A conference, a Swedish school and a farm

Thanks again for your interest. 

This week I write late having attended the Environmental Defence Society conference on Tuesday and Wednesday, and partaken in some rather different stuff since then.

A conference

Impressions from the EDS conference are all over the internet if you want to find them.  David Williams made a report here, for example, and at least my own LinkedIn feed is awash with impressions of what went down.

It was only my second EDS conference, and first in a few years. It was an interesting time to go as New Zealand’s environmental law, policy and funding is tossed about upon a deluge of changes and cuts. Almost needless to say the sense of anxiety in environmental circles is considerable.

Without in any way wishing to diminish the value of any individual speakers, my impression of the conference was a common one to any conference at all:  that the true value of being there was the opportunity to talk with people from across a range of environmental positions, and to use the opportunity to let the talks wash over one, so to get a general feel for where “the issues” are at. 

Of course, the subject matter of almost every talk was the scientific, legal or policy issues of the day.  Even so, for my part the main current of the conference had nothing to do with any of that at all.  To me the real sense was a growing recognition that we live inside a story, that stories tend to be both much bigger and much smaller than we give them credit for, and that stories can change.

What stories am I talking about?

In some ways, New Zealand environmentalism is a bit like everywhere else’s, and for that matter a bit like many domains, everywhere. It is similar in that it has seen its fair strain of thrall to science.  Where perhaps I might want to talk about the way I love this place and be taken seriously, as I need to say with my family, in environmentalism there can be a need to speak in another language.

I was born at 349 ppm; a fish stock is at x% of a modelled maximum sustainable yield; or nationwide “ecosystem services”, or our “natural capital”, stands at $97 billion (though I gather this is an “old number”). “The Science is in” as the IPCC continues to remind us. And so on. Only by speaking in this way can something, something other than ‘us’ and which cannot speak for itself, be rendered legible. Or so it can often seem. The weakness, of course, is that science can only suggest what is, and nothing much about what ought to be, so that using its language can have a deep non-sequitur quality.  

At EDS we heard plenty of this. Plenty of graphs with projections to 2100 and so on. There were also plenty of policy proposals to match – the earnest need for an “RM 3” or conservation or marine law reform.  

At times we heard scoffs exchanged over some of these proposals.  Almost incredibly to me, the notion of an RMA replacement “based on property rights” was a particular bugbear for some.  Some, like Act Party people, want that passionately.  Others demanded to know “what that even means”, with the unspoken assertion either that the notion is preposterous or doesn’t exist.  At the conference I heard no acknowledgement that Part 3 of the current RMA is based precisely on property rights and regulations on externalities – as a cursory read will show (I am making no suggestion it is perfect, of course).  This was an opportunity missed, because such an acknowledgement might have led to interesting reflections on the political drivers of reform calls, or the importance of implementing words on a legal page out in the physical world.

Any blind spots showing up at the conference had their complements in spades. 

In the main, the complement came in the form of a return of ideas of wisdom, which were aired with considerable prominence.  We heard these articulations most often from Māori speakers, but also from some of the more thoughtful agricultural and fishing traditionalists and some wiser greens.  More traditionally religious ecological views were not aired - but this is New Zealand after all.

Wherever else these people are, they are living, in the sense of the verb, traditions that locate them in something bigger than themselves.  Their obligation to respect whatever is beyond them comes this way. It is a different mode of forbearing from certain conduct, something entirely other than a sense of needing to comply with legal requirements or policy prescriptions driven by science.

Progress in science, technology and policy are obviously necessary environmental tools and all ways of looking at the world deserve our respect.  It’s just that they seem to be proving insufficient to sustain our national story about relationship with whenua and moana.

One hugely uplifting note at EDS was to hear large numbers of people publicly articulating their cultural wisdom. They can see a story in which we live a more positive relationship with nature than now, and one that also contains the possibility of human flourishing.

Two final short notes on stories at EDS.

First, Fonterra clearly understands that we live in a story. It sent a high-ranking staffer and former diplomat to navigate conference waters. This gentleman was remarkable for his ability to tell the story Fonterra would like us to hear, and nothing else.

Second, I had the privilege of finishing EDS talking with a prominent New Zealand environmentalist quietly for several hours. It made for a late drive home. We talked about things like the role of virtues - like humility and trust - in whatever comes next. How about those for things best told in the language of science?

A Swedish School

That’s where a radically different environmental experience came in later in the week.  On Friday morning I attended the fourth instalment of the Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture.  This is a series of online conversations hosted by Dougald Hine, founder of Dark Mountain and more recently At Work in the Ruins.  Hine can be a fascinating conversationist on environmental matters, as he was with Christchurch’s own Michael Reynolds.

In Regrowing people of all ages, walks, ethnicities and everything else come together to talk.  Regrowing is about asking what work is worth doing when you think the world is in genuine trouble in any which way.  So far Hine and interlocuters have sketched out several possibilities, many with specific and practical elaborations. 

It is fascinating and often powerful to attend online conversations with people from all over the world, mediated through Zoom, and to get into waters like we do in Regrowing.  Things can get pretty rarefied, and I’m not sure it will be “useful”, if utility is the right measure anyway.  But I’m going to sit with it for a while, because it is getting concrete at times. Also because it all comes by way of a long intellectual journey, over which I may have learned precisely no proposition whatever, but perhaps came to look at, rather than through, some of my pairs of glasses really for the first time.

This started years ago trying to take in Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind and John Vervaeke’s extraordinary Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.  This led to Iain MacGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary in 2019 then The Matter with Things in 2023.  Primers on the latter can be found here (video) and here (text).

Eventually MacGilchrist talked with Hine, and this got me eventually to his colourfully titled seminars.  It turns out that Hine founded Dark Mountain with the well-known Paul Kingsnorth, who latterly enjoyed prominence for some unique and confronting critiques on the Covid moment.  Together, Hine and Kingsnorth had been activists in the mold of Extinction Rebellion but landed, through Dark Mountain’s Uncivilisation, on “giving up”. Interestingly these guys have gotten to Christianity, following in the footsteps of Ivan Illich, a Catholic priest and father to much of the environmental movement - a current very much absent in New Zealand environmentalism as I mentioned.

I recognise this will all sound insane to some – and obviously feel free to unsubscribe or stop reading if you think it is.  As I say I’m not sure Regrowing will be useful.  But if nothing else it is quite something to notice the resonance between that experience and the sense of a current of stories surfacing so prominently at EDS.

A farm

Uncareful readers might have taken the impression I am a science-hating story-loving and perhaps even proselytising lightweight.  That would not be right, but let me finish by saying that I rounded out the week seeing that living out stories is frequently hard. 

This week I also watched hoggets – years of breeding work – board a sheep truck and leave a Canterbury farm for the last time.  The wool and mutton prices are just too low to hold on to them without putting the ongoing stewardship of the place under pressure.  A bit of dairy support work will replace the sheep.

From all involved, there was a quiet sense of loss, a sense of needing to get on with life, and in that wonderful kiwi way – an all but unspoken acknowledgement of both. 

That day, the reality of the price point struck the larger story of stewardship pretty hard.  Here again stories weren’t everything, and very definitely they were not nothing.