Comment
We quickly destroyed many of our natural ecosystems in Aotearoa and drove them from pristine to near death. Now is the time to show that we are learning fast to help restore nature
Opinion: Matariki is a very welcome and much needed new celebration for us a nation. Like the beginning of nature’s new year – from here nights are shortened and days extended – it is a moment of thanksgiving for the end of one annual life cycle and the beginning of the next.
Every year it is time for us to sow seeds, plant crops and start new projects. Literally if we are farmers and gardeners working with nature’s other great gifts of life such as land and water, plants and animals.
But literally also for us who buy all our food at stores. Our lives are completely dependent on the nature and living systems of the Earth, whether we are rural or urban people. Every year, Matariki is the right moment to remind ourselves of our dependence and to renew our intention to re-establish our true relationship with nature.
If you have any doubts about our desperately urgent need to do so, watch the Breaking Boundaries: the science of our planet documentary on Netflix by Sir David Attenborough and Johan Rockström; or read their book.
Attenborough you will know well; Rockström you will not, but he is a pioneer of one of the newer areas of Western science dating only from the early 1980s. It is Earth Systems Science that is rapidly expanding our understanding of how intensely nature’s productive, complex and varied systems are interdependent for survival. They form the living earth, our life support system.
Earth systems science is mātauranga Pākehā, Western knowledge. But we are latecomers to such insights, even if it brings deep new knowledge even to the sub-atomic level. Long before us, indigenous peoples around the world began to understand the rhythms and cycles of life through intense observation of nature, which was passed down from generation to generation. They have never lost sight of the big picture, the systems and how to live their lives in them.
“When we try to pick anything out on our own, we find it linked to everything else in the Universe.”
– John Muir
Western science is beginning to understand and benefit from such knowledge and wisdom. For example, the United Nations’ 6th (and current) round of climate crisis assessment reports draws on such sources more than ever before.
Here in Aotearoa we show how these two knowledge systems can inform each other while trying to understand together and solve complex problems in nature that our people have caused. Some of the best examples are in the 11 National Science Challenges, each of which has decade-long, interdisciplinary, well-funded objectives to help us resolve issues of sustainability in nature, in people, and in the interaction between them.
To do this, they bring mātauranga Māori and mātauranga Pākehā together, to the benefit of both and their end goals. For example, the Our Land and Water National Science Challenge does this by committing to “the Māori worldview (Te Ao Māori) [that] acknowledge the interconnectedness and interrelationship of all living and non-living things. ” Collectively, the 11 challenges compiled this guide to such work across their wide fields.
In a sense, it’s old wisdom. Back in 1900, Āpirana Ngata, the Ngāti Porou leader and scholar, wrote about mātauranga Māori and mātauranga Pākehā and the great advantage of “throwing our nets between them”, rather than catching one fish or another. .
Another fascinating example is the Environment Aotearoa 2022, the latest version of our triennial report on the health of our ecosystems and the impact of human activities on them.
It uses Te Ao Māori as its overarching structure to present the scientific data we collect on 48 measures of ecosystem health; to describe the relationships between them that determine the overall state of nature; and then to highlight how it contributes to our well-being – environmental and economic, social and cultural.
To do this, it uses Te Kāhui or Matariki (the Matariki star cluster) as a way to present its evidence. Each of the stars in it represents a way we connect with the environment. And as a sign of the Māori new year, Matariki commemorates loss and celebrates hope for the future.
These are examples of our special gift to the world on how to ensure that indigenous and Western knowledge enhance each other so that we can better rediscover our true relationship with nature.
Aotearoa was the last large land mass on the planet that was inhabited by humans barely 30 generations ago. Over that time, we have greatly changed those ecosystems, and lately, we have deeply exploited and broken them down.
Maybe just at that point we start committing ourselves to helping nature recover. Thanks to Te Ao Māori and mātauranga Māori, we have a wealth of indigenous knowledge to help guide us.
Unusual compared to indigenous knowledge elsewhere in the world, it has been accumulating in ecosystem terms in a remarkably short time. Thus, Māori has extensive knowledge and narration of the way we have accelerated the destruction of nature in many of our ecosystems, which has driven them from pristine to near death. Now is the time to show that we are learning fast to help restore nature.
Every society across the living earth has the same monumental challenge to survival. The first semblance of understanding each person’s needs is that their life depends entirely on nature. If nature is healthy, they are healthy.
Nature has given us this moment at Matariki every year to remind ourselves of our symbiotic relationships with and dependence on nature. At Ao Māori’s stories of the stars we tell profound truths in poetic ways.
And these are universal truths. Astronomers calculate from holding cave paintings of the stars that they – whether you call them Te Kāhui or Matariki, or the Pleiades, or Subaru (as the Japanese do) or other names in other cultures – are the oldest proven source of human stories. dates back about 100,000 years.
As John Muir, the Scottish-born, early 20th-century American environmentalist, wrote in his 1911 book My first summer in the Sierra: “When we try to pick anything out on our own, we find it linked to everything else in the Universe.”