors were bold and brave; feisty, robust and independent. They came here to create a better life for themselves and their families. We can do the same. In dreaming of a country where people, waterways, forests and the ocean prosper together, listen to the karanga (cry) of Papa-tūānuku, the Earth Mother, calling for the water of life:
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Piki mai, kake mai |
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Climb here, draw near |
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Hōmai te waiora ki ahau |
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Bring me the water of life |
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Kia tūtehu ana koia te moe a te kuia i te pō |
|
The sleep of this old woman has been troubled in the night |
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Ka pō, ka ao, ka awatea! |
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But the dawn has come, it is day, it is light! |
1 Jared Diamond (1990). New Zealand as an Archipelago: An international perspective, in D. R. Towns, C. H. Daugherty and I. A. E. Atkinson (eds), Ecological Restoration of New Zealand Islands. Conservation Sciences Publication No. 2. Wellington: Department of Conservation, p. 3.
2 Royal Society of New Zealand (2016). Climate Change Implications for New Zealand. Wellington: Royal Society of New Zealand, p. 52.
3 Anne Salmond (2017). Tears of Rangi: Experiments across worlds. Auckland, Auckland University Press, p. 2.
4 Tikao, Teone Taare, as told to Herries Beattie (1939). Tikao Talks: Tales and traditions as told by Teone Taare Tikao to Herries Beattie. Dunedin: A. H. and A. W. Reed, p. 27.
5 Te Rangikaheke, cited in Jenifer Curnow (1983). Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke. Master’s thesis, University of Auckland, p. 254.
6 Nepia Pohuhu, quoted in S. Percy Smith (1913). The Lore of the Whare Wananga. Wellington: The Polynesian Society, p. 13.
7 Nicholas Blomley (2003). Law, Property and the Geography of Violence: The frontier, the survey and the grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 93, no. 1, pp. 121–41.
8 Michel Foucault (1970). The Order of Things: The archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock.
9 T. Frangscyr, J. L. Heilbron and R. Rider (1990). The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
10 P. H. Reill (2005). Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
11 Quoted in Edward Andrade (1973). Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publications Inc.
12 See Salmond, Tears of Rangi, pp. 316–350.
13 John MacAskill (2006). ‘The Most Arbitrary, Scandalous Act of Tyranny’: The Crown, private proprietors and the ownership of the Scottish foreshore in the nineteenth century. The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 85, no. 220/2, pp. 277–304.
14 Waitangi Tribunal (1999). The Whanganui River Report. Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, p. 189.
15 Ibid., p. 32.
16 Turama Thomas Hawira, brief of evidence for the Whanganui District Inquiry (do B28), p. 11.
17 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2017). Taonga of an Island Nation: Saving New Zealand’s birds. Wellington: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
18 Ibid., p. 5.
19 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2016). The State of New Zealand’s Environment: Commentary by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Wellington: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, p. 36.
20 Ibid., p. 38.
21 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2015). Update Report: Water Quality in New Zealand. Land use and nutrient pollution. Wellington: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, p. 13. Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2016). The State of New Zealand’s Environment: Commentary by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Wellington: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, p. 38.
22 Lake Forsythe in Canterbury, for instance: see Charlie Mitchell (2016). Canterbury’s poisonous Lake Forsyth kills sheep, full of green slime, Stuff.co.nz, 27 April. Retrieved from http://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/79201011/canterburys-poisonous-lake-forsyth-kills-sheep-full-of-green-slime.
23 Department of Conservation (DOC) (2013). Conservation Status of New Zealand Freshwater Fish. Wellington: DOC, p. 3.
24 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2016). The State of New Zealand’s Environment: Commentary by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Wellington: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, pp. 32–33.
25 Ibid., p. 32.
26 For a detailed analysis of the impacts of climate change on other living systems in New Zealand, see Royal Society of New Zealand, Climate Change: Implications for New Zealand. Wellington: Royal Society of New Zealand.
27 Hilary Stewart and Larry Elliott (2013). Nicholas Stern: ‘I got it wrong on climate change — it’s far, far worse,’ The Observer, 26 January. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos.
28 Salmond, Tears of Rangi, p. 377.
29 See Jacinta Ruru, in Simon Day (2017). If the Hills Could Sue: Jacinta Ruru on legal personality and a Māori worldview, Spinoff.co.nz, 27 November. Retrieved from https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/atea-otago/27-11-2017/if-the-hills-could-sue-jacinta-ruru-on-legal-personality-and-a-maori-worldview/.
30 World Bank (2016). Poverty and Shared Prosperity: Taking on inequality. Washington DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / World Bank Group.
31 UN Women (nd). The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. UN Women, http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/post-2015.