The living net: kai in a changing climate
Chris Karamea Insley
Chair ?? Leader ?? and, Influencer ?? Always Innovating and, always Delivering…
As part of the Deep South National Science Challenge, the small coastal town of Omaio is placing mātauranga Māori and climate science at the centre of their food and water management.
Keeping so many pieces in hand requires a clear vision and a hell of a lot of energy. Luckily, Omaio is not lacking in energetic visionaries. Three generations, from Danny to the Insley brothers to Horiana, are expressing their dynamism in different ways.
Peter is now completing his Masters in Environmental Science at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. He reflects on a day spent up in the hills wrangling with the question of how to tie all this activity together – invasive weeds, water, the kōkako, food production, climate change – in a Māori way. “It sharpens your thinking,” he says. “You take responsibility for your environment. I do know about this stuff. I’m walking the talk. I’m not just sitting in a classroom or an office doing research, when I can’t actually implement it.”
Communities like Omaio have experienced waves of cataclysmic change that may well echo what’s coming with climate change. Settler colonialism, land wars, world wars, loss of taonga, including land and fishing grounds, economic upheaval and cultural loss.
I can’t help but think that in order to adapt to our changing climate, we could look at the example set by those who’ve been through it already.
And Danny provides a crucial depth to the national conversation about sustainability, resilience and risk management. He compels us to maintain an integrated vision that’s responsive to the climate and to the community, and that focusses on building connections – between disciplines, between generations, between science and the communities it serves.
I sometimes feel that a sense of the bigger economic, cultural and relational picture is overlooked in “mainstream” science. But in describing the breathtaking technology of a massive, hand-made fishing net, and speaking both in practical language and in metaphor, Danny finds the relationships between food, technology, trade, sustainability and productive community.
He holds an unbroken line from his tūpuna to his grandchildren – a unifying theory and practice I feel we might all try to aspire to.