Valuing What's Important

Valuing What's Important - Abstract

Human impacts have done immense damage to New Zealand’s environment but there is hope.  If we re-orient our management of our impacts to one of kaitiakitanga, give up the conceit that humans own the planet and bring into better focus in public debates those things that we value most, we are likely to be better off now and in the future. We are still terra-centric but our greatest future responsibility is for the sea.

Valuing What's Important

The sound of the waves, the smell of the bush, the beach and the sea, the clarity of the view, the gentle knock of flax seed heads, the slap of the sea and the flutter of cabbage tree leaves against each other as the clouds speed by.  We all have an awareness of the environment in New Zealand.  Some places are more elemental than others.  Whatever our preferred environment, the New Zealand environment and society are fundamental to our well-being.  Yet one of the hardest things to come to grips with is that many of our day to day choices and the ways we have been brought up are putting the things we most value at risk and are ecologically unsustainable.

One of the major changes in thinking of the last decade or two is to give some formal shape to the need to recognise, cherish and protect some of these things that matter to us most.  One way of expressing this is to think in terms of maintaining and protecting natural, social, cultural and human capital– while resisting the “commodification” of the environment and our social relations that can sometimes accompany such terms.

Our impacts have been huge: of that there is little doubt.  We have known about it for years and much of it is well-documented (see for instance the Ministry for the Environment’s  State of the New Zealand Environment 1997).

Mutual trust, a readiness to help each other, tolerance, a common sense of community – best without the stifling sense of conformism – these are aspects of the New Zealand community that we value.  Interestingly, these are also aspects that could make us better at managing our impacts on our environment.  The international literature suggests that the stronger the social cohesion, bonds and interactions within a group, the better we are likely to be at managing our environmental impacts.

These impacts are the results of our introduced species, our pastoral farming, forestry and fishing methods, our high impact subdivisions and settlements, land and waste mismanagement and our transport systems.  Some of it reflects our predominant value systems and the way we relate to the environment.

Of course we also have to understand what are our impacts and how our activities may cause those impacts.  We have to value what we put at risk and have the will to change our ways.

Social cohesion is not enough on its own – witness the enormous amount of damage to the land, water and life while people have been in New Zealand and in strong cohesive societies.

Recent studies (see for instance the first two editions of New Scientist in October 2003) show that people rate time with friends and family, the quality of the environment, and their satisfaction as more important to well being than materialism.  So why are we hooked on “growth”?   What we need is a more penetrating discussion of how to increase well-being without destroying natural, social, cultural and human capital.  We need to reframe our thinking and our institutions and their reporting to give clearer expression and accounts of what really matters to us.

Unhappily, many of the things that we measure and debate nationally are not the things that most people actually value most.   This is because so many of the things we value are not traded in the market – or the aspects that we value are not so traded and their value is not automatically accounted for in public monetary statistics such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), trade statistics and the like.

High in our estimation are the bonds of community, the quality of the natural environment, the nature of our bequests to the future, our pride in our good stewardship of the environment that we have inherited.   We often lose sight of these issues.

We need public indicators of satisfaction and well being that include these things that we consider matter – and those things that we consider are ethically important: like whether we are leaving an environment intact for the future and how we treat those without voice.

The Genuine Progress Indicator is one attempt at modifying GDP to give more visibility to the losses of natural and social capital that we face. It is an index of well-being that adjusts for unemployment, crime and pollution that may require spending but do not promote well-being.  We need other more direct indicators that are published and commented on publicly regularly.

We have for years focussed our environmental concerns on the land and freshwater   – and we have begun to address our shortcomings of understanding and of practice.  For most people gone are the days when felling bush was acceptable.  Good practice of living with a lighter ecological footprint is catching on – whether it be with lighter  live-stock rates, land use changes, fencing off water margins, using the bus rather than a car, or using more energy efficient processes or pest control.

Our orientation as land lubbers – with our focus on the land and our preoccupation about the land environment is understandable – but it is not the way of the future.  

The future is salty and wet. The NIWA map, “Underwater New Zealand” is striking.   It reveals that New Zealand is really a huge underwater continent – part of a wider biophysical system with deep cold currents that pass by from the Antarctic with upwellings and ocean systems that bring to us nutrients, remarkable diverse species and invertebrate communities, migrating marine mammals and our climate and weather systems.

Many of us have missed that the sea area for which New Zealand has responsibility covers fifteen times the land area of New Zealand.  This comprises our Territorial Sea (out to 12 nautical miles) and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) which stretches from 12 to 200 nautical miles.

New Zealand is also delineating the continental shelf around us – we will take over the responsibility for its sea bed once we have done so.  This will give New Zealand an area of seabed about 23-24 times our land area to administer.  It is a huge responsibility and it provides opportunities – all courtesy of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Our responsibility is to “protect and preserve the marine environment” (Article 192 of UNCLOS).  Our failure to comply with this responsibility has been dismal.  We have allowed orange roughy stocks to be reduced to scandalously low rates before fishing ceased (to 3% of the original stock in the case of the Challenger Plateau) with losses of sea birds, benthic communities (those on the seafloor) and much damage done in the process of fishing.  Sedimentation of the marine organisms is also a major problem.

Our debates about the seabed and foreshore serve as something of a cameo for other issues that face us.  How long will we frame the debate in the language of human conceit towards each other and the environment?  Can we seriously believe the notion that humans – in groups or as a whole - own all other species and biophysical systems?  Such is neither ethically nor evolutionarily plausible.

It is a strange and ultimately self defeating conceit to see the world as our chattel, ours to destroy.  It cannot be that we can truly found a durable society on the notion that we can do whatever we wish with anything we own.

Our language of property needs careful remodelling to stress that we have responsibilities and that these set bounds on any entitlements that society may allow.

Increasingly we can find out about the companies we keep. Internet technologies and vigilant human rights and environmental organisations can help us make choices about the paper we use, the footwear we buy, our trading partners and banks.  Ethical trading and investment is hard but is getting easier – and it pays.

For some, the period of denial and distrust of the information about damage, depletion and degradation is long and deep – as illustrated by the denials of climate change.  For others, the understanding of the need to change has dawned but habits die hard. We need supportive infrastructure, options, urban design, information and encouragement.

Maori traditional thinking has people belonging to the land and being kaitiaki of it.  This is a more realistic account of the human nature relationship than the version of man having dominion over all.  Absolutist ideas of property stem from 18^th century philosophers such as John Locke.  But read in the original, he was far more temperate than some of his modern acolytes.  His notions have been caricatured into those of the individual in pursuit of happiness, with some inviolable self with whose property the government must not meddle. Locke, however insisted that we must leave to the future “as much and as good” as we inherited.

In New Zealand we can see the dual devastation of the impact of colonisation on the land and on Maori – whose culture, communities and environment have sagged and shrunk under the tide of people and the species that they brought that have left an ever growing queue to extinction.

We have all learned that the freedom that our forebears sought is not unconditional:  we must pay more regard to our impacts on Maori and on the host environment upon which we depend.

Taking action is not always easy – particularly when we have habits and practices that we have engaged in in good faith but that are revealed to cause harm.

The good news is that forbearance and care need not mean losses of well being.  More sustainable production and consumption patterns may well lead us to be better off.  If we value the environment and honour the tangata whenua, recognising their kiatiakitanga, we may feel more at home and more fulfilled than when we live in a society beset by conflict and degradation.

But how do we change and how to we get there?

Our first commitment might be to leave a lighter ecological footprint, by making many small changes – to think for instance whether we need take a vehicle rather than walk or take public transport.  We can all make small changes – some of us can make big changes.

Fundamental to many of the changes that we make will be our own sense of what is important, what we respect.  If we care about and respect both the future and environment, then we will treat both better – and there may be less conflict.

Individually though, we can only make changes within our “opportunity set” – there are some changes that we need to address as a community.  We can alter the indicators of success that we have:  for instance to reflect well being rather than simply use or abuse of resources.  As a nation we could focus on increasing well-being rather than “economic growth”.

We could aim to maintain and protect natural, cultural and social capital – and to be as vigilant about these as we are with public and private financial capital.  This means that we would maintain the environment intact, with limits to protect natural processes, systems, places and ecosystems.  Decision rules such as the precautionary principle that suggest that we avoid actions with significant irreversible adverse consequences or consequences which we cannot predict.

Our decisions about land use and pollution are already governed on land and out to 12 nautical miles by the Resource Management Act.  It could operate much better – if councils were more consistent, more truly regarding of the environment and affected people and if those with environmental cases were better assisted to put these cases.

We need an equivalent for the oceans – an oceans policy that is future-regarding, protective of native species, diversity and processes.

We could do the world and ourselves a favour by switching at least some taxation from expenditure (such as GST) to taxation of activities with environmental harm.  The government has run into opposition for its levy on farmers for research into methane reduction:  but in principle those who pollute should pay.  It is far more equitable and more economically efficient to charge for greenhouse gas emissions than to charge for expenditure or employment.

Massive subsidies to road transport – rail users pay for the rail tracks but road users mostly do not pay for the roads or their maintenance – should be replaced with full user pays.

An approach to marine and fisheries management that recognise kaitiaki of the sea and limits the damage done by fishing – particularly trawling – would ensure more for the future.

There is not space for a full blue-print – but facing up to the need to change, working from a principle of limiting impacts rather than human conceit would be a great start.