XR Whangarei
A Call to the Arms of Papatūānuku
Nga mihi nui ki a koutou katoa
Nga mihi hoki ki a Ranginui e tu iho nei, ki a Papatūānuku e takoto nei, me ngā āhuatanga katoa o te ao tūroa.
This is the Whangārei Branch page which includes updated information about local events and activities, news and an occasional blog. It is intended to link the people of Te Tai Tokerau to emerging news, scientific research and reports on the Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa NZ website, to increase public awareness of climate breakdown, environmental degradation and extinction of species; and to encourage direct action that will wake up the general public and government at all levels to the need for urgent measures to protect our mother Earth.
Extinction Rebellion is a movement rather than an entity so opinions expressed here are individual. But further to XR’s three demands, our overall shared purpose is to participate in a rapid transformation of society, in Aotearoa and the world, to relinquish the use of fossil fuel energy and all the other human activities that are heating the atmosphere and the oceans and extinguishing life forms at an accelerating rate.
We seek to convince our fellows, whanau, friends, work colleagues, the many people in the social hinterlands of our lives, of the urgency of the crisis. And by engaging with our local Whangarei community we contribute to the national debate on how to respond to the existential threat that faces Aotearoa and the world.
Some key documents and media are listed on this XR Whangarei page as a platform for people to navigate into the plethora of scientific research, social and political analyses, and proposals for appropriate strategies to undertake the monumental task of rapidly transforming the way we live and think.
For anybody with an awareness of the global climate emergency the passing of another decade of human ‘business as usual’ brings an emotional mixture of sadness and anger. Sadness at the accelerating obliteration of life on earth by our species. Anger at the status quo that enables a small number of elite, immensely wealthy individuals to hijack the modern capitalistic economic system for their own life-destroying agendas.
It is 2020. Most of us are aware now of the climate breakdown crisis. We’ve seen the news from around the world; we’ve processed the information and decided how to respond to it. So far most people have chosen to ignore it, to filter it out of their thoughts, because it’s too much to comprehend, too stressful to imagine, or simply too much of an interference to the daily routine and comforts of their busy lives. It’s hard enough just trying to work for a living, or care for others or raise a family and ensure a place to live with food on the table. So we carry on our daily lives as cogs in the global machine, the fossil-fueled industrial civilisation that is cooking our planet, sucking the water from the earth, poisoning the air, the land, the rivers and the ocean, obliterating forest after forest, species after species, in a mad human frenzy with the momentum to annihilate life on earth.
We are up against our common human emotional frailties of self-absorption and fatalism, apathy in the face of forces that seem too powerful to resist. Easier to just ignore it and live what life there is to enjoy while it’s there. But we surely owe it to our descendants, and to the rest of life on Earth to minimise further destruction and salvage what’s left of a habitable planet in the short time we have left. We cannot by heedless apathy sacrifice other species until the last one is gone, or give up on the survival of our own descendants, or leave them to witness the flight of the last bird, the falling of the last tree, the drying up of the last stream.
We need a Force of environmental health and peace protectors, a critical mass of ordinary people who will stand up and demand the dismantling of the fossil fueled madness that is consuming the world. People who are prepared to suffer the hardships, turmoil and perils of a transitioning society, with the resilience of the Depression era and a collective imagination to forge new, rational ways of living harmoniously on this Earth.
We need creative artists to visualise the dreadful possibilities of the future, musicians to make the soundtrack to the rebellion, writers, bloggers, media, journalists, i.t. experts, local scientists, educators to provide public information through talks and presentations, strategists and organisers, and lots of activists brave enough to face down authority in mass civil disobedience, to channel their cries of despair and outrage into acts of righteous defiance guided by the inspiration and strategies of a long line of historic passive resistance, the spirit of Parihaka, the spirit of tiakitanga and aroha for Ranginui and Papatūānuku.
He waka eke noa
We’re all onboard the same canoe January 2020