New documentary highlights destruction on the East Coast and climate change impacts on tangata whenua
Tui Warmenhoven ( Ngati Porou ) wipes away a tear as she surveys the broken and mangled tarseal formerly known as the road to Tokomaru Bay. It has been four weeks since Cyclone Gabrielle , and the only way to access her marae is through the use of an all-terrain vehicle. We did not cause this, but were the ones that are suffering for it. A researcher, lawyer and the Greenpeace Aotearoa board chairperson, Warmenhoven is one of three wahine Maori from Tairawhiti speaking out in a new Greenpeace short film about the havoc climate change is wreaking in the region. Twelve minutes long, the documentary, titled Downstream, paints a grim picture, interspersing interviews with footage of beaches choked by logs, destroyed bridges and overflowing rivers. As the land is being stripped and eroding, so are we as a people, and we're fighting to survive, says Warmenhoven. Its something thats never going to go away in my lifetime. Im going to be working on this, Im going to be advocating, Im going to be, with the rest of my community, looking for solutions till the day I die. Alongside the environmental cost is the economic one. Bobbie Morice (Ngati Porou) relies on the roads being open to deliver pies from her business based in Ruatoria . Gabrielles wrath saw her supply routes dwindle when once Ruatoria Pies supplied 30 stores, it now supplies only five. Of course, it wouldnt be a documentary about Tairawhiti without mentioning the effects of forestry erosion, and more specifically, slash . According to the documentary, it is a problem that dates back to the days when Pakeha settlers stripped native bush away to make space for farming. They cleared 80% of the virgin forest. Our people went from forest people to farm people in a generation, says Warmenhoven. Take the forest cover away, strip Papatuanuku, strip her korowai off her, lay her bare and wham. And that's when it all started moving. When the land became too difficult, farms were sold and converted into blocks of pine trees , which Maria Smith (Ngati Porou) guessed was the wrong type of tree. Slash is effectively forestry leftovers, the centre of a recent ministerial inquiry led by former National Party minister, Hekia Parata. That inquiry warned that tangata whenua could be left landless as a result of the ongoing devastation. In heavy rain events, it moves, and it moves with great force. Just voracious. It smashes roads , it takes out landscapes, farmland, good land, land with bush on it, wetlands, says Warmenhoven. It is an innocent generation that has inherited the problem of climate change , and Warmenhoven questions what can be done now to rectify things. That is where a sense of hope emerges, because the people of Tairawhiti are nothing if not resilient. Warmenhoven, Smith and Morice know what the problems are and have ideas about how to achieve long-term solutions. Holding big business to account is one of them, particularly dairy companies like Fonterra , Warmenhoven says. Then there is a return to a more natural way of life, where whanau feed themselves with homegrown kai . This is not just a fight for Tairawhiti. It is not a fight for tangata whenua. This is a fight for everyone in Aotearoa, she says. We were forest people. And we will be forest people again.