3. March on the Israeli Embassy

Although not one of the biggest, this is a personal favourite. In June, after Israel killed 16 aid workers on a boat carrying supplies to Palestinians in Gaza, marches occurred around the world, including here in humble Wellington. I had never been involved in a protest focusing purely on social justice before, and the thrill was tangible. It was like some sort of epiphany in Amelie, where I realised my life’s purpose, albeit with messier hair and less crème brulee.

2. Camp for climate action Aotearoa ‘Day of Action’

Here I’m cheating a little. The inaugural Climate Camp Aotearoa took place in December 2009, just after the completion of the unsurprisingly disastrous international climate talks in Copenhagen. After five days of workshops and sustainable living in Upper Hutt, over 150 climate campers took to the streets of Wellington to protest against false solutions to climate change, namely carbon trading. There were blockades, arrests and misunderstandings over what exactly “Stop trading our futures!” meant. We marched down Lambton
Quay for half an hour, blocking traffic until the cops bodily pushed us onto the pavement. Yes, this protest gets five stars for fun, action and energy.

1. Anti-mining march (Auckland)

The biggest national protest in years. In May, over 40,000 people marched down Queen St to ask John Key and his devilish sidekick Gerry Brownlee not to mine our most precious national parks. It was pretty damn successful, resulting in Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel being removed from the mining short-list. The march was colourful and upbeat, or at least it appeared to be so. I wouldn’t know, having been stuck in Warkworth for the event’s duration. I was wearing a remarkable amount of pink tulle in preparation for my role as a radical cheerleader, and the bus driver must have mistaken me for a sulky pastel shrub as he drove by.

While these protests were all obviously dazzling, the red carpet of activism continues. The year’s not over yet; there’ll be plenty more occasions to dust off your placards, your D-Locks and megaphones and take to the streets. All frivolity aside, there’s a lot out there to resist: freedoms are being eroded, work rights withdrawn, racist television presenters abound. Like some sort of malicious gumbo, there are abundant and diverse opportunities to speak truth to power. What will your best-dressed protests look like in 2011?

And then the National government announced that Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company, has been given a five year exploratory licence for oil and gas in the Raukumara Basin (off the East Cape). It was bad timing, to say the least.

Petrobas is infamous for its record of oil and gas spills. Greenpeace Brazil has claimed that from 1975-2001 Petrobras was responsible for 18 major spills, resulting in 141 deaths and about 29 million barrels of oil spilt. Petrobras is also renowned for trying to keep these spills undercover and understating any accidents that occur. They’re obviously a super company to sign a deal awarding the rights to our ocean floor with.

Aotearoa is apparently sitting on a black-gold mine of fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia said so. When Gerry Brownlee announced a couple of weeks ago that “for far too long, New Zealand has not taken advantage of the wealth hidden in our hills, in our oceans, and in the ground”, his obvious implication is that if the fuels are there, then we must squeeze out every last drop of oil, every waft of available gas. In this particular worldview, natural resources exist purely for consumption, and consumption equals money. Here I imagine Gerry, his hands full of cigars and sherry, lounging in a smoking-jacket, lapels emblazoned with ‘profits before people’, chuckling as he gives out oil exploration packages.

As indicated by the Gulf Oil Spill, offshore drilling has implications for safety and for marine and coastal biodiversity. In Aotearoa, as in many locations across the globe, there are also implications for indigenous rights (um, seabed and foreshore, anyone?).

But we do need oil, right? I have a geologist friend (possibly now an ex-friend) who angrily berates me for opposing mining and drilling in New Zealand. He says that we do need to extract resources, so developed countries should try to use resources from their own lands, instead of fucking up poorer nations with lower safety standards. I dispute this; surely we need to stop exploiting fossil fuels now, because hey, their carbon emissions are making our planet uninhabitable. And it’s not just eco-idealism: there are alternative energy sources out there; we need to give them more love and more funding.

Instead of giving multinational oil companies Aotearoa’s natural resources on a plate, we could be encouraging the use of alternative energies and start questioning our patterns of resource use. It’s not just about the pelicans.

Okay, possibly not the highest-quality metaphor. But that is what we do, in university and in general life: we talk about stuff, we theorise, but we don’t transmute theory into action. I can bemoan climate change all I want, I can draw all sorts of conclusions and connections, but it doesn’t mean anything if my complaining doesn’t produce any results.

Back to our overly affectionate bedfellows: today’s example of the interdependency of social and eco inequalities is the destruction of Papuan rainforests, specifically the logging of Kwila, an endangered tree. Deforestation has already led to 83 per cent of Kwila disappearing from the forests of Papua, with the species estimated to slide completely off the map in 35 years if logging persists. We’re talking habitat destruction, species extinctions and hardcore contribution to climate change.

As if being an eco-disaster wasn’t sinister enough, the logging of Kwila also has serious human rights implications. Indigenous people in Indonesian Papua have their lands and resources stolen from them, and groups such as Amnesty International have recorded the torture and imprisonment of villagers working to oppose logging operations.

It seems obvious that logging Kwila is bad. One could say it’s extremely bad. But where’s all this endangered wood going? Who is ridiculous enough to purchase it? Well, Aotearoa and Australia receive about 60 per cent of all Kwila from Papua New Guinea, mostly in the form of attractive outdoor furniture. Yup, that’s right, we are selling and buying endangered rainforest timber; one more thing for New Zealanders to be proud of.

There’s currently no government regulation to stop illegally logged timber being imported into Aotearoa. While many stores have succumbed to pressure from environmental groups, a few continue to stock Kwila products and thus support human rights abuses and the trashing of Papuan rainforests. Bunnings Warehouse is one such example.

So here’s our chance. Not only to concurrently strive for social and environmental justice, but to put our fighting words into operation. Come cut your teeth on some protest action: join Rainforest Action in asking Bunnings to end the sale of endangered Kwila. We’ll see you and your pithy placard at 12pm, Saturday 2 October, outside Bunnings Warehouse, 46–56 Tory Street.

Before I began my tertiary education, it was easy to imagine university life as the following: intense wine-infused political debates after late-afternoon lectures; getting involved in student protest actions; carrying out research that actually has an impact on the real world. Admittedly, aspects of this romanticised vision have finally materialised, but it strikes me that, in general, university is not the veritable bastion of free-thought it could be. Victoria doesn’t have a culture of community, let alone student activism.

Educatory theorist Paulo Freire wrote of “education as the practice of freedom”. Is that what we’re trying to achieve in our musty lecture halls and bustling libraries: freedom? I’m no Arts major, but if I understand correctly, Freire was saying that encouraging critical thinking in education can lead to resisting oppression in everyday life. We could ask what this means for our depoliticised tertiary institutions, run as corporate bodies, the ideal post-graduation outcome being a well-paid job, if we’re lucky. Like a bad one-night stand, university tends to leave one unsatisfied, wishing that it’d just end so you can skulk away.

Does it have to be like this? Surely it’s possible to use our (dearly paid for) time at university to confront and change society? Yes, we can ask for a side-serving of activism on our curricular main course, but we can also confront issues from within our text strewn, all-nighter-induced academic haze. To misquote Noam Chomsky: if we consider university a place of privilege which confers an array of opportunities, then we have a responsibility to critique and challenge society.

Okay, we’ve done some mild theorising; now we need to work out how to put ‘radical academia’ into practice. With some handy Google Scholar-ing I gathered a few tips, such as voicing alternative viewpoints in our disciplines, reflecting on our privileged places within our research, and making our research relevant and understandable to the real world.

We write and talk about theory, but it’s rare that we attempt to live it. Although it may be difficult to live theory if you’re, say, a geologist, research within many disciplines has the capacity to record and create social change. But for real transformation to occur we need institutional metamorphosis; we need to challenge the paths our universities have taken. We can participate instead of being bystanders; we can drink copious cups of coffee and still have an impact on the outside world. Can’t we?

I’m not proud of this. Ideally, I would like to be supportive of groups working towards the same ends. We definitely need a whole spectrum of action against behemothic crises such as climate change. Campaigns I see as being ineffective, others may see as pragmatic. Approaches I consider the only way to really get to grips with an issue, others consider as being hopelessly idealistic, potentially polarising to a wider audience or simply dangerous.

So, maybe a diversity of views is good. And it is possible to work with a variety of perspectives concurrently. For instance, creating an environmentally sustainable community can simultaneously be a political statement of autonomy and localisation (the reverse of globalisation). If there are a myriad of approaches to tackling climate change, then it’s more likely everyone will get busy, and shit will get done, right?

Well, kinda. As long as we aren’t encouraging people to pursue courses of action which say, “hey we’re fixing the problem!” but actually achieve nothing, or even worse, exacerbate said problem. Recently, an article in the Guardian discussed how ‘clicktivism’ (signing e-petitions, joining Facebook groups and the like) is decreasing real-life political action by competing with local grassroots groups and colonising budding activist identities. No surprise there.

The ‘greenwashing’ of products is our second example. ‘Greenwashing’ describes how a company or government may pretend to be eco-friendly when they’re not. Say, for example, a certain cleaning brand markets their products as the only way to stop countless baby polar bears from perishing in arctic waters. People may feel a warm rosy glow of achievement when buying this product, but there are two important factors to consider: (a) the product might not do anything at all; (b) purchasing the product may make people feel like they have done enough. A focus on green consumption puts the onus of change on the individual, rather than treating climate change as a systematic problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I buy recycled toilet paper, get annoyed when people don’t recycle and use prettily-packaged eco beauty products. But I also strongly believe that consumption is not going to save the world. We need big changes, and we shouldn’t mask problems or limit political involvement by treating consumption as the primary route to change.

So, while I am attempting to respect all forms of action striving to tackle climate change, if you start informing me that changing light bulbs will save the world, I still might tell you to fuck off.

It was something of an occasion last weekend when I bought a $20 ticket and headed out in the evening fog to attend a different type of gig from those of my not-so-fevered youth. Set at the Newtown Community Centre, the seats were filled with a variety of ages. I guessed at people’s backgrounds: grey-haired radicals, colourfully-clad anarchists and long-time ardent unionists. The draw card of the night was David Rovics, a US-based musician who writes political folk songs about subjects as diverse as the occupation of Palestine and the reasons why Somali pirates are awesome.

Rovic’s music was alternatively hilarious and heart-wrenching, and ended up giving me more chills than three years of living in a Dunedin flat put together. His songs brought about an almost uncontrollable urge to chain myself to something (erm, in a political way, of course). I wondered: what is it about a well-written song that can tear you up? It’s one thing to read, research and superficially understand an issue, and another to be suddenly overwhelmed with sadness by means of a simple melodic and lyrical progression.
In the realm of climate change psychology, studies continually find that providing information alone results in no real behaviour change. We don’t respond well to plain facts alone, but what about emotions?

Call me an idealist, but I figure that if we could better understand the struggles of others we’d dig so deep in our pockets for Pakistan that we’d hit a coal seam. If we could begin to feel the effects of military occupations far across the globe we’d be protesting outside embassies daily, weekly, forever. The problem is that it’s incredibly difficult to imagine another human’s pain, particularly when they’re unknown and distant. Let’s not even try to talk about other forms of life: how do you empathise with a carnivourous snail? What about an ecosystem?

Although communicating intangible feelings using analytical descriptions can obviously be pretty problematic, for most people emotions can be translated through music, visual art, and fiction. That’s why protest songs are so important: because they can easily make emotional connections that encourage peeps to take action. Unsurprisingly, in many different cultures you can find a massive back-catalogue of songs calling for social change. Protest music gives commonality to artists diverse as Bikini Kill, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to find any climate change-related protest music. I fear this is a niche that must be filled. If you’d like to join my hip-hop collective, please contact me ASAP.

My background in craft is obviously not strong. Give me a vegan cupcake recipe and I’ll fatten you up in no time, but crochet hooks give me an uncomfortable feeling that someone—hopefully the person that handed me said crochet hook—will soon lose an eye. This ineptitude is a shame: craft is now socially desirable, just like Doc Martens and oversized, horrendously patterned jerseys.

If we travel back a few decades, craft wasn’t considered that cool. Store-bought, plastic-wrapped and seen-on-TV items were lusted after, not the flawed handmade-with-love variety. Real art got stuck up in huge galleries and real artists learned their skills at art schools and academies. Next there were skilled craftspeople making functional (and beautiful) woodwork, pottery and textiles. Then, finally, you had ‘women’s work’, activities like knitting, making clothes, weaving, crochet and the like. Never given value in economic systems, this important work was marginalised and often used to reinforce traditional gender roles. For feminists of my mum’s generation, handmade craft was considered a tool to keep women downtrodden.

But craft has come back with a vengeance. The ‘Stitch and Bitch’, Etsy.com and increased art-world interest has meant that handmade is not only appreciated, it’s also economically profitable. ‘Craftivism’ is the feral grandchild of this revival. A patchwork-Frankenstein’s Monster of craft and activism, the term was created in 2003 by writer Betsey Greer to describe “a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more infinite”. Which, um, sounds really good, but leaves me questioning what a craftivist actually does?

A quick rifle through the internet throws out these suggestions: knitting pink blankets for tanks; guerrilla art; and ‘knit-ins’, where knitting circles take over a public space. Feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-war, environmentalist… craftivism can be all these things. For more clarification I had a chat with local crafty-lady Raven Cretney, who is part of Nanatech, a group “passionate about reinvigorating the skills of the past and present”. Raven was unsurprisingly enthusiastic, saying “Craft can be used for all sorts of purposes: to make a statement about a political issue through knit tagging, to brighten a public space, to make clothes for someone in need or to learn and build community.”

This was encouragement enough for me. While I have no plans to finish knitting my ex’s scarf, I do have plans to knit a tea-cosy covering the Beehive, or perhaps Gerry Brownlee.

In May this year, after displays of public concern, the Justice and Electoral Select Committee sent the Search and Surveillance Bill back to the drawing board. In the last fortnight the bill has swooped back into the parliamentary picture.

The Justice and Electoral Select Committee has released recommendations for the bill in an interim report, suggesting changes including clarifying the “relationship between the bill and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990”.

The report indicates that the extent of power envisioned in the initial bill will be downsized, however, those opposed to the bill say the interim report does not correct fundamental problems.

“The Search and Surveillance Bill is an assault on every New Zealander’s fundamental rights and freedoms. There is simply no justification for this massive increase in state power,” says Lee Warren from Campaign to Stop the Bill.

In its current format, the bill will allow warrantless searches to be carried out on suspicion and grants ‘enforcement officers’ powers to seize items in plain view.

Other contentious provisions include agencies being given the right to search computers and email, and the introduction of examination orders, requiring individuals to report to the police for questioning. Circumstances where video and audio surveillance are able to be carried out will also broaden dramatically.

While supporters say the bill is simply a tool to consolidate existing powers, those opposed say this is not the case. Many of the powers that the Search and Surveillance Bill will grant to police and government agencies are previously unlegislated.

Further public submissions are being called for on the Search and Surveillance Bill.

Submissions can be emailed to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee Clerk at james.picker@parliament.govt.nz until Friday 3 September.

A public debate will be held on Monday 30 August between Michael Bott from the Council for Civil Liberties and National MP Chester Burrows, venue to be confirmed.

In early 2009 I arrived back from my first Camp for Climate Action get-together. I’d been remarkably cheerful the entire bus ride home: gossiping with middle-aged women, smiling at dairy owners, not even scowling at small children. My joy was almost tangible: I couldn’t wait to tell everyone what I’d discovered. Surprisingly, my flatmates appeared more worried than pleased at my happiness—there was suspicion when, instead of silently-staring-at-my-cup-of-coffee, I chose to wax lyrical at breakfast. They listened to my chatter, observed my newly learned hand signals, accepted my enthusiasm, and concluded that I had been wooed into a cult.

There was no cult. Rather, I had been seduced by the charms of consensus decision making. I was overwhelmed with the beauty of it: a process where everyone agrees and everyone has a say. In a group of 40 people each was welcome—no, encouraged—to give their opinion. Minor disagreements were worked out relatively easily and the atmosphere of trust was so thick you could’ve sliced it and eaten it on toast.

Consensus is defined as process of making decisions collectively, where individuals come to agreement together through discussion and synthesis of ideas. While voting must always deliver a win-lose verdict, consensus aims to reach a decision every single person is happy with.

Hand signals are used to aid effective consensus processes (and I think this is where my flatmates got worried): a display of jazz hands indicates “yes” or “I agree”, a ‘time out T’ signifies “technical point”, and a large forearmed formed ‘X’ is a “block”, showing that you disagree with a proposal or decision. Initially, waggling my ‘spirit-fingers’ simultaneously with 40-odd activists felt like an episode of Glee staged in an alternate reality, but soon consensus became my decision-making process of choice. I’m now ruined for conventional groups. When Steve talks out of turn I burn with anger; when shy Simone is left out I despair; when Ying dominates the entire conversation I shrivel inside. Give me a facilitator and a speaking order and I’ll be in fairness nirvana.

The length of time needed is the one serious downfall, but it’s worth it. When people know that their view must be heard, arguing caused by egos and defensiveness practically disintegrates. Consensus works not from a basis of rainbows, unicorns and magic, but from the positive assumption that everyone actually might agree. Crazy, eh.

I get annoyed when people talk exclusively about “fostering leadership” and “young leaders”, as increasing participation and equality in society also needs to be heavily underlined. For me, getting involved with a group that utilises horizontal decision-making processes resulted in recognising how many peeps’ opinions are suppressed daily. Not by force, but simply by not making room for them.

Direct democracy: it just makes consensus. Groan.

Usually when you mention guerrilla gardening, people begin asking interested questions about the lifestyles of herbivorous primates. To halt visions of vegetable-fuelled rampages in Tokyo, it helps to define ‘guerrilla’ as an “irregular armed force” and explain that ‘guerrilla gardening’ is the creation of gardens on land that doesn’t belong to you, without permission from the land owners. Guerrilla gardening could describe how your Aunt Barbara’s dahlia bed is encroaching on her neighbour’s yard, but more commonly refers to deliberate and politically-charged acts of re-vegetation.

Neglected private or state land may be reclaimed by gardeners for a number of reasons: to produce food for individuals or communities; to beautify community areas; to bring life into urban landscapes; to highlight issues of land rights and ownership; or as a form of societal critique. In the United Kingdom, members of the “Pansy Project” plant flowers in public places where homophobic attacks have occurred.

There’s a variety of guerrilla gardening methods out there. One idea would be to sneak, balaclava-shrouded, down Lambton Quay at 3am, leaving tubs of flax at every bus stop. Or your whanau could plant cabbages and carrots in the round-a-bout down the road. Perhaps you and your crew could spend an afternoon creating ‘seed bombs’—dried balls of seeds, clay and compost—to throw at vacant lots and car parks as you cycle through the city.

I’m not really a gardener, although in February I did watch a friend tie green beans up with string. And once I fell out of a lemon tree. So I decided to undertake the simplest act of guerrilla gardening imaginable: throwing seeds around the outskirts of Aro Valley Park. It wasn’t very dramatic: a woman curiously glanced my way before continuing to tow her small pug along; a busker smiled at me so I glared back at him suspiciously. I would sincerely doubt anyone remotely involved in Aro Park cares about floral additions to the neighbourhood. Will my efforts result in a glorious efflorescence of resistance? Probably not, but at least I got my feet wet (or nails dirty). Next stop: sowing silverbeet seeds on a traffic island.

Try as I might, I can’t see anything wrong with guerrilla gardening. Growing edible and/or beautiful plants in misused or neglected places is indisputably positive.