Principle 1

The whenua, Papatuanuku, is the source of all life. She is the Mother. Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata. Caring for the whenua is the first priority. Everything else must be measured against this.

The concept of the Earth being “mother” is found in almost every traditional culture. Traditional people depended very directly on what the Earth could provide; a bad season often meant starvation and death, a good season the chance to heal, to save, and to prepare for the next bad season. We are not confronted with that very basic fact of life in the way most of us live today; our water comes out of a tap, not from a river or spring, and food comes from the shops in town, along with everything else we need, not from the land on which we live.

We are not so sure of that now with COVID 19 putting us into lockdown. But we still depend on the shops to provide, and tolerate the impositions the lockdown imposes.

Yet our whole way of life still depends on what the whenua can provide. But the whenua doesn’t depend on us; she can get on quite well without us. We must constantly remind ourselves of that.

For us then that means that caring for the Earth, Papatuanuku, our Mother, is by far the greatest priority.

Everything depends on her health, most especially our economy: not just our agriculture and horticulture and the export dollars they produce, or tourism and all the overseas exchange it contributes to balancing the books, but everything about how we live.

That applies especially to water; life wouldn’t exist without water. Water sustains our life and lives; it is the gift of life.

With that at the very front of our minds, the first question in the Resource Management Act should be something like this:

“Does this proposed action help the earth more that it hurts it.

 If the answer is yes, it can be approved.

If that is uncertain, the proposal needs to be looked at again and revised.

If the answer is no, it hurts the whenua more than it helps, it is rejected”.

There is no room for “ifs” and “buts”.

If that was how we managed our environment our future would be more certain.

In actual fact such an approach is in keeping with the Resource Management Act:

Part II

Purpose And Principles
5. Purpose - (1) The purpose of this Act is to promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources.

(2) In this Act, “sustainable management” means managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enable people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well being and for their health and safety while –

(a)Sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and

(b) Safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil and ecosystems; and

(c) Avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment. 

For the sake of our future and those who follow us the Act needs to be administered in a more literal way; we need to do as the words say: “promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources”.

We need to try to follow the spirit of the law, rather than looking for the absolute minimum needed to comply that we can justify to ourselves.

What has happened in fact is the Act has been administered in a way that ensures that economic development continues to progress in such a way that its effects on the environment are acceptable to those who administer the Act and those to whom they are answerable. That means those who have the resources to undertake business developments, and to profit from them. The result has been the continuing gradual deterioration of the environment that we are all witness to and are increasingly alarmed about.

The time has come to stop postponing the inevitable and work to ensure that the Act does achieve the protection of the environment and the life that belongs there, as stated in the Act itself.

In practice what does that really mean?

It means that if what we decide to do threatens to deprive the coming generations of what they need to survive, we don’t go ahead.

We are good at justifying things because we say economic development is absolutely necessary for our future. Our future; but we need to think more about the future of those who follow us. “Future” means beyond our own lifetimes. Some of the things we have allowed ourselves to do have caused irreparable long term damage. The wholesale irrigation on the Canterbury plains is an example of that. Coming generations may not need the multitude of material possession we think we need. But they will want to survive. In years to come even the basics may be out of reach, such things as water that is safe to drink and enough healthy food to be well.

The trouble is we have undermined the whenua’s way of healing herself to the extent that more and more often she is no longer able to do so, and it is us, and more significantly, those who will follow us, who will suffer the consequences. They will be the ones who will pay. In most of New Zealand, for example, already water is only safe to drink because it has been treated with chemicals.

The term “Future Eaters”, coined by Tim Flannery best describes our way of using the Earth’s resources.

Even the strongest person will one day reach a breaking point, a point of collapse. The Earth, Papatuanuku, our Mother, is close to that point. It’s easy to see, just as easily is it easy to see when a person is close to a nervous breakdown. We need to take notice now and act before the crisis really hits.

It is not farming that has brought that about, or motor vehicles. Rather it’s the accumulative effect of how we have used the Earth’s resources, taking much more than we give back. We need to stop looking for others to blame and do more to accept our own ongoing contribution to the current crisis. What’s gone wrong is we have taken so much that we have disempowered nature’s way of caring for herself. In New Zealand most especially we have done away with swamps and wetlands, and the trees and plants that bounded every river and stream that are a key part of her self-care. Much of Christchurch was built on a swamp, drained to make it habitable; so are many of our other towns and cities; and bush is removed to farm, and to clear our view.

That’s what Tiwaiwaka is about, caring for Papatuanuku, to ensure her health, and through that our health, our well being, our future.

The single biggest change we must make is to re-order our priorities. Economic development is not the greatest priority facing our country, and the whole planet. That must always be subject to what is best for Papatuanuku.

There can be no exceptions to that. We must stop making excuses for ourselves, or pretending that we are doing is not destroying the futures of those who will follow us, after we are dead. We must stop putting our wants ahead of Papatuanuku’s needs, and those of her other children, our tuakana. Remember, we are the potiki, the last born..

- Pa Ropata / Rob McGowan 2020