Raewyn Peart MNZM is a sailor, an author and an environmental lawyer. As policy director for the Environmental Defence Society, Peart is also a passionate advocate for ocean conservation.
During the depression, my father's family was forced off their farm outside Raglan, which meant to some extent they had to live off the land and sea. They were hard times, but these were also the days when people could catch so many fish their boats virtually sunk under the weight of them. Dad used to tell stories of fishing trips to Great Barrier Island, and how Tryphena Harbour was alive with fish and birds.
We grew up far from the sea in Hamilton but we also had a bach at Maraetai, where my dad kept a dinghy. I would go out with him as the sun was rising, setting a small net and catching fish. When I was about 12 we started sailing further afield in dad's little trimaran. For six weeks every Christmas, we'd sail around the Hauraki Gulf and up the Northland coast. We had very little safety equipment; no radios or life jackets or marine weather forecasts, which meant it was dicey at times, but it was also magical. We'd swim and snorkel, and because there wasn't much room for the six of us, we'd go ashore to camp, and cook our meals over a fire. At bedtime, we'd curl up by the fire in our sleeping bags and go to sleep looking up at the stars through the branches of pohutukawa trees.
My father left school at 15, and he struggled to get an education, so it was very important to him that we went to university. He was also very keen on us doing science. But I hated my school and as soon as I got UE, in the mid 70s, I took a year off and sailed to the South Pacific, around Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, with dad and one of my sisters. The boat belonged to a friend of dad's, and none of us had ever sailed a keeler before, or offshore, so it was quite an adventure. We caused quite a bit of excitement in the villages too, as many of them had rarely seen a yacht before.
I loved exploring the reefs and I remember one time diving down to sit on the seafloor. I was looking up at the surface, feeling perfectly at home when it dawned on me that I was running out of air, only I'd become so at home underwater, I forgot I needed to breathe.
That adventure was amazing but also destabilising and, when we got home, I started a science degree, only to discover I'm not a very science sort of person. Eventually, I finished a degree in psychology, politics and economics, only there weren't any jobs for a degree like that, so I spent a few years bumming around, mainly working on orchards.
After several years of marginal employment, I returned to university to study law and commerce at Otago. I'm not sure where law came from, as I'd never met a lawyer in my life, but I found it fascinating because the law is the bedrock of society. I also found I was good at it, and to win prizes after pruning kiwifruit was very satisfying.
I won the Kensington Swan scholarship, which meant I was offered a job in either their litigation or commercial departments. Because commercial law sounded boring, I chose litigation and I arrived in Auckland just after the 1987 financial crash. My first year working as a lawyer saw me spend a lot of time in court winding companies up, or bankrupting people who couldn't pay their credit cards off. Needless to say, it wasn't much fun.
When one of my colleagues had a motorcycle accident, I took over some of his workload, under Tony Randerson KC, who was one of the partners back then. To my mind, Tony was doing much more interesting work, real-world stuff, like planning for Waitākere City Council and I was captivated.
Raewyn Peart, policy director for the Environmental Defence Society, is also an advocate for ocean conservation and greater marine protection in the Hauraki Gulf. Photo / Alex Burton
Tony was also director of the Environmental Defence Society [EDS], and once a month these people with long hair and casual clothes would straggle in. They really stood out in a corporate law office where everyone wore suits and I wondered who they were, because they looked so interesting. Eventually, I was invited to do some pro bono work for the EDS and that ignited my interest in environmental issues.
I was soon offered a job at Russell McVeigh, as part of their new resource management team. I learned an enormous amount there, but their "up or out" culture where everyone was competing for a small number of partnerships didn't align with my values. We worked very long hours, including weekends, and were paid a small fraction of what they charged us out at. The idea was that you'd slave away in the hope of being made partner, and then you'd become wealthy.
I did enjoy the environmental cases, like the initial development of Viaduct Basin and the expansion of Westhaven Marina, working with scientists and planners and KCs but working really hard, so someone else could make lots of money wasn't satisfying or sustainable. I eventually thought, "nah, I'm not doing this anymore" because my desire for a more just society was more important than professional recognition or money.
Another major turning point was moving overseas with my then-husband. We started in the UK for his sabbatical, then moved to South Africa, to Durban, in the mid-90s. We arrived during the transition from apartheid, the year after Nelson Mandela became president, so it was a fascinating time to be there. There had also been a massive brain drain in the wake of transition, so I was snapped up to work in the environment division of the CSIR, the South African government's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Much of what I did related to economic development because there was so much poverty and still is. One thing I learned there, if you want to do anything to improve the environment, the economic and social upliftment of the people has to be part of any project.
Our daughter was born in South Africa and I took a short time off before going back to work. But the great thing was, African women carried their young children around with them and breastfed where ever they happened to be. So I often took Tanya to work with me, to meetings and conferences, so I could keep breastfeeding and no one minded. There was no way I could've done that in New Zealand 25 years ago.
When Tanya was about to turn 4, we returned to New Zealand, because I wanted her to have a childhood like I'd had, of sailing and snorkelling around our beautiful coastal environment. But when I took Tanya for her first snorkel in the Hauraki Gulf, I was horrified. Places that were once full of life, with lots of big fish and little fish, there was nothing down there but kina barrens and small stands of sad scrubby kelp. Maybe you'd see the odd spottie, but it would dart away as soon as it saw you, and the water was murky. How on earth could the next generation be inspired to look after the marine environment if they couldn't even see it? I was appalled at the extent of the degradation, and that it had happened during my lifetime.
I felt a deep sense of loss, and that was the start of my journey of discovery. I wanted to understand what had happened, which led to all kinds of marine-focused work, including being part of the Stakeholder Working Group that developed the Sea Change Marine Spatial Plan for the Hauraki Gulf.
When that spatial plan was about to be nutted out nine years ago, the government did an incredibly brave thing, and instead of writing the plan themselves, they gave the pen to a collaborative group of stakeholders. This was a novel approach, and while I felt trepidation upon being included, I also had a deep need to be part of the solution.
I met some incredible people during that process. Because even after doing so much work in the marine space, including writing a book on dolphins, I'd never spoken to a commercial fisherman or a recreational fishing rep and there I was sitting around a table with them. We were all pretty suspicious of each other at first, sitting there, sizing each other up. I thought they looked scary, and I was later told they all thought I was a fierce environmental lawyer.
But the remarkable thing about the process, all of us, from mana whenua to dairy farmers, commercial fishermen to recreational guys, we became friends because of our shared passion for the Hauraki Gulf. At heart, we were all environmentalists. Admittedly, the idea of marine reserves was an incredibly difficult subject to broach. A lot of recreational and commercial fishers hate the idea of marine reserves being put where they fish, but the proposal that's on the table today was largely hammered out by those people.
Since starting that fraught process in 2013, with all its blood, sweat and tears, the Gulf has deteriorated even further, and the need for protection is even more urgent. The fact of the matter is, just 0.3 per cent of the Gulf is fully protected today, and even if 10 per cent ends up being protected, there's still 90 per cent open for fishing. Yet some people are outraged that they won't be able to fish 99 per cent of those waters.
Support is growing for protection. Everyone can see the Gulf is going downhill, and we are getting to the point where parts may already be irreversibly damaged, which is why it is imperative we protect a substantial amount of the Gulf now. The proposal isn't perfect, and there are gaps, but we can always adjust and learn as we go. But we absolutely have to get on with it, because if we sit on our hands and watch the place die, everyone suffers.
Marine protection is not the whole answer but it is definitely a key part of the solution. We know from the science that marine reserves enable depleted reef systems to recover, which is why the Department of Conservation is currently consulting on a network of areas within the Gulf to be protected. There will always be some people who don't like being told they can't fish somewhere they've always fished, but it is critical that we start the journey towards restoring this extraordinary environment before it's too late.
