The Guardians Trying To Save & Preserve Aotearoa
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Loading... - Nolan Doyle
- 31 May 2022
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They’re standing up for their whenua, their rÄkau, for their cultural heritage and endangered species like the kororÄ. In the midst of a global pandemic and a climate and ecological crisis, documentary film-maker Sharron Ward meets the guardians — the kaitiaki, both MÄori and PÄkehÄ — trying to save and preserve Aotearoa for future generations
For the past 20 years I’ve been living abroad working as a documentary film-maker for the likes of the BBC and Channel 4. I’ve gone behind the scenes to report on heroin addicts in Thailand and teenage opium addicts in Kabul.
I created The Accidental Activists documentary series for The Guardian based on unsung heroes in Libya following the fall of Gaddafi, and followed a British humanitarian to northern Iraq for a BBC film.
I documented women experiencing sexual and domestic violence in Jordan and Lebanon and the sexual exploitation of Syrian refugee women in the world’s second-largest refugee camp in Jordan (which won an International Emmy).
It has been an exhilarating and inspiring career; seeing humanity at its best and worst. When Covid-19 hit, the idea of coming home to Aotearoa — the idyllic, peaceful, breath-taking place I grew up in — resonated.
I confess, however, I’m not one to sit around meditating on New Zealand’s endless blue skies. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ll know the planet is predicted to reach a number of irreversible and devastating tipping points, a point of no return where wide-spread ecological damage is expected across the globe. I was curious. What was happening at home?
I was quick to discover that we are bearing the brunt of our own ecological and economic pressures. The explosion of population over the last few years has seen a growing strain on resources. The intensification of dairy farming and other agricultural practices creating widespread degradation of the land and waterways.
Research shows New Zealand has the world’s highest proportion of species at risk, and because of overfishing and global warming, the oceans around Aotearoa, in particular the Hauraki Gulf, are reported to be on the brink of ecological collapse.
So what are the people of our beautiful ‘clean, green’ country doing about it? As a journalist I wanted to learn about what is happening at a grass roots level.
Rising to the environmental challenges, I discovered, are a number of small protection movements from the Far North to the deep south — inspiring mana whenua and committed individuals who are holding and re-claiming the land, in a hope to preserve their tikanga for future generations.
The Protect Mataharehare kaupapa is a movement trying to protect a culturally significant pÅhutukawa, by taking up a tented occupation in the grounds of Dove Myer Robinson Park in Parnell, central Auckland.
“Te HÄ”, as the tree is called, means “breath of life” and it is the mauri of this ancient rÄkau that kaitiaki are determined to protect.
The tree is threatened by the imminent construction of an Erebus Disaster memorial right under its very branches. The protectors believe it will inevitably damage the root system and hence the tree itself. Read More...
