If you spend time around the Wellington CBD, chances are you’ve seen Alex Dyer. He and his big yellow cargo bike are a regular feature in parking spaces around town. He’s been a one-man campaign to raise awareness about the alternatives to cars.Many people imagine that the future will look much like the present, but with electric cars and windmills. Alex and Lorraine talk about why this can’t be the case.

You’ll hear some traffic noise in this episode – I filtered out much of it after the first few minutes, but this conversation happens on the side of the road for a reason, so it’s only right.

The 2020 hunger strikes and climate vigil went for 103 consecutive days, ending at Labour’s landslide election. Soon after, the crew of regulars found themselves inside the building, watching from the gallery as Parliament declared a Climate Emergency.

At the same time, the government declared a range of measures to get it’s own emissions down, without presenting anything much to challenge the industries that drive our emissions. Greta Thunberg noted that this will address 1% of emissions.

It was nice, for a while, to have the crew together in a place out of the weather, with furniture.

These interviews are already old, and 2020 is nearly over. It’s probably churlish to be too negative, the two elections this year could have gone much worse, still, the machine is still going in the wrong direction, and the handles are still falling off it. We’re clearly in the middle of a K shaped recovery, where a growing economy is piping billions of dollars to the wealthy while the poor get locked into lives of high rents in substandard housing.

It also turns out anyone with enough financial stability can spend the rest of their lives working to pay debts on homes that will become un-sellable since the insurance companies will soon be cutting them off.

Watch the way Gun Control is discussed in the U.S. Everyone acknowledges the problem but very few imagine a solution. Ironically, every other country has found a way to do much better. It’s not that we can’t imagine solutions. We don’t even need to – they are already there.

We just can’t imagine using them.

Is there something bright to say at this point? At the beginning of this year, I didn’t know most of the people interviewed this year. From the gallery, I got to watch Kiri Allan’s speech on the emergency shake the walls. There are people inside the building who are hungry for change.

And there’s a fresh batch of people and stories we’re looking forward to exploring. We are finding each other. David Graeber died, this year, which is both how I found out about him and how he changed my views on everything. The parliament playground just has a slide, whichgives you a break from the swings and the roundabouts.

This episode combines talks with hunger strikers Sue Boyde and Rick Williment, recorded by Lorraine Tyler.

The day Paul Nieman arrived to provide hunger striker Sue Boyd had to step down for medicalreasons. He found himself taking her place and spent 10 days in the chair before returning tofamily in Ashburton.

His perspective comes straight from the high-emitting, blue voting, conservative core, wheredenial and skepticism are common.

I spent the evenings with him up at Viard house, and it was great to get some insightsfrom outside our urban point of view.

In the end, I concluded that even if there is more acceptance of science here in the city,there is still precious little action from the person in the street, so maybe it amounts to thesame thing.

Robin Treadwell: Retired doctor, activist and mother, made the trip from Waiheke to take up the Hunger Strike role after David Goldsmith returned home. Lorraine got a chance to talk with her during her strike.

Siana

Siana Fitzjohn is fearless. In March, she scaled a 100m oil rig in Cook Strait, so you may have seen her in the news. She also organised a meeting with a community of coal miners in Canterbury. That’s the story I wanted to hear. I caught up with her online. The connection cut out a few times, so you’ll hear some breaks in the audio.

We met Molly Melhuish on the lawn of parliament, supporting David Goldsmith during his hunger strike. She is the 81-year-old we might all aspire to be: brimming with fun and stories, ideas, and gadgets. She has a distinguished history as a campaigner for just and efficient energy systems in New Zealand.

This is a short talk with Molly. We’ll record a longer piece with her later, to capture some of the complexities of the electricity business in New Zealand

Last month, David Goldsmith and Tim Musson came to Wellington from Christchurch and moved into Viard House, a part of the Catholic Cathedral in Hill Street: right across the road from Paliament.

This was part of a new movement, E Tū for Future. David and Tim spent the next month at the base of the Richard Seddon statue, in front of the Beehive. David went on a 21 day hunger strike; consuming nothing but a little bone broth every day.

Lorraine Tyler is the interviewer in this episode. She has recorded more talks with David and veteran campaigner Molly Melhuish, who also joined us on the lawn.

The next two episodes (at least) will also come from the recordings around the statue as the E Tū vigil leads into the coming election.

Eduardo Salazar

 Eduardo Salazar from Peru came to talk about the difference a road makes in his country. The documentary we talk about (Voices of the Road) is currently making its rounds in the international film festival circle and will be publicly released in September 2020.

The quote we talk about at the end is here:

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” — Che Guevara

This episode, I’m proud to introduce Emma Knight, a school striker and Fridays for Future supporter – we met on the lawn of parliament during Ollie Langridge’s 100 days. She’s interviewing Alicia Hall, the founder of Millions of Mothers.

Not sure just yet who the next interviewee will be: Emma is keen to talk about the ZCA and the law, I would love to get Alicia along as an interviewer and I’d like to get a talk with David Hall about his book ‘A careful revolution’ before much more time passes.

Take a course in another language and you will soon be introduced to simple one to one mappings – kia ora, haere rā, tēnā koutou, ka kite.

But open the Williams dictionary and you’ll soon see that this language looks at the world very differently.

I still know very little, but some individual words carry extraordinary weight and learning them alone is taking a step outside yourself. The words I mulled over at Ihumatao were manaaki, kaupapa and tīpuna.

Tīpuna means ancestor, but ancestor in Māori tīpuna resonates inside a more indigenous sense of time. Hape, the club-footed brother who rode to Ihumatao on a magical stingray is tīpuna, as is a dead auntie, as is yourself when you think, as you must, seven generations into the future. Tīpuna is both mission and duty.

Manaaki is hospitality and that too reaches far beyond the one for one. Manaaki is the duty of care that speaks to the disappointment that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is yet to come on the atea at Ihumātao. The duty of care, the sense that manuhiri must be honoured and kōrero must be heard is more. Yes, we have unresolved issues, and so we have prepared a place for you that we may begin by sharing who we are.

The word at Parihaka was whakamā.

Whakamā is shame. The meaning of that word is also more expansive than the Engish counterpart. Whakamā may apply to either side, it is a kind of lessening. Rachel Buchanan, in the recent book Ko Taranaki Te Maunga, suggests that some Taranaki speakers took it even further, finding somehow a place in the word for some redemption.

I’m just starting to learn these things and rather than veer wildly out of my lane I’ll just tell you briefly of some books. Of course, Rachel Buchanan’s is essential reading for someone wanting to start this journey. Any discussion of indigenous experience also leads me back to Steve Coll’s ‘Private Empire’ – a long piece on Exxon Mobil. Read together the two books construct a three-dimensional model with colonisation on one axis and extraction on the other.

When I arrived in Taranaki I visited the excellent Poppys bookstore in New Plymouth where Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race‘ was that month’s staff recommendation. This echoed much of the exasperation I’d seen from Māori when trying to address the newcomers to environmental activism. She says:

The perverse thing about our current racial structure is that it has always fallen on the shoulders of those at the bottom to change it. Yet racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties and double standards of whiteness. it is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take the responsibility to solve. You can only do so much from the outside.

Back in Wellington, someone at a cafe started a conversation about the book and we traded – I then read Ta-Nehisi Coates ‘Between the world and me‘ – a long letter to his son. He speaks of ‘people who think that they are white’. And this cuts directly to the problem. This arbitrary difference created a world where some people are brutalised from the foundations of our civilisation all the way up.

Parihaka is both a beacon and a warning. This is what the project of empire does, here is what is lost and, just as Reni Eddo-Lodge said,