food security

Beyond Growth Aotearoa Conference 2023 – recordings now available!

envirohistory NZLeave a comment

The session recordings for the recent Beyond Growth Aotearoa conference, held at Victoria University of Wellington are now available and can be viewed on Youtube.

My session focused on sufficiency as a pathway to a post-growth economy. In the talk I draw on the experience of France, which has instituted sufficiency at the core of its energy law. Whatever we call this new pathway, the reality is clear: the current economic system is not working for people or the planet. We need an economy that focuses on delivering what people need to support wellbeing while operating within safe operating boundaries (listen to my conversation about wellbeing economy with RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan here). In my conference session I suggest some possible areas of focus, including a food resilience strategy and an energy security strategy. Take a listen to find out more.

The transition to an ‘economy of enough’

envirohistory NZLeave a comment
A hundred years ago many New Zealanders were content with a bowl of porridge in the morning made from oats produced in Southland and Otago. Photo: Newsroom.

My latest article on Newsroom asks what if we made sufficiency a central guiding principal of our economy, as countries such as France are starting to do? It draws on earlier advocacy of the late Jeanette Fitzsimons, who argued for an ‘economy of enough’.

On one autumnal afternoon in 2013, the late Jeanette Fitzsimons addressed a hall full of people in the leafy town of Waikanae on the Kāpiti Coast. Unusually, for a former academic and seasoned politician, she began her address with a story about a certain slow-witted but very likeable bear – who had indulged in a bit too much honey while visiting his friend Rabbit and got stuck in Rabbit’s doorway on his way out.

In the story much discussion ensued on ways to resolve this predicament, including Rabbit moving to a bigger tree, or cutting a bigger doorway. But in the end it was Christopher Robin who sagely concluded, “Pooh, you will just have to stay there and not eat any more until you lose weight”.

Through this story, Fitzsimons was deftly providing an analogy for the current human predicament. She went on to describe the need to transition to an “economy of enough”. That is, rather than Rabbit upsizing to allow for more honey consumption, Pooh just needed to cut back a bit. He needed to understand how much honey was enough and be satisfied with that.

Ten years have passed, and the need to transition to an economy of enough has only become more urgent. The words “overshoot”, “polycrisis”, “metacrisis” and “collapse” are now scattered through everyday conversations in lecture halls, meeting rooms, cafes and living rooms around the country as our awareness of the situation deepens.

Continue reading the article on Newsroom.

Food security at the heart of our cost of living crisis

envirohistory NZ1 Comment

Here is my second recent article, published on Newsroom. It argues that if we believe the cost of living crisis is more than a momentary blip, we need policy that will strengthen NZ’s own food security and encourage bioregionalism.

New Zealanders have been finding their supermarket shop a painful experience for some time now, but in December many reached their pain threshold as food prices increased by 10.6 percent compared with 2021. Fresh produce was a whopping 24 percent more expensive – at a time of the year when it is usually plentiful and cheap. Economists reassure us this is just a momentary blip in an otherwise smoothly running economic system – prices will ‘soften’, inflation will ‘moderate’ and ‘better times will come’. These reassurances are comforting and most of us are happy to be soothed by this narrative.

But what if empty supermarket shelves and high prices are symptomatic of something much bigger? A sign of a broken system, now starting to show the tell-tale fissures of climate disruption, ecological collapse, energy descent and increased resource scarcity.

The immediate causes of surging food prices are familiar to most of us: high shipping costs, supply chain disruption, a tight labour market, disrupted weather patterns, spiralling on-farm costs such as fertiliser and diesel.

But all these factors are more connected than we might think. 

Read the rest of the article here.