National Guard troops called out to protect American democracy from followers of the American president. Are we back on a good track now? Photo / AP
The fourth and final part of "Why I'm Afraid", Simon Wilson's essay on democracy and crisis in the modern world.
We are burying dreams in graves
Before they are planted in soil,
Even in death mother earth
Will honour our memory ...
- From a poem by Matilda Clack and Takunda
Muzondiwa
Here's the problem. A barrel of oil can do the work of 10,000 hours of manual labour and it costs only US$50. Why wouldn't you want to put fossil fuels to work?
Here's the problem. We measure our wealth and our progress in GDP: gross domestic product, which is a way of describing the quantity of economic activity. But GDP falls when people reduce their waste, use less energy, swim for free at the beach instead of paying to do at the pool. It rises with every violent crime and car crash.
GDP not only fails to measure quality of life, it focuses our attention away from it.
Here's the problem. The world is rushing towards a tipping point, where global warming caused by changes to the climate will become uncontrollable. The weight of expert thinking suggests we could reach that point in 10 to 15 years.
Here's the problem. We lack the decision-making structures, economic frameworks and political will to stop this happening. And do we lack the mental capacity, too? Is that idea just too hard to hold in our heads?
What's the answer? The great hope is to preserve our quality of life, and build on it for all citizens, without relying on oil, coal and gas.
But is prosperity without economic growth even possible, or will it inevitably create mass unemployment and misery? Or, conversely, if we decide we must have economic growth, can we do it sustainably, so it preserves the resources of the planet and does not lead to a climate catastrophe?
Nobody, yet, has come up with good answers for all this. British economist Kate Raworth calls it "the intolerable dilemma": at a fundamental level, our goals contradict each other.
Raworth has done more than most to try to resolve this dilemma. She's created a revolutionary economic analysis that explains the problem and describes a solution. (Her book is called Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, which carries the clear suggestion we should stop trying to think like the 19th- and 20th-century versions.)
But even she doesn't know how we're going to resolve that dilemma.
Raworth took part in an election debate here last year, via Zoom, and I spoke at length with her afterwards. She had a warning for optimists who seek answers in a greened-up business-as-usual approach. "The desire for green growth," she said, "runs ahead of the evidence."
Her "doughnut economics" analysis proposes that we look at life on Earth as a doughnut, with a hole in the middle. The inner edge of the doughnut prescribes the minimum standard of living required for security and prosperity: our social foundation. People living in the middle, in the doughnut hole, do not enjoy that standard.
The outer ring prescribes the limits on the resources we can use for that security and prosperity: it's the ecological ceiling. Most developed countries overshoot the ring.
The task is to find ways for all people to live on the doughnut, not in the hole, while restricting our use of resources to the prescribed limit as well. But how?
"The science is only a decade old," said Raworth, "and we're trying to create a new vision. Of course it's challenging, but we're talking about regenerative agriculture, valuing biodiversity, insisting on clean air and water. These things aren't hard to imagine. Here's an example: industries reusing materials, by repairing and restoring. Thinks like this, they're already happening."
Want a reason to hope? Doughnut economics is a pretty good one: it provides a coherent framework for a decisive break with the neoliberal orthodoxy of the past 40 years.
"I don't have the answers to all the questions I'm asking," said Raworth, "but I believe these are the existential economic questions of our time."
And she has governments around the world – at state and city level – inviting her to help them find the answers themselves. Ministers in this country talked with her when she visited in 2019.
So how are we doing?
"On a global scale, New Zealand is very good at meeting people's needs. But you're way outside the doughnut on your use of resources and production of emissions. They're both much higher than in most developed countries."
Raworth said we shouldn't be put off just because it's "never been done before". At least, not since capitalism overran the world. "It's never been tried, either."
But, she added, the concept of living well and in harmony with the world has always existed. She mentioned the Taoist yin and yang, the Celtic double spiral and the Māori koru, which is a version of Te Takarangi, the double spiral of creation. Raworth's doughnut borrows from them all.
"We have to keep saying, we know this, we know this, we are destroying the life system on which we depend. Success is living in balance. We already know this from our own bodies."
Guess what? There's a Māori version of the doughnut. In fact, there are several, including one by Ngāi Tūhoe soil scientist and environmental consultant Teina Boasa-Dean, which fully reconceives the doughnut in Tūhoe Māori terms.
The biggest change is that Boasa-Dean has inverted Raworth's concept. Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother, is the ecological foundation at the centre, with the degradations happening to her marking the inner ring. That's called Hā Tuamātangi: the Earth's last breath.
Around this is Oranga Iho Nui, a "safe and just space for humanity to thrive and ecology to regenerate". The outer ring is Tūāpapa o te Ora, the spring of wellbeing. This is the space where social progress can be unlimited: in education and health, food production, peace and justice, income and work, political voice and much more.
The concept derives from that double spiral, Te Takarangi. "Strictly speaking," Boasa-Dean told me on the line from Taneatua, in Te Urewera, "it's not really a reconceived doughnut. This concept has always existed for Māori and other indigenous peoples."
She's met Kate Raworth and also Ellen MacArthur, the former round-the-world sailor turned ecological activist, at conferences in Britain.
"I was the only Māori there," she said. "And I realised the European concept they were talking about was a bit one-dimensional. They were rejigging a 200-year-old model that had raped and pillaged the land. You know, the whole 'Take it, make it and throw it away' approach. As a Māori I was intrigued at how it fitted with the way we see the world.
"With everything, the first thing you need to understand is its whakapapa. Where it originates. When you make something you already understandhat it will be recycled back. The simple term for that is whakapapa. It's always implicit: life inducing life, everything returns to the land, to the sea, the mountains, the forest.
Does it fit with Raworth's doughnut? "I admire the doughnut but it doesn't go far enough. Takarangi is an enrichment."
Raworth is relaxed about this. She calls the Takarangi approach "a great design and philosophical question".
"In some visual culture," she wrote on Twitter last year, "what's in the centre is foundational, what's around the edge is peripheral. In other visual culture, what's outer is foundational because it includes everything, and anything that lies within it is a dependent subset of that. This is the visual interpretation I followed in drawing the Doughnut. Humanity as a subsystem of the living world, hence within it."
There are real-world applications for all this.
The symbol of the Tūhoe vision is Te Kura Whare, a large communal house at Tāneatua. It's the country's first certified "Living Building" and one of only 15 in the world. Boasa-Dean was at Te Kura Whare when we spoke.
Te Kura Whare meets a big range of ecological, social and economic targets, in its construction and use, and is now a model for further development. "Some of the major parts here are going into a blueprint for our first green eco-village," Boasa-Dean said.
Tūhoe, like many other iwi, are regenerating their papakainga, or local villages, and building new communities, too. Ecological approaches to construction line up alongside employment, health, education, welfare and cultural initiatives.
"We'll use this blueprint for all 41 of our subtribal papakainga," Boasa-Dean said. "It's about bringing old practices back into a modern eco-village. It's phenomenal."
Mark this. Out there on the edge of the Urewera wilderness, they're leading the world. And they're doing it with Government support. Another reason for hope.
At a climate conference in Auckland last year, Hana Maihi, an Edmund Hillary Fellow, spoke of the value of whakawhanaungatanga: the process of making connections through cultural reference, whakapapa and so much more: "Our relationships will get us through," she said.
The thing is, though, while iwi are busy with kaitiakitanga, the guardianship of the world, and building economic possibilities on the strength of it, how about the rest of us? If it works at a communal level, how does it work at scale? How do you make structural economic reforms in an industrial society?
I asked Juhi Shareef about this. She worked with Boasa-Dean to create the Takarangi doughnut under the Moonshot:City initiative, and chairs the Sustainable Business Network's circular economy "accelerator" group. She said we should think of structural economic reform as a three-stage process.
"There's business as usual, you know, BAU. Then there's the move to 'sustainable' operations. They're less bad, but that's not the goal. The goal is stage three: regenerative and circular."
Farming that preserves and enhances the land; trading in ways that keep the wealth going round; using resources on the basis they will be reused.
"In a couple of months", Shareef said, "we're going to launch a map of regenerative and circular economy projects in Aotearoa New Zealand. It will be like a heat map. We'll be able to see where the hot spots are, what sectors are active and who the changemakers are."
It won't contain everything, but they'll be crowdsourcing their input, to keep adding to the map.
The great opportunity is the Covid rebuild, although right now we're in danger of it being the great missed opportunity.
Rod Carr, chair of the Climate Change Commission: "It's important to keep the economy going, but the Government has spent $13 billion to lock in existing activities."
Only about 20 per cent of the "shovel ready" projects, he pointed out, and 20 per cent of the overall spend, have a carbon-reduction element. Those are terrible figures. They undermine hope.
You can use an X and Y graph to chart the relationship of individual countries to Kate Raworth's doughnut. On the X axis, up the side, you measure wellbeing. On the Y axis along the bottom, you measure emissions. Divide the graph in quarters and plot countries onto it.
New Zealand has high wellbeing (though not for all) and high emissions, which puts it in a large group of developed countries high in the top-right quarter. But the goal is to be in the top left quarter, with low emissions to accompany those high levels of wealth and wellbeing.
The number of countries that have achieved this? Zero.
Is democracy up to the challenges we now face? What can we do to ensure that it is? That's been the theme of this four-part essay. The biggest challenge is the climate crisis and, once you start looking, it's not hard to find change for the good everywhere.
Japan, the world's third-largest economy, has a plan to "fundamentally shift our long-standing policy on coal-fired power generation", according to the new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga. In the Philippines, the Catholic Church has persuaded the Government to stop building new coal-fired plants. In Mexico, Mayans are suing the Government for ignoring climate damage.
News of such things now comes daily. Often the change does not seem like enough, but the globe is awash with it nonetheless.
The Council of Europe kicked off an online forum in November called "Can Democracy Save the Environment?". The slogan was "12 months to answer 1 question".
Jury's still out; we're in that 12 months now.
Progress. The New Zealand Government's budgets are evolving to sit within the Treasury's Living Standards Framework, which in turn is based on the OECD's concept of "four capitals" (natural, social, human and financial).
There's still much to do to really make it stick, but it's not likely the approach will be undone anytime soon, whoever is in power. This is how we see the world, now.
More progress. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals, with 17 goals and 169 related targets, are endorsed by most nations. Conspiracists despair that "Agenda 2030" is a plot to enslave the citizens of the world. In reality, the aim is to eliminate poverty and create a balanced approach to the use of resources.
What more appropriate task for an international organisation of governments could there be? The problem is only that progress is too slow.
Which brings us to America. Democracy saved the United States these past few months, and it wasn't just the voters and the courts and all the brave officials who stood up to be counted. The republic put 25,000 troops and police onto the streets of the capital on Inauguration Day, to prevent the president's mob from trying once more to steal an election.
That was astonishing three times over: that the military did it, that it was necessary, and that it was so comprehensively successful.
It was quite a spectacle, the Biden-Harris inauguration. America reclaimed, by a diverse multitude of sensible, open-hearted, generous, creative, liberal people – and now great again.
Was that the message? American commentators have written about how precarious the event seemed, but what I saw was a celebration of power and glory. Everyone laughed at Trump when he wanted to make America great, but the Biden crew was every bit as smitten with the exact same idea.
The difference was, this time the "great" they believed in was good great: Lady Gaga singing the Star-Spangled Banner, rather than some goon parading the slave-owners' flag through the halls of the Capitol. And poetry: the poetry of hope.
Do all Americans think America is great, end of story? Is there no room for humility, for any recognition that their own system nearly destroyed them – and with them, quite possibly, us? Any chance they might grasp that now would be a good time to step back and see what they might learn from the rest of the democratic world?
Step forward John Kerry, who holds the newly created position of US "climate envoy". Just this week he told the United Nations' Climate Adaptation Summit that his country would be "humble" in its return to the climate action table, seeking "conciliation and cooperation".
But he also said the US will be ambitious. He wants to turn the next UN Climate Change Conference into a platform on which "all major emitter countries raise their ambition significantly and in which we help protect those who are the most vulnerable".
Easy to say. Easy for his country to do, too, because after the past four years America no longer has any climate ambitions. They're coming off a low base. But much harder for those other major emitters that have already committed to zero carbon by the middle of the century.
Still, the ambition is the right one. To reduce the risk of runaway global warming, targets need to focus on 2030, which means action now. Not 2050, which allows them to defer the thinking 'til later.
At the same meeting this week, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres called 2021 "make or break". COP26, the big climate meeting this year, is scheduled for November in Glasgow, but Joe Biden wants an urgent leaders' summit much earlier. Excellent.
The depth of New Zealand's own commitment will be clear soon enough. The Climate Change Commission releases its draft carbon budget proposals this weekend and the Government must have its legislative and regulatory responses in place by the end of the year.
American leadership is critical to everything about this. It's not just because where the world's biggest polluter goes, there others follow. America has to be the change we need, because of all the ways in which it leads or can lead: with its technology, its money, its corporate reach, hard power and softer influence, in the attitudes and behaviour of its citizens. Where America goes, the conditions for others to follow exist.
Put that in terms of cars. California plans an early end to petrol-driven vehicles. If the rest of America does the same, the entire international market for those cars could collapse.
That principle applies all the way down the food chain. It's hard to make decisions for yourself when the conditions don't support you. It's easy when governments, corporates and councils provide the conditions for citizens to make good choices.
Again, take cars. We could all choose to buy electric vehicles (EVs) – cars, and vans and bicycles – and most of us could use public transport more. But usually it's not economically "rational" or time efficient or perhaps even safe to do so.
According to Bloomberg, EVs will be as cheap or cheaper than comparable petrol-driven vehicles by 2025. That's really soon. But soon enough? The Greens have finally persuaded the Government to introduce a clean car standard, but low-emissions vehicles could be subsidised now. And where's the big EV fuelling station rollout? Why has there still been no announcement of an end-date for importing petrol and diesel vehicles?
As for bike riding, it won't boom until e-bikes are cheaper and there's enough urban infrastructure to keep riders safe. And if more people are to take the bus or train, we need a lot more buses and trains. Electric, of course.
Meanwhile, companies like Toyota and Z Energy have put themselves in the forefront of the corporate response to the climate crisis. Toyota is committed to hybrids, electric and hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, but it's also going all out to promote its new monster Hilux trucks. Tag line: "powerful"!
How about a ban on advertising double-cab utes? How about removing their tax advantage?
Kate Raworth: "Every company where profits are based on an extractive economy needs to change. But we're not going to solve this company by company. It needs shareholders as a whole to value more than maximum profits. And, when necessary, laws will have to change to make that happen."
And don't forget the adverse consequences of inaction. If New Zealand doesn't phase out petrol and diesel vehicles soon, we will become the dumping ground for the world.
We're all looking at you, Grant Robertson.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean the sky ends here –
This poem is the closest thing to hope we have
But we're running out of metaphors, and running out of endings,
And so is mother earth ...
- Matilda Clack and Takunda Muzondiwa
Two years ago the PM's Business Advisory Council wrote to the PM to warn that if New Zealand didn't speed up its response to the climate crisis, we would lose many of the talented people straining to go faster. They'd go where the action is.
Covid bought us some time: no one's going anywhere just now. But unless we step up, that will happen.
Covid did something else, too. It taught us there are health consequences for the way we consume the resources of the Earth. When we destroy wildlife habitats, animals and their viruses press up closer to humans. As the Swedish environmental scientist Johan Rockstrom points out, air pollution affects lung capacity.
He calls Covid "a predicted manifestation" of how we live. Covid and the climate are part of the same crisis.
Although we also learned, if we didn't know it already, that those who consume the most are not likely to be harmed the most. Covid, like most of the effects of climate change, has been disproportionately worse for poorer communities.
Kate Raworth says Covid has made change both harder and easier. Easier, because it has taught us about the centrality of health. Harder, because when we have our health we promptly forget about it and go shopping.
Maybe Ganesh Nana will make a difference. The Wellington-based economist is on record as a fan of Raworth's doughnut and the Government has appointed him the new head of the Productivity Commission. The doughnut just rolled a little closer to the centre of power.
Everything is connected. As we decide what to change about our own lives and as we ask for the leadership we need from the Government, Raworth has a simple test for deciding who's worth listening to.
"Whether it's a company or a country, ask yourself: Are they creating a future for their grandchildren they themselves would never want to live in?"
A good way to assess that: Do they have ambitious 2030 targets and a plan for achieving them?
He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tāngata, he tāngata. Everyone knows it and it's true: the closest thing to hope we have is us. Not because individual action is the key to saving the world from the predations of greedy corporates and frightened governments. It's the reverse. It's because we can insist, long and loud, that those governments and corporates do better.
Can New Zealand make a difference? Professor Anita Wreford, an economist at Lincoln University specialising in agriculture and climate change: "The countries that each contribute under 1 per cent of global emissions together make up about 50 per cent."
The answer is, yes we can.
Amanda Gorman, who read her poem "The Hill We Climb" at Joe Biden's inauguration, is a spoken-word poet, a member of a large and vibrant international community of mainly young, activist performance poets. At a climate action conference in Auckland last year, Matilda Clack and Takunda Muzondiwa, students and former members of Mt Albert Grammar's 4pm Poetry Collective, presented their own spoken-word poem. This is it.
THE WAVES NEVER MADE IT
The waves never made it to the shore
Their sound never captured in conches or cochlears
The waves do not reach us anymore
We distance climate dystopia from ourselves
Like the year 2050 isn't within our lifetimes,
But these coping mechanisms may salve your cognitive dissonance
But cannot create distance from the future, who remains fast approaching, like a tsunami.
We are burying dreams in graves
Before they are planted in soil,
Even in death mother earth
Will honour our memory
Cremating our bodies by binding them to her soil
As if to say
She will hold us forever
All this trauma has aged us
Coerced us into believing our time has already come
Forgetting the future is our grandchild and we've been raising her all along
Dystopia has already arrived and what was once fiction is now fact;
In my first year of university
I learned that the school mixes
The recycling with the rubbish in the end anyway
And I guess that goes to show
That our individual efforts
To be our own sustainable saviours
Are limited
By institutional and economic systems
When those in power put profit before people
They will fail to invest in our futures;
So we ask them; if we too are made of water
What becomes of us when the oceans dry up?
Companies get money while conveniently avoiding accountability
Turn flashlight to families who can't afford organic
And spotlight their struggle like a circus stage show
As if this is all entertainment
The applause of individual success almost sounds like an ocean crashing if you listen hard enough
If we keep emphasising individual actions, we will never be able to view the world as whole
And when capitalism is founded on guilt, we're all charged as guilty
Sentenced to never being good enough or green enough
When instead we should be focused on being collective and not complacent
Now is the time to hold onto the optimism of a future that hasn't yet faded
The collective desire for change sits in the very fact you remain in this room,
Listening to the breath that will exhale into tomorrow
Stewardship across the skyline that stretches further than the eye can see;
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean the sky ends here –
This poem is the closest thing to hope we have
But we're running out of metaphors, and running out of endings,
And so is mother earth.
If we're the teenage protagonists in this dystopia,
Which role do you choose to play?
Is your legacy one on paper or will it be written
In the actuality of a liveable planet
Will your words be more than vessels for self-interested advantage,
And will they be heard in conches and cochlears, in the wind, in the rain
The waves never made it to the shore
But maybe, there's another ending where they do.
Why I'm Afraid
Part 1: In the century of crisis we are not coping
Part 2: Confronting the climate crisis
Part 3: After America's Age of the Ridiculous, what now?
Part 4: Doughnut economics and a reason to hope
'The contribution they’ve made to ballet in this country ... has been immense.'