The complex pine forest debate is a chance for the media to pit Māori against each other and ignore the far deeper issue of climate change and its direct connection to colonisation. 

If you’ve been following the news recently you might have heard the government announce it was planning to exclude pine trees from earning credits under the permanent forest category of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). 

Loosely translated, it meant landowners who plant pine forests with the intention of leaving them in the ground forever couldn’t profit from doing so. But a number of Māori were upset and warned that this move could potentially breach the Treaty. 

In response, the government – tentatively at least – appeared to backtrack. Then it was suggested by opposing voices that keeping pine in the ETS could also constitute a Treaty breach. (A very good one-stop analysis of both sides of the debate can be found here).

I’m not sure about you, but I was sitting there scratching my head. Surely Māori would be united in fighting for native regeneration?

The first thing to understand when it comes to reporting of “Māori issues” in the media is that conflict and confusion is the daily bread (fyi, Pākehā have issues too). Journalism is an industry that has inherited (and still operates within) a culture that has a long tradition of racism and hostility towards Māori. Racism has always sold newspapers, led headlines, and provided fodder for cartoonists, and it still does.  

People might bristle at the suggestion that coverage of climate change is racist, but analysis of things like the ETS controversy suggests otherwise. 

Reports of climate change rarely look past the most obvious environmental indicators (global warming and extreme weather events) in order to accurately represent the causes of climate change. Without deep and critical analysis of colonisation and its impact on climate change, it’s all too easy to misrepresent where the conflict around solutions really lies. Whether this is deliberate, ignorant or just slack, the result is, Māori are portrayed negatively. And that’s pretty racist. 

That box of useless cords

When it comes to climate change, Māori are caught between a rock, a hard place and a cliff face falling into a rising tide.

As a population, Māori contributed little to global warming. The land that was turned from native forest into pasture was stolen. Here’s an interactive to see just how aggressive and quick that transition was. (Fun fact, “colony” comes from the Latin colonia meaning farm or settlement).

Now that scientists and politicians and pretty much everyone agrees that the decimation of native forests and draining of wetlands to make way for intensive agriculture was a foolish idea, the plan (or one part of it) is to put the forests back. It’s still farming, but instead of livestock or forestry, what is being traded is carbon – in other words, Tāne Māhuta’s potential to sequester carbon.

Māori, on every side of the ETS, are trying to make decisions for the long-term collective benefit of whenua and mokopuna, with only tiny portions of often vulnerable and marginal land remaining to them. There is disagreement about the best way to do this (more on that in a bit). But the conflict is caused not by a difference of opinion, but by the mechanisms the government is using to reduce carbon emissions.

Picture a box of old cords and wires for defunct 90s technology that you’ve either lost or no longer works. You don’t even know what half the cords are for. You pull one and it drags all of them. You might think you’re making progress untangling one knot, but you’re really just tightening an invisible chokehold somewhere else in the system.

This box is government policy. Climate change affects every single cord in the box, from health, to education, to housing – everything. The ETS is just one cord in a very chaotic tangle. 

The critical point is that Māori did not want this box. Māori wanted nothing to do with these cords for machines and government departments that we didn’t ask for. This box is the same box that Māori said “yeah, nah, we’re all good bro,” when presented with the Treaty.

But the Treaty was very badly translated, Māori got swindled for their land and the government set up its equipment and machinery, much of which is now defunct, and here we are. At the mercy of chaos.

And it’s complicated.

On the one hand, carbon farming is extremely lucrative because the cost of polluting is going up. The more expensive it is to offset emissions, the more likely companies are to reduce them, and this is good because it means New Zealand might have a chance at meeting its net zero targets by 2050.

For investors, pine is the best way to get into carbon farming, largely because it grows quickly (that earlier link has some graphs). As for natives, no one’s really sure how much carbon they’re capable of sequestering, because they got felled into oblivion before anyone could properly study them. Unlike pine, which has heaps of research (the ETS has multiple formulas – kind of like price lists – to assess the level of carbon sequestration by exotic trees, versus only one for natives.)

Some, however, think these calculations could be inaccurate. Or at least misleading. There are a few projects underway to investigate, like this one in Tāmaki (featuring two semi-retired Pākehā gangstas championing indigenous forests under what could become a catchy slogan Give The Natives a Chance) – but it’s slow, and the government is running out of time. 

More to the point, trees do so much more than just suck up carbon. Forests support and sustain the well-being of countless other living species, not just humans. 

But under the ETS, the government has narrowly distorted the value of Tāne Māhuta to something that can be weighed, traded and profited from: carbon. 

For those in favour of keeping pine in the ETS, it’s largely with the hope of a long-term vision of native regeneration. The early cash returns from pine can be redistributed in the short term to support better health, housing, employment and social outcomes, and for most, this is not a question of wealth generation. It’s a question of survival against the odds in an environment exacerbated by the much less visible, historical impacts of climate change (i.e. colonisation). 

With the income from carbon farming generated almost immediately, the much more complex project of native regeneration can get underway sooner, if not simultaneously.

But if leaving pine in the ground forever sounds disastrous, it’s probably because there’s a good chance it will be. Predictions are that transitioning to native from pine will be tricky, expensive and risky. Even on paper, it seems wild to think that exotic forests are the solution to indigenous survival.

So what’s the key message?

In short, Māori are faced with absolutely crapshit “climate” decisions every day of the week, on every front.

As a layperson, what’s important to understand is that the more pressure the government comes under as climate change intensifies – the more it pulls those cords – the tighter the knot becomes on Māori communities, many of whom will remain invisible to the media covering the issues.

Just look at that box of tangled cords: Māori have borne the brunt of responsibility for past excesses environmentally, socially and economically. These excesses have disproportionately benefited Pākehā on every indicator you care to look at.

While the government fusses around with the cords, making sure powerful lobby groups are happy, Māori communities are sitting in the environment court trying to prevent ongoing exploitation and extraction, just in an effort to protect what little remains.

As Māori, we have no choice but to get our hands in that box too, but we’re disadvantaged by a lack of power, access to resources and autonomy. This is not an equal situation, it isn’t just, and it’s a far cry from the partnership that was promised in 1840.

If the ETS reveals anything, it’s that the government still hasn’t relinquished its unwavering faith in the market as a mechanism to deliver positive outcomes for Papatūānuku, even though it never has before, without any great sacrifice or radical shift away from the core values that caused the environmental destruction we urgently need to reverse. 

Whereas whānau and hapū, on the other hand, want the same thing our ancestors who signed the Treaty wanted: to protect, serve, sustain, and be sustained by, our own land – now, and for future generations. 

It is a mission at the best of times, let alone in a system that is suddenly panicking because it has only just realised that the climate is changing and its values are completely unsustainable. 

Let’s get rid of the box

Climate Change continues to be a tool of colonisation because it constantly shifts the conversation back to the box. The mess of cords and what to do about it. The dominance of these conversations in the media, and oversimplification of them, deflect responsibility and attention away from the Crown. 

The day that the government admits defeat and chucks out its chaotic, immoral, and illogical box of wires and starts over – i.e. constitutional transformation – is probably a long way off, but we have to hold fast to the future vision that Moana Jackson never let us lose faith in. 

If Moana believes we can chuck out the box and start over, I know we can and will. 

We just can’t put it in landfill. 

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