Climate emergency
Kintsugi shows how we can fix what we broke in a way that keeps the story alive about how we broke it. But it has to start with acknowledging the break.
Opinion: How can a broken cup help us heal our planet? Several years ago, during the earthquakes in Seddon, a beautiful ceramic cup and saucer, which my stepfather Seb inherited from his parents, was destroyed. Seb had a great appreciation for beautiful things – glass, ceramics, paintings, music, trees. He was also a practical man – a builder, a vegetable gardener and a man who lived very much in the moment.
So when the cup and saucer broke, it was the end of its life as far as he was concerned. Before he threw it away, I asked if I could have it. I found it hard to bear that something created by one of the world’s greatest mid-century ceramic artists would end up in a landfill in Masterton.
Not long after the earthquake, Seb died. He left a very special break in the heart of our family.
Lucie Rie’s cup and saucer has been in the back of a drawer for several years. I recently sent it off to someone who specializes in Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repair. Kintsugi craftsmen take broken objects and reassemble them in a way that doesn’t try to cover up the breaks, but uses resin and gold and silver lacquer to create something new and different beautiful. It makes breaking part of the object’s history.
The cup is now something of much greater value to me – a beautiful, different object that allows me to reflect on his past life and what Seb brought into our lives. It is also a reminder of what is broken can be mourned, but something else beautiful can also be made of it if we consider the break as part of the story.
Kintsugi makes me think about our planet. About the damage the way we live, work, play, earn and travel has wrought on our life support systems – our climate, water, soil and plant ecosystems – and how we might move to restore what we have having broken in a way that keeps alive the story of how we broke it. But it has to start with acknowledging the break.
You can’t fix what you don’t see is broken
On the south coast of Wellington last week people gathered to talk about their homes, and what to do when the seas rise, the land sinks, the weather becomes more extreme and the places they call home are made uninhabitable. They were sad, angry and worried, which seems normal in light of the expected loss and uncertainty about “what should we do next?”
Wellington’s south coast is just the last of many communities around the world facing the pain, loss and uncertainty that human-induced climate change and environmental damage has caused. For our Pacific neighbors and people living in the south of the world, their loss, pain and sorrow began decades ago, but very few rulers showed up to listen or act — they didn’t want to acknowledge that things were breaking. or their role in it.
It’s wrong for those people to hurt first and not to listen to the damage our systems have done to the planet. As more people experience the tides against our front doors, we can fix some. As more and more communities experience climate and environmental loss, including those with greater power and wealth and voice, we have an opportunity to come together in that loss and do better. This should start with building a better understanding and recognition of what is broken and why.
In countries like New Zealand, many people may care about climate change and the environment, but still don’t understand exactly what boundaries we’ve crossed, or how the economic, work, farming and transportation systems we’ve built contributed to damage. They don’t understand what changes will make the biggest difference to repair the damage. And they don’t understand or support those changes when they’re proposed.
It’s absurd for some people to reject policies that will reduce transportation-related carbon emissions, such as bike lanes, the removal of parking lots, or fewer roads, while facing climate change-induced flooding of their homes. But the problem is not that people are stupid, but that people have been insufficiently helped by leaders’ information and manipulated by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo.
The information people get should be based on building a much deeper understanding – that the way we live, work and play, especially in wealthier Western countries, is the source of the damage to our life-sustaining systems, and these ways need to change. in specific ways, and our lives with them. People in government, in power, in business need to make all this clear in an accessible and meaningful way. As I have arguedwe can significantly improve the way we talk about these things.
We must mourn our collective loss
After recognizing what’s broken, we must have a way to mourn our collective, not just individual, loss. The current approach to storytelling and reporting on environmental damage often creates an ‘other’. We often mention ‘other’ people in ‘other’ communities who have certain characteristics that make them more vulnerable to harm. This approach contributes to reasoning that denies real risk. For example, “I’m fine. I don’t live on the coast, on a low-lying atoll, in the floodplains or work on land.”
But climate change and other types of damage to the ecosystem are all of us to share, mourn and act on together. We need the collective ‘we’ to see and understand that we are all harmed, that life will not be what it was for all of us, in different ways.
Of course, different communities and people experience different losses. Some people had much more than they needed and the loss is, in absolute terms, small. Other people have so little and used to take so much, that the loss is everything. But if Duncan Grieves pointed out recently, “Everyone measures their relative happiness relative to their previous happiness and if you have experienced decline, you are bummed!”. And if many of us can feel and acknowledge that loss and grief, it can be a source of shared understanding and solidarity. Solidarity can help us think about how we can fix and do better, especially for those who need it most: the disabled, indigenous communities and those who will be the first to lose their jobs if we change the economic system.
Fix the damage, but don’t try to recreate what was
We see what’s broken, share our grief, and have a shared desire to fix what we can, because there’s still much to be saved. But like Kintsugi, we can’t recreate what was. We have to repair with different methods and materials, and with different knowledge and skills.
I can’t even begin to see and name all the different ways we can collectively explore how to reduce and adapt climate change and environmental damage. But I do know it has to be different from the way things are currently done in our systems. We cannot use the same economic theory based on mining or exchanging parts of the environment for wealth. We cannot rely on knowledge and belief systems that suggest beyond all reason that we can have infinite growth on a planet with clear boundaries. And we can’t keep listening to and being led by the same people with the same ideas. Therefore, this must be a collective effort. We have no shortage of better alternatives, or people willing and willing to trade. All around us there is better knowledge, skills and hope. Are we willing to see them?
We need to do democracy and decision-making in different ways that serve a different purpose: to support collective cooperation. I’m interested in what can happen at the local level, where the pain is most felt and seen. People in our local democratic institutions could provide communities with new structures to better understand the problems and solutions and to grieve, plan and recover together. That meeting on the south coast certainly suggested that more is needed and desired.
We need to look at the leadership within Te Ao Māori and the potential in our treaty partnership. Ngati Toa, one of my local iwi, is leading joint decision-making about the climate that many people on the other side of the motu are closely monitoring. In a true partnership, communities, iwi and hapū can create solutions together that recognize the damage appropriately, and test solutions at a scale appropriate to the challenge.
In honest repair lies something even better
About the climate and the environment I am deeply hopeful and at the same time deeply afraid. There is hope in the work so many people do to fix. But we should not try to cover the broken pieces. For example, we need to stop coming up with systems to try and navigate our way out of life beyond the boundaries of the ecosystem that sustains us. If we see the broken parts for what they are and make them clear, we can make something better for our children and their children – a way of life that is true to what we as humans need to thrive together physically, socially and emotionally. .