When I was originally tasked with writing a blog post about how Aotearoa could possibly build back better from COVID-19, I was in a deep state of imposter’s syndrome. Truthfully speaking, I’m not sure I’ve left. But here we are. Never mind the fact that my working life is spent on the frontlines of another crisis–the educational one in case you’re wondering–and that my academic training is not even remotely related to Environmental Science or the like. The stakes were, and continue to be, higher than normal, and this goes beyond my usual millennial existential dread… and that says a lot!
To talk about the Climate Crisis is to remind myself that I am not–as much as my mum made me believe–the centre of the universe. The earth is warming. The seas are rising. People across the Pacific are being displaced, and the countries that have the most to answer for, are conveniently the ones least likely to enact the brave thinking and the transformative change necessary to ensure our lands, cultures and peoples, have a smidgen of surviving. But you knew this already. This is the narrative, and the very real truth about the severity of the circumstances we find ourselves in. The urgency we need to begin to peel back the decades of exploitation of our planet’s resources cannot be understated. Change must happen now.
What else that cannot be understated is the whakapapa of critical and creative work that other Pacific Climate Activists and champions have done, in order for critical mass to have been achieved. We are at a watershed moment in our movement towards Climate Justice. But that has only come on the backs of Pacific resilience, and indigenous excellence and creativity. I think here of the Pacific Climate Warriors, especially Mary Moeono-Kolio and Briana Fruean – their work with the Aotearoa branches of 350 Pacific is the sort of stuff I intend to use as teaching material, to remind and inspire our tamaiti that change is possible. In the same breath groups like Te Ara Whatu and Mission To Zero’s work have enabled our voices to engage in Climate Change conversations at both grassroots, and international levels. I also think of how I felt watching Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i’s winning 2019 Storyteller’s presentation, ‘Waiting Water’ for the first time. In the 6 minute 40 second oratory masterclass, she transformed into a Moana-Pacific diasporic voice that engaged in the climate crisis discourse, with all the nuance that living abroad brings, without the identity crisis. For the first time I feel seen, and challenged. For the first time I know that change must happen now.
Further afield, and a few degrees removed from the New Zealand diasporic experience of Pacific peoples, I also think of Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Terisa Siagatonu’s poetry. How necessary their work has been in informing and mobilising their communities, while simultaneously communicating to organisations like the UN to listen to us. These are only a few of the many Pacific people who I have long admired, and who I have seen do the work, taking the time to ensure that there is critical and creative mass gathering around the devastating effects of the Climate Crisis on the Pacific. Change must happen now. It is no longer, merely a lack of awareness or access to knowledge – that can be the convenient reason for our inaction. But is there more to say? Is there more to explore in this crisis, that just might offer some reprieve from the fatalistic stakes, and provide much needed space to stay curious, explore and dream?
Before I go any further, this blog post won’t have all the answers, in fact I hope it has only questions–because truthfully I’m probably one of the last people who should be advising you about how we can achieve a world that has curbed the climate crisis. But at the very least, I hope that the questions raised: open up, and reframe conversations around the Climate Crisis for us–especially the ‘us’ who are of Pacific descent and in the diaspora. We all have a role to play. And as Shakespeare says, “All the world’s a stage,” – even if that stage is sinking, and our existence is too.
“The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naivete, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion.” – Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of Hope, 1997
Enter Hope.
The main crux of my blog post, other than to pay credence to the many voices of the Pacific who have been, and continue to, fight for us–is to argue that we must hope audaciously, and with that audacious hope, dream up a world where our goals for the climate, goes beyond mere survival. Let me explain.
When teaching creative writing in my high school English classes, I often probe my students with some fundamental questions that Olivia Taouma, one of my mentors and dear cousin, once ambushed me with while we were out at lunch at the Apia Waterfront. They are:
What is a story you want to tell?
What is the story you must tell?
What is the story only you can tell?
That is the story that the world must hear!
Although not originally part of this quote, I have since added that without telling this story, you stop the world from knowing you in your fullness and richness. In turn, the world as we know it, is not able to be as vivid, without your story, without you. These stories then become our essential stories. The stories we must share in order to both survive, and thrive. The stories we tell ourselves in order to make our existence mean something. With this search for story in mind, it has been no easy feat trying to position myself within this Climate Crisis conversation. I am no expert. I believe that’s been well established. But I also am not the Islander with lived experience of climate change. I cannot pretend to use first-hand experiences to advocate for Climate Justice. So this never ending feedback loop of trying to find the essential story—my story—has definitely taken its toll on my mental health–cue the above normal levels of coffee consumption, and the extra months it has taken to write this–as I try to find my story! However, I’ve landed on something; the story I must tell… is a story of hope and climate-dreaming.
Sounds naive right?! Almost too common-sensical and simplistic; simultaneously dismissive of the complexities that we face in our commitment to climate justice?
You may be right, but let me tell you the story anyway.
In the field of education, educators serving low-decile, poorly resourced, poverty stricken communities and schools, are tasked with putting thousands of students through the New Zealand education system. We do this every year like clock work, and with varying degrees of success. However, in order to do this, Associate Professor Jeff Duncan-Andrade urges us to hope audaciously and critically. This sort of critical and audacious hope calls us kaiako to look at tamaiti, not for the things they lack, but for who they are, and for who they one day might become. Put another way, our tamaiti are the roses that grew from concrete⸺the very ones that Tupac Shakur once wrote about in his titular poem, of the same name.
But how does this link back to our commitment to climate justice, and how does this prevent our seas from rising? Through hope. As an educator, only in my third year of serving at a low decile school, I know what hopelessness looks like. I see it take on this ominous phantom-like presence, as it hijacks the way my kids walk and talk into my classroom. I see it also in the institutional racism that is inherent in our education system, and the many ways in which our education system burns great teachers out. There are many layers to this hopelessness that settles in systems of inequality. Our education system is not the only system that breeds hopelessness. So I know exactly the taste of its salt, when I dip my toes in the ocean that is this Climate Crisis.
But without coming across delusional, I am asking for us all to dream a bigger dream for our climate and planet, and to hope critically. Note that Paulo Friere said it best when he writes:
“The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naivete, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion.” – Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of Hope, 1997
A hokey kind of hope found on utopian ideals is one quick way to gaslight the experiences of climate change survivors, and it also has the same sort of dismissive Trupmian overtones that has brought us here. But to commit to climate justice without hope, as if to say that the solution to climate change will be on calculated acts alone is a reductive and frivolous illusion. So how can Aotearoa build back better from COVID-19?
Well we’ll go a long way through simply having courageous conversations about the Climate Crisis that simultaneously give voice to the damage, and the urgency with which we must act, to ensure our Pacific region avoids an Atlantis-like future. However, we must ensure that these conversations are threaded with hope, and that this hope is founded on a dream for the climate that doesn’t just demand we are carbon neutral by 2050, but that Indigenous voices and the flourishing of their lands, are essential in helping us get there.
Critical hope and climate dreaming can look like many things. For me, it most recently looked like the conversation I had with Xavier Vito, a Year 13 student at De La Salle College, and excellent debater. He described to me that his desire to study Environmental Science was to ensure that he gave his all to ensure our future generations get to experience the Samoa that he has been blessed to call home. This is a climate-dream worth pursuing. The critical hope that Xavier, and so many of his peers have is inspiring. They are the change that is happening now.
In closing, and as I urge us all to think about how we might practise critical hope in our fight for climate justice, I want to offer up a whakataukī that Princess Te Puia once said. Not only do I believe this whakataukī is applicable in our everyday lives, but it also has particular salience, as I call for us to climate-dream ourselves into a world where our earth, and ourselves are flourishing.
Mehemea ka moemoea ahau
ko ahau anake
Mehemea ka moemoea tatou
ka taea e tatou
If I dream alone,
alone I dream
If we dream,
we dream together.
Zech Soakai is a poet, educator and activist currently working with some of the most talented rangatahi in Aotearoa, out at Papakura High School. His work is most commonly found at the intersections where equity, education and creativity meet, and is privileged to serve the future generations of South Auckland.