What if we just let ourselves fall in love with the land?

An entwinement with the kupu of my friend.

I sometimes wonder, a bit laughingly, why Nadine Hura gives me the time of day. We met through a writing community, although I can’t remember how exactly. I’m a reasonably successful writer who plods her way through nerdy topics. Nadine’s prolific, writing for a host of big deal publications with her signature mix of metaphor, connection and music. A girl’s gotta plod pretty hard to keep up.

Nadine’s been writing a book, and finding it tough going at times. I offered support, even though I thought there probably wasn’t much I could do. I’ve never written a book, but I’ve done a PhD, and I know that creating something big with a lot of words is usually a solo kind of hell. But Nadine came up with a job for me. The book - a collection of essays - was nearly there, she messaged. Would I be keen to read an advance copy?

And so Slowing the Sun arrived in my letterbox.

About a quarter of the way in, I was smiling wryly. Nadine was recounting the time she annoyed the bejesus out of a social policy lecturer with her questions in class. She’d already told me she’d tried social policy and it wasn’t her bag - and now I was starting to understand why. Part of the reason I smiled is that I’d been a rookie social policy lecturer for a couple of semesters. If Nadine was writing about the foreignness of the world of policy, then I’d been an awkward envoy of that world, faffing anxiously with my microphone and hoping desperately my slides would work.

I don’t really know how to review books - and while I admire it when authors do clever technical stuff, I ultimately remember writing for what it makes me think and how it makes me feel. I have even less idea how to review this book, because it’s so original and all-encompassing and fully alive, words that don’t quite measure up to the task at hand.

But now I’ve laid out a few caveats, I’m going to give it a go. I want to try to explain some of the reasons why Slowing the Sun made me think and feel so deeply.

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The climate crisis is bound up with colonial exploitation of the land. Exploitation of the land is bound up with exploitation of people: those who hold the shovels are seldom the ones to reap the rewards. The severing of people from land creates injustice and injury. Nadine traces the fallout of that severing through her own life and whakapapa: chaos and endurance, life and death, love and desolation, hurt and restoration.

I’ve named these things a bit like a grocery list, but Nadine’s point is this: everything’s connected. This means climate solutions won’t be found easily, in a single place, or without a shift in values and beliefs. (These aren’t Nadine’s words, to be fair, but my simplification.)

Something that grabbed my interest was Nadine’s experience of, and lack of faith in, public policy as the answer to the climate crisis (or pretty much anything else). When I talk about policy, I’m talking broadly about the ideas governments have - and more specifically, the work of policymakers who advise leaders what they should do, and who figure out how to put ideas into practice.

Whether she was trying to decipher it, or working in a major Ministry that created it, policymaking left Nadine cold. She would sit at her desk in the Ministry, longing for the ocean she could see through the window. It was a poignant image: I used to sit in a similar desk in the same building.

As well as lecturing social policy for a time (the history and theory), I’ve worked as a policymaker and taught and mentored other policymakers (the actual doing). Years ago, when I started in policy, I found it foreign and confusing and intimidating, although it eventually began to make sense, and I even came to enjoy it. But in part because of my early experience, I feel passionately about making policy accessible - a bit of a passionless passion that makes me laugh at myself. I just figure that the people who pay for policy to be made, and have to live with the results, should have the right to understand it.

I think Nadine’s identified something really important - a way of understanding policy, our society, our economy, even the planet itself, that’s so ingrained it’s sometimes hard to see, but isn’t serving the purpose we need it to. And I share her fears. We all have a job on our hands to repair the world around us, and we need to make sure we have the right tools.

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When Nadine articulates how policy feels to her, she is speaking from her whakapapa as a wahine Māori. I want to reflect on some of her ideas, from my own whakapapa as a Pākehā woman. My ancestors are from Scotland and Ireland. My mother’s side, farmers and eventually truckers, came here by boat generations ago; and my father, who had a trade, turned up in the early 70s on a Boeing.

I’m Tangata Tiriti, meaning that although I love the land, my relationship to it is different - and so is my relationship to some of the concepts we’re about to dive into. I’m going to make these concepts as un-boring and un-scary as I can, by sharing them in the same way I share them with people starting out in their policy careers. Hang in there with me.

Here’s how I like to begin my explanation. Policymaking is neutral, right? Objective? A factual description of the world as it really is, without emotions or bias clouding things?

It’s a slightly provocative question - not because the answer’s unclear, but because it’s tricky to articulate. So I have a go. First, I acknowledge that policy is full of what I call ‘wordy-words’, or technical terms. It’s not that these words don’t mean things, or that the things they mean aren’t helpful at least some of the time. But we need to be careful with words. Words can make people feel more or less, smart or stupid, welcomed in or shut out.

I say to my listeners, the policy words we’re eventually going to talk about aren’t so mystical anyway. Most of them boil down to stuff you already know intuitively or by another name. You’ve got this, I remind people: and at this point, I’ll usually see nodding or visible relief. People can carry shame from other experiences, especially school, when they’ve been made to feel not good enough; and policy and its wordy-words can sometimes stoke that past shame a little. There’s nothing emotionless about this experience.

Then what about the neutrality and objectivity of policy? This is the part of my spiel where I launch into a series of (simplified) concepts I discovered on a detour while doing my PhD. I’m sad to say I can’t remember which concept came from where, so I can’t offer any references - and any failures in the way these concepts are woven is entirely my own.

Once upon a time, back in the day, Europe thought up a bunch of stuff. (Europe certainly wasn’t the only place to think up this stuff, or other important stuff, but that’s another story for another day.) The Enlightenment happened. Science and maths, in the sense we think about them now, started getting people excited. In time, science and maths led to the industrial revolution. All these things fed a sense of cultural superiority that in turn fed colonisation. Other countries’ resources were great for fuelling European economies, machines, and the working class who laboured dangerously on those machines. In return for their resources, other countries had ‘better’ European ways foisted on them - dispossession dressed unconvincingly as a gift.

These are concepts you’ve probably come across before - but it’s the next set of concepts that I find really interesting.

Machines, and especially the new science of engineering, really captured the European imagination (or at least, some of those imaginations). These new concepts got expanded out to different things. People asked, what if you thought about society as a machine - something you could tinker with, to make it run better? The theory goes that the forerunners of today’s policymakers came up with new, engineered systems to order and even control society and the natural world. Town planning. Sewerage. Policing. Even gathering statistics, a novel science that helped measure and turn into numbers the population itself: old or young, rural or urban, working or not.

Are these necessarily bad things? Of course not. Before modern sanitation, my ancestors were flinging poo out the window onto the street, and wondering why people got sick - not our best work. The trick is remembering that things are more complex than ‘technology good’/’lack of technology bad’, and that technology is wrapped up in a bunch of other stuff, arriving on countries’ shores not always by mutual exchange, but sometimes at the point of a gun.

Usually, at this point in the story, my listeners are super engaged - but they’re also wondering where I’m headed. As we move to the next set of concepts, things begin to fall into place.

Once you start thinking about societies as like machines, it’s not such a leap to think about people as like machines. More European concepts came from the emerging discipline of economics: another system for ordering the world. Key to at least some economics was homo economicus, or rational economic man - and trust me, homo economicus is definitely a bro. He’s highly reasoned, or at least, that’s what he tells himself. He is fundamentally motivated by self-interest, something he’s constantly calculating through every transaction with others, always figuring out the most advantageous ways to spend his money and time. You can tell he’s not a woman, because he doesn’t do illogical things like having children instead of doing real (paid) work - and you can he’s not indigenous, because he sees land in dollar values, not cultural or spiritual ones.

OK, this is a bit crude. Some economists (and policymakers) have genuinely thought about human nature this way. Most economists (and policymakers) are a bit more nuanced, and more open to other ways of thinking. But the point is, if your thinking comes out of the tradition that says people are always rational, self-interested and calculating, you’ll lean towards policies built around self-interested behaviour, to make sure society’s ordered and controlled. That means creating carrots (incentives for the right behaviour) and sticks (sanctions for the wrong behaviour). It’s almost like programming a machine, you see?

Again, I’m being a bit provocative. In some policy situations, thinking in terms of incentives and sanctions works pretty well. For example, if the government incentivises one type of investment (like rental properties) over another, you can assume people will do the maths and you can reliably predict where they’ll put their money. But in other policy situations, incentives and sanctions don’t work well at all. Take prisons. No rational person wants to go to prison. If people were really programmable carrot/stick machines, with self-interest their overarching value, prisons wouldn’t exist. But people aren’t so easily explainable, and nor is the world around them. Colonisation, inequity, poverty, institutional racism, spiritual denigration - all these things play a part in imprisonment, and just because you can’t measure them neatly or apply a dollar value doesn’t mean they’re not a thing. They’re just way harder for policymakers to understand and address.

By now, my listeners have generally figured out the point of my story - if we make policies that treat people or societies like they’re machines, we’ll sometimes miss the mark. But I’ve still got a trick up my sleeve. I say, you might be thinking all this machine and engineering stuff, with its vestiges of European superiority and colonial baggage, is behind us. I add: we policymakers still use this kind of language every day. Machinery of government (meaning the way government systems are organised). Policy levers (the different ways policies can be implemented). Shifting the dial (a phrase used to mean ‘making real change’). These are the concepts we use when we think about ordering and controlling stuff.

One group I worked with sat back and mused when I finished my story.

‘Gosh’, said one person, ‘When you really drill down … ah, drill?’.

Everyone laughed. Another person said, ‘We talk about a pipeline of learners moving through the education system. Hmmm’.

Another added, ‘We make reporting dashboards. That’s a car thing, right?”

I like to complete my riff by sharing my theory: when some people feel alienated by policy, this language might be part of the reason. Policy speaks to one set of cultural values and stays silent on others, without seeming to notice - talking about the world in machine and engineering terms, as if these were more natural than nature itself.

To be clear, I’m not bagging policymakers. I like policy, mostly, and the folks who work on it. Most I’ve met are good humans who care deeply about what they do, and the people and planet they’re doing it for. But to this day, our professional language is besotted with one type of metaphor - not other ways of knowing, describing or being part of the world. It’s a subtle signal about what matters, for sure, but it’s definitely there.

And once you see it, both in policy and everyday talk, you wonder how it stayed invisible so long.

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I fibbed a little, telling you I’m speaking from the perspective of my whakapapa. I don’t know my whakapapa. And I don’t just mean that my ancestors are names on a page and nothing more. For the most part, I don’t even know who they are.

My mum’s retired, and dabbling in a little genealogy. She’s come up with a mixed bag. There are some ancestors who sucked up to the Irish establishment, and others who fled it. A nun who spent part of World War Two in a concentration camp. Mostly, there are ordinary people: labourers and women who married labourers, their own female work unrecorded. You can see when and where these folks were born and baptised, were wedded and died. That’s about it.

As Nadine wove everything into connectedness - whakapapa, land, language, wairua and mauri - it struck a chord with me. I wondered if my own experience, having a whakapapa I don’t know, one that can’t easily be connected to the world around me, is something others feel.

There was a golden moment in the history of racism when white people at least felt embarrassed to claim technology makes them superior. That moment was fleeting. There’s been a shocking and brazen revival of white dudes shouting, generally from the Facebook comments, that indigenous people need to be grateful. We brought them technology, taught them maths, built them bridges.

I always wonder, who is ‘we’? Each time I see a comment like that, made by an Alan or a Ron, I think, bro. I can count the number of bridges you’ve built on no hands.

What strikes me is that these men, although they are not always men, are so desperate for a whakapapa of concrete and steel - and how emotional they get about it, given they’re meant to be the rational ones explaining to the rest. And it’s not even the machines or the engineering they’re in love with: they lose interest in science pretty bloody quick when the conversation turns to climate change. They just like the idea of a world not-so-gone-by, with its hierarchies: some people over others, some countries over others, and humans over nature.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never been able to take myself seriously as a technologically superior being. I’m just too awkward, faffing anxiously with my microphone and hoping desperately my slides will work.

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So, what’s the solution? If policy alone won’t fix things, how do we respond to the climate crisis - or any other of the problems facing people and planet?

I’ve ended this piece the way I started it: without an answer. There’s a bit of relief in saying that. I’m still learning to think - and by that, I mean I’m learning not to see the world from only one perspective, translate it according to my way of being, tether everything to the stuff I already know, as if forcing it through a machine. If I knew everything, I’d stop being a learner, and if I stopped being a learner, I wouldn’t feel wonderment at the world anymore - the kind you get by curling up in the sun and reading a book by a clever friend.

The last words of this piece go to Nadine, who’s got a few ideas:

It has been the strangest experience to feel myself healing from the relational impacts of climate change by learning te reo Māori, studying science and practising art. But it makes sense. I often think that addressing the climate crisis could be as simple as healing the mental, emotional and spiritual disconnection with people, whānau and communities. By this frame, overcoming our shame to speak te reo Māori is climate action. Learning the names and the stories of the mountains and rivers we live beside is climate action. Paying attention to the ancestral knowledge that is revealed with each new retelling of pūrākau is climate action. Protecting the integrity of mātauranga Māori from misuse and appropriation is climate action. Not being embarrassed to ask the people who live and breathe the science and data and policy of climate change to explain things in a language that makes sense is climate action.

You can see Nadine speak about Slowing the Sun 26 May, 6pm, at Unity Books. You can order the book, or just head to a bookshop and grab it. I promise you’ll be happy you did.