The wealth to be found in kōrero

May 23

Someone once said, ‘talk is cheap’. As someone long involved in conservation on this island I have become aware, not of the ‘cheapness’ of kōrero but of its richness in fostering new ideas and new projects benefiting the environment, including the marine environment.

For the last five years Waiheke conservationists both individuals and groups plus agencies caring about the environment, plus iwi and mana whenua have come out of their ‘silos’ and have sat down under The Collective umbrella and really talked to each other, in some cases reconnecting in new partnership arrangements to amplify environmental good on the island. One of these partnerships is the Waiheke Marine Project. I have recently been challenged in my thinking and profoundly moved by parts of Emma Marris’s 'Wild Souls – Freedom and Flourishing in the non-human world'.

As Marris says "There is no single happy ending for life on Earth just as there is no simple formula for acting ethically in a humanized world. We must do the best we can with multiple incommensurable values, then live with the choices we have made, the species not saved, the pain we caused".

Marris’s thesis in both her books point to the, maybe sad, fact that we live in a ‘post-wild’ world. The planet has been humanized to the enth degree. More than ever we need to stay ‘talking together’ to either halt the decline caused by this humanization or find ways to adapt to what ‘is’ and ‘what might be’, whether that is further species extinction or climate change.

What does that mean for those of us working to improve the marine environment, specifically for us on Waiheke, in how this relates to the regeneration of Tikapa Moana?

In recent days there has been discussion about the Ministry of the Environment’s updated discussion paper on ‘Adapting to Sea-level Rise’. There is talk about ‘managed retreat’ by some human communities from the coast. I ask myself, where is the talk, the korero of what sea-level rise will mean for those non-human animals who rely on coastal and inter-tidal habitats for their survival? Do we talk about the species whose habitats we can save or help adapt as the sea rises? Do we let some species fend for themselves as they try to make new homes in a changed coastal seascape? We, indeed, must live with the choices we make. The quality of these choices I believe relies on good, respectful, ‘drilling down’ korero. We are starting to have some of these conversations in relation to kororā as we realise that some of their traditional burrows will disappear around the Waiheke coastline (and we know it will take time for them to adapt to new nesting habitat opportunities as they are very territorial).

I would love to hear if people are thinking about sea-rise impact on other marine coastal/intertidal fauna or flora and what the beginnings of kōrero about these might sound like.

Sue Fitchett
Communication Group Member