Discoveries Down Under
Liana Forest
For many years I’ve had the dream of returning to an island in the Hauraki Gulf out of the port of Auckland, New Zealand. My family and I spent many idyllic holidays on Waiheke Island in a cottage belonging to the Royal Forest and Bird Society. We left New Zealand in 1980, after eight years residing in the Waitakere watershed rain forest above Auckland. Although we returned to see friends, colleagues, and family, we never revisited the island. Now I was spending Christmas with my daughter and granddaughters in Ranui, a small town belonging to Waitakere City, soon to be swallowed up by the megalopolis that Auckland has become in the intervening years. As a student of change processes, societal, cultural, and personal, I was eager to see whether Waiheke was still the environmental paradise I remembered.
As part of my work for Transition Towns—a worldwide framework for helping communities become resilient to major changes ahead of us all—I checked into the status of that movement in New Zealand (see http://transitiontowns.org.nz/groups). Knowing how Kiwis live up to the “she’ll be right, mate” practical persons they believe themselves to be, I was not too surprised to see that Transition Aotearoa already had 4 official sites, and 41 “mullers,” (places still in the process of mulling over participation) in the North Island, and 11 more in the South Island. Waiheke Island had been the first official Transition Initiative.
The week before Christmas was not an ideal time to find anyone. It was summer and in New Zealand many whole companies take two weeks off and most people are on holiday. But I was able to speak with four members of Transition Waiheke’s Core Group, as they call their Initiating Hub for the island (http://transitiontowns.org.nz/waiheke). Two members, James Samuel and Rosie Walford, agreed to meet me for lunch in Oneroa, the town nearest the ferry. So on a bright sunny morning, three days before Christmas, my daughter, Lauren, and my granddaughter, Shanti, and I boarded a beautiful two-tiered ferry. The boat was more luxurious than those I remembered, and as we chugged past Auckland’s north shore, out into the gulf, we clicked cameras, along with American tourists, at Rangitoto, the island volcano, and Motu Tapu, the Maoris’ “sacred island,” next door.
I knew James had founded a community garden and food exchange stall, hosted documentary nights with discussions, and was working on a CSA project on donated land. I had visited the social enterprise ning site he started: Ooooby (Out of Our Own Backyards) http://ooooby.ning.com/. This was a food growers club, pioneering a model that would allow people to be appropriately rewarded for the work they were doing to build a sustainable food system. I found people from all over the world, many from California, had joined.
I’d spoken with Rosie, a facilitator for group visioning, creative problem solving, and motivating activism (http://www.thebigstretch.com). As a eco-psychologist, Rosie emphasizes the value of doing problem-solving and planning while on walks or retreats in natural settings, such as the Forest and Bird Society Reserve I used to visit. With organizations and businesses she uses the Natural Step framework to help them factor sustainability into their future We were both interested in widening identity as a way to bringing people to embrace environmental change. Both James and Rosie have had extensive experience and education abroad, yet both have chosen to live on an island of around 8,000 souls scattered in small communities.
We found the recommended café, and I ordered fresh, creative salads, a far cry from the typical lunches of thin white bread spread with marmite or canned spaghetti I remembered from my early days in New Zealand. My family members left for the beach, and soon James rode up on his bike. We immediately recognized one another, and fell into conversation. He told me there were six people on Waiheke Island engaged in working on an integrated, local, resilient food system. He works with the civic engagement models presented by Ruth Marsh, a sustainable development trainer (www.ourcommonfuture.co.nz) involved in New Zealand Transition Initiatives Social Network, and Peter Block, a Connecticut organizational development consultant, whose latest book is Community, The Structure of Belonging. “All change begins with conversation,” and “change comes through consent and connectedness rather than mandate and force,” are watchwords of this approach. You don’t attempt to enroll people; you engage them in conversation.
Using his hands to help explain, James drew in the air his picture of the role of Transition Towns as an analog of bacterial DNA-swapping. “There has to be some body or group to help guide individuals to where they can best contribute what they have to give to others. It’s like a continual, ever-changing flow of energy that constantly evolves.” As an example, he cited the meeting Rosie and he attended that morning, where an idea about collecting all the ripe plums on the island was further developed. “The idea for The Great Waiheke Plum Drive has been simmering for a few years, and when the early plums started ripening on one of my favourite scrumping trees, I knew it was time to bite the bullet and set a date for this event. Having friends express their support for the idea was all that was needed to set things in motion.” (For those without U.K.-derived vocabulary, “scrumping” means to scrounge fruit from other people’s trees.)
Rosie arrived then, and joined our conversation. Waiheke is an island full of environmental initiatives and lawyers for these issues, she told me. Initially Transition Towns Waiheke was envisioned as a focal point for all that was going on. The issue of how to coordinate between voluntary organizations is a difficult one, and I agreed that we have the same challenge in San Luis Obispo County. The Core Group was about to have a meeting to evaluate where they are, their current purpose, and how best to support the well being of core group members. I told them we, the Transition Town San Luis Obispo Hub and five Area Initiating Groups, were about to have a retreat for the same reason.
Rosie also consults with Transition Town members dealing with differences in how to go about group goals. We agreed that a key issue for TT Initiating groups is balancing the energies of those who feel an overwhelming urgency to get things changed before catastrophe is upon us, and those who prefer to focus more on positive, community building aspects of Transition Towns. Some in our TT group saw this as an issue of “action persons” vs. “process persons.” Rosie’s view was that all participants were focused on action as well as process, but with different emotional and psychological mindsets.
Now my daughter joined us, since my granddaughter had to get back to Auckland for her job. Lauren quizzed James and quickly discovered that he had lived for several years on Opanuku Road in the Waitakere mountains, overlapping our residency there only two houses down from his! All too soon, we had to leave to catch the four o’clock ferry. I was surprised at how much time had flown by while we shared on what was so important to us all, and I hoped we could continue our conversation by email or SKYPE.
When I’d returned to the U.S., I explored the links they gave me. I learned that Rosie had not only graduated from Oxford University in psychology, but had trained in creative problem solving and leadership at the Creative Education Foundation, State University of New York. And James, who has been supporting the growth of Transition Towns in Aotearoa since October of 2007, runs a blog with continuing discussions (http://yesterdaysfuture.net/blog/) of relevant topics as well as comments on videos at http://posterous.com. I wished we had been able to discuss some of these paths of mutual interest.
I was further amazed to discover that the first ever Great Waiheke Plum Harvest http://waihekeharvest.wordpress.com/ had indeed taken place on January 7, only two weeks and two days from the time of our luncheon. James, Rosie, and their Transition Waiheke colleagues, with the help of owners of plum trees, the chef of “Traffic Jam,” Maureen van der Lee, age 85, and numerous volunteers, had pulled off the planning, organizing, and implementation in a total of only three weeks. Not only that, but the whole event was photographed, a video made, and an event description, (along with a timeline, recording keeping and timesheets, the assumptions, process and planning records) all were posted on a website the day after the event!
The website description concludes: “The timing was defined by the trees and the ripening of the fruit, so we gave ourselves three weeks to organise and promote it – I am told a sense of urgency contributes to a successful event, and by all accounts it was. If the measure of its success was the number of happy people, the number of jars of jam (about 150), fostering a sense of community, harvesting and processing an abundant local resource, building resilience into our local food system, and having a good time while doing it, then everyone who was a part of and made this event possible, can feel very good about their contribution.” Watching the video of the event and the snapshots of everyone, I had a sense of being there.
This made me wonder. Perhaps there is an ideal nature-driven sense of urgency that focuses intention and mobilizes a community response, akin to what happens when there is a natural disaster. Rather than fearing catastrophe, we can seize natural opportunities and use our creative problem-solving and organizational skills to take advantage of them, leading to further community resilience and skill-building. Participating in such events and celebrating our results builds unity in the community. All of this can also expand our sense of identity with our planet and the wider universe out of which it has emerged.
I did not experience directly on this trip whether Waiheke Island is still the natural paradise I remembered from earlier visits, but I came away convinced that it is a paradise for environmental and Transition Town activists, and a place we activists in SLO County can learn from. Certainly there are many different ways to develop our moves toward community resilience.
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written by Phyllis Davies, February 10, 2010
thanks for sharing. I can see why it was such a great experience.
Love & appreciation,
Phyllis
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written by James Samuel, February 12, 2010
A beautifully written piece - thorough and wide.
Thank you for sharing this, and yes all good with images of course.
It meant a lot to me to have this published in Hope Dance, as that magazine holds a special place for me, as it was a source of inspiration in a moment when I really needed it.
Blessings and love,
James
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written by Bob Banner, February 12, 2010
bob
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written by Susan Wood, February 17, 2010
And, Bob Banner, thanks for all you do with HopeDance and everything else.
Susan
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Thanks for sharing.
Love,
Joe St.Clair