Stuff: Let’s face it, New Zealand — we’re terrible environmentalists

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The recent fuss over James Shaw’s flight to the Glasgow climate change talks would be funny if it weren’t so hypocritical.

The climate change minister needs to be at the summit: although many things can be done over Zoom, a high-level climate negotiation is not one of them. If you’re not in the room – and in all the corridor meetings and hastily convened side huddles – you don’t really know what’s going on. You can’t properly represent your country.

Yet we badly need to put our best foot forward at COP26 because, contrary to all our national myths, we have an abysmal environmental record. We are, overall, some of the least green people in the developed world.

Among industrialised nations, we have the sixth highest greenhouse gas emissions per person, each of us racking up an appalling 16.9 tons of carbon dioxide (or equivalents) every year. We generate 781kg of municipal waste per person, more than all but two other developed countries.

As if that weren’t enough, we have some of the OECD’s most polluted rivers and the highest proportion of threatened animal species anywhere on the planet. We’re No 1, but not in the way we’d hoped.

None of the defences of this frankly awful record seem convincing. Sure, we have an exceptionally large number of endemic species. But that just means we should have taken even greater care of them.

Sure, our climate emissions – and river pollutants – come disproportionately from farming, a dominant export industry that’s hard to address without widespread economic disruption. But that just means we should have recognised the problem sooner and diversified more quickly.

Not all of this can be sheeted home to the average citizen. It’s not their fault, for instance, that the farming lobby is so powerful: even under a Labour-led government, the organisation with the greatest access to ministers was Federated Farmers.

But we ordinary New Zealanders haven’t even done very much about the environmental damage happening closer to home. Although the polluted rivers problem is largely a rural one, many urban waterways are also in a parlous state. New Zealanders, the vast majority of whom live in cities, have sat back and – in most cases – done precisely nothing.

Poorer families, understandably, are often too busy keeping ahead of their bills to worry about their carbon footprint. But middle-class households have no excuse.

We can’t even recycle properly: we send to landfill thousands of tonnes of goods that most Europeans would recycle. Yes, they have better recycling systems: but what does it say about us that we have never systematically voted for the politicians who would get ours up to scratch?

The bright spots in our environmental record, such as they are, often stem from the fact that there are so few of us: just 5 million people in a landmass larger than the UK, which houses 13 times as many. I shudder to think how polluted this country would be if it were more densely populated.

The sad truth is that many New Zealanders don’t care that much about the environment – at least not in any meaningful sense. Oh sure, they say they do. They tell pollsters how important it is. They talk lovingly about light and landscape.

But, as the Christians say, faith without works is dead. So if people don’t back their words with deeds, if they’re not willing to inconvenience themselves or give their time to help the environment, and they don’t have a valid excuse for inaction, do they really, in fact, care?

Of course there are individuals and communities out there doing wonderful, environmentally restorative work: planting trees, protesting against climate change, calling for cleaner rivers and less waste. Iwi such as Ngāti Ruanui and Nga Rauru Kītahi are leading the fight against potentially damaging mining plans in Taranaki and elsewhere. Generation Zero provided the impetus for the Zero Carbon Act. These people know the planet is something to be treasured.

But too many New Zealanders, Pākehā in particular, remain stuck in an extractive mindset that I suspect has been passed down from history, and has much to do with the male settler’s desire to head off into the bush and be left alone to do what he will, no matter how environmentally hurtful.

One of our first major colonial economic activities was a sealing industry that almost eliminated the animals on which it was based. That was two centuries ago, but old habits die hard.

None of this is intended as a counsel of despair. People are always capable of change – and the first step is to confess one’s own failures. James Shaw can’t solve all our problems, obviously. But at least he’s trying to turn things round. We should be throwing fewer insults at him, and looking more closely at ourselves.