NONE SO BLIND

My late teens were a time when I was afflicted with three things that many teens still suffer apparently – vanity, poverty and a flirtation with delinquency. In my case it meant I refused to wear my glasses but couldn’t afford contacts, and occasionally sought solace in a bottle. To say I was delinquent is probably too dramatic. More like a tipsy mole than a gang moll really.

Now, according to a recent study out of Harvard, that part of the brain that deals with higher thought, anticipation, planning and goal-directed behaviour doesn’t mature until around 24 or 25, while the lower brain that deals with emotion and gut reactions is fully up and running between ages 11 to 17. So, daft though it seems to me now, that’s why it was once more important to my teenage brain for me to look good than to see good.

Engari, now that I’m old(er) I still see worrying signs of poor judgment in myself and other so-called adults. One instance of this is the way we are not coming to grips with the Kyoto protocol and its likely impact on our businesses, land use and climate.

The latest announcement out of Wellington that carbon credits will go to forest owners should make every Maori in Te Hiku sit up and go, “hmmm”. The biggest existing source of carbon credits and sinks in our neighbourhood are the forests currently growing on Maori land at Aupouri, Parengarenga, Waikeri, Epikauri, Owhata, Tapuwae, Te Puna Toopu O Hokianga and other pockets throughout the Far North. They are already major contributors to the economic life of every one of us in this region, not just the forestry contractors and the millworkers who are always on the front of any industry downturn. Without them our climate and land use would be very different. Ask anyone who has lived here longer forty years and they’ll get a faraway look in their eyes as they talk about earth-cracking droughts and land-consuming sand drifts on the Aupouri peninsula, or the back-breaking work of clearing ti-tree and blasting old kauri stumps for small-scale dairying in the Hokianga. They have an impact on the livelihoods of our local training providers, construction firms, cartage contractors, road-builders, quarry owners, pastoral farmers, horticulturists, and all the businesses and providers that ply their goods and services in the area.

If these trees were being planted now, they would earn someone a bunch of “carbon credits”. When they’re cut down in the future, they’ll cost someone a bunch of “carbon sinks”. This has big implications for whoever owns the Aupouri forest lands after the Treaty settlement dust settles.

Maori are drowning in new information that requires constant higher level thinking. So the Kyoto protocol has been one of those things where our brains have often defaulted to a gut response of hoha, and we’ve literally failed to see the forests for the trees. Engari it’s as plain as the noses on our faces that, quite apart from trade in the actual pieces of paper that allocate a credit or a sink, their future impact on us is going to be enormous.

Unlike teenagers, iwi with pending Treaty settlements cannot be excused for ignoring these mechanisms. If they do, they risk vain, poverty-stricken delinquency – and there would truly be none so blind.

Hei konei. Hei kona.