14 Wairarapa Midweek Extra Wednesday, May 18, 2022 ARATOI VOICES
Extra
Take a look around you I was idly tidying up the fallen leaves and removing rocks from a flowerbed in my garden when my mind started wandering and landed on the Aratoi exhibition, Toitū Te Whenua, The Land Will Always Remain. It struck me; who was I tidying for? The exhibition features five diverse artists, IanWayne Grant, Simon Lardelli, Jacqui Colley, Jenna Packer and Bruce Foster who investigate the ecological, historical, political and social forces which shape our environment. The exhibition is powerful, it’s not necessarily entertaining but it certainly makes you think. The images
linger in your mind until an unsuspecting moment surprises you and knocks you off guard. Thinking about Jenna Packer’s work, her uncomfortable paintings, showing the destruction of bush, the transformation and tidying creating a new landscape garden. Why are we trying to control chaos? The rocks that I was eagerly digging up and removing with such haste, are old. Extremely old. The process a rock must go through, erosion, pressure, and heating over eons of time is really quite remarkable. Have you ever stopped to really think about where the gravel on your
Jenna Packer, Book of Numbers (2021), acrylic on aluminium. Courtesy Milford Galleries. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
driveway came from? Take a look around, everything around us is old and has been formed within the last 4.5 billion years. That’s Deep Time. Humans on the other hand have only been around for at most three million years, the very
beginnings of the Stone Age. Think of all the buildings we have made, the landscape that has been dug up and changed, the scars that have been left behind since then. Bruce Foster’s photography work shows the reality of these human
processes, the scars left on the landscape. In the end, I gave up tidying the garden and put the rocks back where I found them. Toitū Te Whenua, The Land Will Always Remain is showing at Aratoi until June 26.
CLIMATE FOR CHANGE
Real climate action must happen now Anne Nelson Many of you will have heard about the report from the IPCC which drove home the message that real action on climate change has to happen now if we are to avoid mounting loss of life, biodiversity and infrastructure. (The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the group of experts that provides scientific information to governments and international climate change summits.) And now we have learnt that Aotearoa is more vulnerable to sea level rise than had been thought. It’s easy to feel frightened and overwhelmed by news like this, especially when climate disasters are becoming more frequent, and continents like Antarctica and the
Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean.
Arctic are experiencing temperature extremes. It’s the kind of news that makes you want to go back to bed and pull the blankets over your head. But a growing number of people are suggesting we look at the situation not from a place of fear, but with a perspective of hope. “I think we have to get out of the mindset that
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we are coming to the end of the world,” Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean said on TVNZ Breakfast. “I think we need to start thinking that we are at the beginning of something.” Fruean said people could start looking at the climate crisis as the beginning of an environmental renaissance.
“We’re so lucky to be in Aotearoa where we live on land of indigenous owners who know how to take care of this land. Maybe a climate solution is learning tikanga Māori.” She also called for greater unity and recognition of our common concern. “There’s a misconception that it’s climate activists against other people. It’s not. It’s all of us for our planet.” Simon Wilson, a Herald correspondent, told RNZ Mediawatch that we should see the climate crisis as an opportunity. “We can paint a picture of how to make a better world out of this... What are the ways in which we make society better, given that we have to change anyway?” But what about the belief that humans are a destructive species? That ‘human nature’ is what
has brought us to where we are now? That a fiery or flooded ending is our inevitable fate? Some interesting discussions are unpacking this theory, including Rutger Bregman’s thought-provoking book ‘Human Kind’. He demonstrates that while it is true that the history of the world is littered with warfare, cruelty and exploitation, there are also abundant examples of people living in harmony with one another and creating social systems that are humane and effective. He advocates that people are deeply inclined to be good to one another. Perhaps seeing humanity from a fresh perspective is what is needed if we are to believe in the possibility of a better future. Perhaps we first have to believe in ourselves.
