Observations on communities after one year in Motueka

July 5, 2010

It’s been nearly a year since we moved from Christchurch to Motueka and it feels like a good time for a progress report, not as a “what we’ve done here” diary but rather what things I’ve learnt.

Also we’ve recently enjoyed a great community festival, the Motueka Festival of Lights, celebrating mid-winter and lifting the spirits of the locals. For those not familiar with this event, have a look here for reports and photos.

If my blog is new to you, you may also want to have a look at earlier articles (for example, this one) about what a community like Motueka means to me philosophically.

My experience here (matched pretty much by that of my wife) shows that most of my expectations have been met and opinions confirmed, but some new things have been learnt – mainly about the strengths and limitations of living in a community the size of Motueka (population 7,500 to 14,000, depending on where you draw the line around it) and a city the size of Christchurch (pop. 400,000 and growing fast).

Other lessons learnt (and still being learnt) are about what it can be like to live in a “sustainable” and “resilient” community that may well be able to withstand the 21st century onslaught of global financial instability, peak oil and climate change.

For a start, I’ve learnt that having fewer choices makes it easier to actually do things. In Christchurch on any day there is a choice of entertainment experiences, so much so that, given almost all involved getting in the car and looking for car parks, we rarely went to any of them. (Especially on the cold winter nights in those parts.) In Motueka good concerts and other entertainments are held quite often, sometimes involving visiting performers but more often using home-grown talent, mostly of excellent quality. And guess what – we actually go to see most of them, mostly within walking distance.

We reside only 5 walking minutes from the main shopping precinct so we use the car far less often than we used to in suburban Christchurch. In winter we drive sometimes when in summer we would have walked or cycled, and we go to Nelson for family and occasional extra shopping or medical excursions, but we realise that if petrol supplies dried up for a month or three our lives would not be disrupted too much.

When we chose Motueka to live, part of the reason was that we didn’t want to be in a smaller village community where everyone knew each other and their activities. Going to that from a city would have been one leap too far. But as hoped, we’ve found the size of Motueka is just right. Almost all the things important for a busy and happy life are located within walking distance, covering a broad range of needs. But it’s big enough for us to know that we will still be meeting new people for many years to come.

We have found that for some locals, even Motueka is too large, and they seem stuck in their own little sub-communities or clubs with little interest in wider community events or activities. Many of the older ones told us that, despite plenty of publicity, they weren’t really aware the Festival of Lights was coming and didn’t really care anyway – they were more interested in their next club meeting and trip away. I guess that happens in communities of all sizes, especially among the well entrenched.

While here I’ve become aware of the Transition Towns (TT) concept. Motueka has a TT group of its own, which is purposeful and active but struggles for traction. I’m quite convinced that the TT concept – basically a green, low-energy, localised economy – is the best for the future, but it’s so hard to go “cold turkey” and switch from a consumption and growth-driven society en masse. I’m confident, however, that Motueka is better placed than many NZ towns to work toward that goal over the coming decade or two, and to weather crises that will devastate larger cities.

I do recognise that the depth and breadth of one’s involvement in a community depends largely on how much time you have, and therefore on your age and family or business responsibilities. I am now edging into the ‘oldies’ category and do have more time on my hands to ponder concepts like ‘community’. It’s easy for parents of young families to become totally occupied in just parenting and have little time to think about wider community issues. But in the parenting process they are also making a big, long-term contribution to the community by raising and teaching the next generation to appreciate their place in it.

And they do. I’ve talked with a few of our teenaged residents who are aware of the positives of the Motueka community and who appreciate what it offers. They commonly talk of leaving to look for the more varied and exciting opportunities in the cities or overseas, but they also say that they can easily see themselves returning to raise families here. We should welcome their adventurous nature because many of them return with vigour and ideas that benefit us all in the long run. And the more welcoming and engaging we make our community to them now, the more likely they are to return.

Even if most teenagers and young parents don’t get involved in wider community projects, most parents nevertheless play a role and make their contribution by helping out at preschool groups, school activities, and sports and other clubs that their kids join. Since arriving here, I’ve been impressed by the sheer number of community groups offering services, support and companionship to people of all demographics.

And finally, the clearest difference I see between community living in a small/medium town and a city. In a community like Motueka, if something needs doing you talk with others like yourself and, if there’s a way, organise amongst yourselves to get it done – yourselves. Whereas in a city your first thought is to find out whose job it is to do that thing – who’s paid to do it – and agitate to get them to do it.


The big lessons from volcanic ash and oil spills

May 10, 2010

One problem with being a worrier about the way the world is going is that when your predictions become reality it’s hard to know what to say without sounding holier-than-thou.

I don’t like being told “I told you so” by anyone else, so I prefer not to say it to others when what is obvious to me, but is negative lefty thinking to others, turns out to actually happen. And generally you can hardly be pleased to be right, because what you’re right about too often results in a mess that you really, really don’t want.

But every now and then things happen that cause you to sit up, put two and two together and say: We are going in the wrong direction! It’s obvious. Why could you not see that this was going to be the result? I did tell you so.

Two recent events have made it abundantly clear that unsustainable activities eventually have downstream costs which even the cheerleaders of relentless economic growth acknowledge are horrendous.

Now I didn’t predict the eruption of that volcano in Iceland, and the ensuing disruption to air traffic. And I didn’t predict the accident at the oil rig off the US coast. So I won’t say ‘I told you so’ about these specific events (though some people actually could).

But what I have thought, spoken and written about for many years, and am being proven correct often enough, has been that the more we allow ourselves as residents of this planet to become dependent upon economic growth and the unsustainable tools of growth, the more likely a disaster results when mother nature or human error throws us a curve ball and these tools let us down.

The volcano event has shown how dependent most of us are, mainly indirectly, on scheduled air services. When they’re interrupted for days or weeks, products cannot get to market, people get stranded, people run out of funds to live, business contracts are threatened or breached. And the thing is …. we can’t do anything about it. Good old Mother Nature reminds us that she’s in charge. No amount of management skill, market-driven competition, economic growth or new technology has any real effect.

I’m not saying that good public management skills, sound trading markets or new technologies are poor goals. I’m just saying that we all need a level of self-sufficiency in our places of living, our communities, and our lives such that our existence is not threatened by distant acts of nature. Disrupted, maybe; but not seriously threatened. Making us ever more dependent on remote technologies and activities is just not the way to go.

(I wrote about this in this article on the Haiti earthquake.)

And then we come to the oil rig situation – an even more salutary event with far longer-term implications and an even more obvious lesson for us. Here I’m going to borrow ideas and a few sentences from an opinion article I read in the Christchurch Press (May 3), written by The Times’s Simon Barnes. It was his piece that prompted me to think: I should be writing in the same vein, because I sure think the same.

As we watch on TV the desperation of the Americans who live and earn their livelihood by the coastline that will now inevitably be ruined for decades by the incoming oil slick, it is impossible to see any good side to this. There is no grey area, no “Yes, but ….”, and certainly no bright side. We’ve got it wrong, and we’re going to pay for it.

Those Americans whose jobs will be ruined by the destruction of the seafood stocks will be directly affected. The rest of us will be affected by the resulting costs and how they ripple through our economies.

And although the operator/owner of the exploded oil rig, BP, and its technology suppliers are directly to blame, we’re all indirectly responsible. Everyone who whinges every time the price of petrol goes up, and who demands the right to use a petrol-powered vehicle to go wherever they please, has played a part in this and every costly mistake made within the petroleum industry (including the tanker whose short-cut caused damage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last month). The oil suppliers are merely responding to demands from addicted consumers for petrol at the cheapest possible cost – which inevitably means ‘cut corners if you have to, I want my petrol now!

As Simon Barnes put it: “These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction for oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment – oil at any price – is madness. Treasure this spill; it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

“We crave oil like a junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.”

Sorry for copying that bit, Simon. But it’s exactly what I’ve thought about the attitude of too many people who lack any longer-term respect for our environment, and he’s said it in far better words than I could have used.

And so I say, with feeling, “I also told you so!”


My last big project – the Motueka Online community website

April 1, 2010

My blogging has been more irregular than I’d have liked so far this year, and the reason has largely been the time I’ve been putting into a project which quite possibly represents the ultimate in what my training and experience over the years (in teaching, science, computer software, journalism and website design) has led to.

Early this week was the official launch of the community website I’d been dreaming of building for quite some time. Detailed planning took place in November last, building occurred over December and January, and during February and March I was showing it to key people (the ones who can help me advance the concept and foster contributions to it) and adding in some basic content.

Of course this website will never ever be “finished” (I certainly hope not!), but now it has sufficient skin around the bones for it to withstand public viewing and invite participation. The site is called Motueka Online and it’s located at www.MotuekaOnline.org.nz. I’m not putting the link here just to get more traffic to it from this blog, but rather to show what I believe a non-commercial community website is capable of offering.

If you’re not sure what I’m on about here, just a bit of background. Last year my wife and I moved to the wonderful district and town of Motueka in Tasman, at the north end of New Zealand’s South Island. This was not just a random or hedonistic (“lifestyle”) escape to a lovely, gentle climate and vibrant, green landscape; rather, it resulted from a strong desire to be part of a productive, caring and hopefully sustainable community. I wrote about it in this blog.

I believe that a community worth living in is one which gets better as each member contributes to it. It’s a good community because people give to it as often as they use it and take from it to fulfil their own lives. So for me it’s a matter of finding what I can contribute, from my kitbag of abilities and weaknesses, that will help make this a community I can love.

My recent background in journalism and website design made this project a pretty sweet combo – a non-commercial website based on a sponsorship model (to make it sustainable into the future) which uses the voice of the people for its content, and which provides the information they need for daily living. Plus, it’s starting to look fun and interesting.

So, the result is there to see and judge. I’m now going to reproduce here the latter part of the speech I made at the launch event (after the bit where I demonstrated the site), and perhaps you can better understand what I’m trying to say. Here goes:

—————————————————

This website is unique in New Zealand, and possible one of very few of this type around the world. Now that’s a bold claim indeed! Is it fair comment?

Before launching out on this project I did a lot of research – mainly among New Zealand community sites – and this is what I found:

  1. There are many commercially oriented town and community websites which exist primarily to list businesses in the area, with items of local community information, news and events largely added in as extras. The excellent Motueka i-Site is one of them. In essence, the success of their operation is based on the model of “news and information supported by advertising”. These sites fill an important niche, and often do it really well.
  2. I found quite a few small non-commercial community sites that look like they were noble ideas when they started out, but have since slipped into disrepair, clearly not maintained for months or even years in some cases. Most of these community websites comprise little more than three or four pages, serving communities so small that there are very few events to report and few businesses to support them. Nice try, but no prize, I’m afraid.
  3. At the other end of the spectrum, I found some large and informative city or district sites which are run and maintained by paid staff working for local bodies. Tasman District Council’s website is clearly one example, as is the Christchurch website maintained by its city library. All of these excellent sites are, however, what I call top-down information sites. I’ll come back to this concept shortly.
  4. I did find two delightful grassroots community sites operating for villages near big cities. One is based in the Heathcote Valley, a suburb of Christchurch, and the other at Tamahere, a satellite settlement of Hamilton. They are both up-to-date, intelligent and driven by community voices rather than by their local body masters. However they struggle because they have insufficient population to be able to attract a wide range of contributions and information.

I believe that Motueka Online is the only site in New Zealand of this size with broad-ranging, community-driven content that is not for profit, not driven by the need for active advertising. In this respect, I believe it is unique. How has this been achieved?

  • First, there’s the size of Motueka, which is just about ideal for this to happen. There is enough going on in and around the town, including a wide range of activities and interests, but not so much that it needs full-time staff to publish and maintain all the information.
  • Secondly I believe the mindset of the people of Motueka is unusually oriented towards their own community, more so than most other towns in New Zealand. We’re a distinct town with a distinct identity, and we’re proud of that.
  • Thirdly, Motueka’s growth and well-being is being guided by a number of skilled and dedicated community leaders, such as yourselves.
  • And finally – and I don’t know how to say this without sounding conceited – I happen to be living here after many years of experience in journalism and website design, and have the time to maintain the site.

I’m going to finish off with a few thoughts about information management over the centuries, and about how much this has changed in recent years. I want to compare two paradigms or models, which I call “top-down” and “bottom-up”.

Over history, the publication of information was controlled by the top-down process. We all know about how authorities such as the church were able to keep the medieval masses in place by controlling information to them. This continued largely into the mid 20th century, with the wealthy classes controlling the means of publication.

Since the 1980s though, desktop publishing allowed ordinary people with average finances to publish their own flyers, newsletters, magazines, and even newspapers. But even then if you wanted to expand your audience into the mainstream media you had to sweet-talk newspaper reporters and other media to publicise your story. It was still largely a top-down flow of information.

As I mentioned earlier, local body websites such as the council’s, provide heaps of information, along with the ability for people to formally respond with submissions, but this is a very controlled and still largely top-down communication.

Since the arrival of the mainstream Internet in the mid-1990s, however, the ability to self-publish has widened spectacularly, and bottom-up publication – of sorts, anyhow – has absolutely taken off. Anyone with an Internet connection and a cheap computer can publish their story and their beliefs online, through their own conventional websites, or through blogs and Facebook pages and the like. And with Google, their audience can find them.

However to many people, particularly those of us over the age of 30 or so, the pendulum has swung too far. Cyberspace has become a free-for-all, with people shouting opinions and wasting endless hours in chat rooms, Twitter pages, blogs and so on. Not only are many people scared to enter and take part in that world, but the more realistic ones also know that, with so much noise there, they are unlikely to be heard anyhow. Millions of voices are competing for attention.

Today, if you want to express yourself or your ideas or publicise an offering, basically you have the choice of three options – 1) paying for an advertisement, 2) persuading an editor to take up your cause, or 3) shouting the loudest on a social networking website.

Motueka Online offers a template for a compromise that may just be the ideal for medium-size communities. It publishes content supplied almost entirely by community members. The contributions are moderated by community members to ensure satisfactory security, privacy and respectfulness. The website also does have some official top-down information, but it’s been massaged and summarised to suit readers with limited time on their hands.

It’s what I’ve been calling bottom-up. Maybe grassroots is a more familiar term. Motueka Online has been designed to provide and encourage easy access for anyone to participate.

But, as the cliché goes, we all have to use it or in time we’ll lose it.


Haiti – a lesson about big cities

January 24, 2010

The terrible humanitarian situation in Haiti following the big earthquake is saddening beyond measure. As for so many other outsiders I’m sure, for me there is an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that even donating significant sums of money cannot alleviate.

The disaster also offers some lessons and insights about modern living, and I’m going to discuss one. Please note, however – it is not my desire in any way to take advantage of the situation to plug some of my beliefs, but rather, hopefully, to add just a little long-term perspective. (Other lessons will doubtless be learned, especially political ones, and many will be quickly forgotten as well.)

Most of what we’re read and heard and seen in the various media has centred on what’s happening in and around the capital Port-au-Prince, a city, we’re told, of 3 million souls.

It’s easy to feel anger or disgust when reading about or watching the looting and anarchy, the stampedes for food, but try to imagine a similar situation in a quake-threatened Wellington with its population of around half a million.

With the airport essentially out of action, how would planes get in with aid? With roads damaged and buildings collapsed along major thoroughfares, how would stuff be distributed? How would you get your survival food after days, even weeks, if all the shops ran dry or were destroyed? What would you drink if the water reticulation system was broken?

How long would it take before you took matters into your own hands and grabbed what you could from wherever you could find it? Desperate shortages lead to desperate actions.

We in New Zealand started to imagine the implications of such infrastructure stress when swine flu caused alarm a year or so ago. What would you need on hand within your home if you couldn’t easily get to the supermarket or the chemist? We’ve also had civil defence analysis and advice put to us to contemplate what would happen in an earthquake or tsunami struck here. We tried to think down that path, but it’s so hard to actually picture. I think it wouldn’t be much different to events in Port au Prince, perhaps just a slightly more dignified or restrained desperation J

My point is that cities of the size of Port-au-Prince, or Sydney, or Auckland simply cannot operate for their residents without the infrastructure to enable goods and services to be traded or exchanged. In all but the most primitive of lifestyles, life depends on the exchange of products and services. You have no garden? That’s OK, you simply buy food from those who do, using money you got from selling what you do have or services you offer to others in the city who don’t have what you do.

It all works as long as there are places of exchange, the means for buyers and sellers to travel to those places, accessible producers of all goods and services regarded as necessary or desirable for life (including transportation to ship in goods not produced locally), and willing buyers and sellers.

But what happens when the market infrastructure breaks down physically? If sellers cannot get goods to market, or cannot even produce the goods, and/or if buyers cannot get to market or cannot afford to pay for purchasers, then it all turns to custard. In a big city, that is.

In smaller communities, people can exchange without the need for the intermediary marketplaces, and distance and access to market is not a problem.

Four months ago I moved from a city of 400,000 people to Motueka, a town of around 10,000. Now everything I need to live comfortably and productively is within walking or cycling distance. The surrounding countryside is capable of supporting the living needs (in particular, the food) of all the residents. The water is sourced locally so, if push came to shove, I could walk to the river to fill a few pots.

If a major disaster hit Motueka, many people’s livelihoods would be severely affected, but we would mostly get by with locally grown food that is accessible via barter trades from walkable sources. We could get clean water (although a tsunami may limit that for a while if lots of seawater got in). With a town built of discrete houses rather that built in top of and hard up against each other, it would be relatively easy to gather enough materials to built adequate temporary shelters.

Sure, there are some nice things that are not readily available in this town, such as big-box retail outlets, concerts by overseas entertainers, tertiary learning institutions, and a full range of eateries (though we do pretty well here on these). For these we do need to drive to Nelson, the nearest city, or Wellington or Christchurch. But most of us know that these consumer items are elective add-ons, not necessities of life.

I wrote about the reasons I moved to Motueka here. Those reasons are based on concepts of community, physical size, and healthy sustainability. The news of yet another humanitarian tragedy in Port-au-Prince, which has been made far worse than many other earthquakes because it was centred near a large, populous, overcrowded and already-stressed city, reinforces for me the unsustainable nature of living cheek-by-jowl in large cities.

I’m not saying that therefore all large cities should be broken up and the population moved to smaller towns and communities, but by encouraging the growth of larger cities – by centralising markets in order to build further material wealth – we are making ever bigger problems for ourselves into the future (as well as enlarging the potential for natural disasters to lead to greater humanitarian tragedies).

I may be wrong but . . . . I believe we should stop fostering ever-larger cities and population centres by encouraging decentralised economies, and by de-emphasising market-driven consumer economics.


New life within a sustainable community – my move to Motueka

October 6, 2009

This blog site has been on idle for a few weeks because we’ve moved house and town and there have been more pressing domestic tasks to attend to than typing out my rambling thoughts. But I’m taking time out to mark the relocation from city to town with some early impressions about life in smaller communities.

I’ve lived for several decades in Christchurch (population about 400,000) but have now moved to Motueka (pop said to be around 7000). Apart from the obvious attractions of a milder and softer climate, a more vibrant, greener landscape, proximity to the sea, and the ability to walk or bike safely to most local destinations, plus the desire to pre-retire in a more laid-back setting, it was the philosophy of community that led my wife and me here.

I may be wrong but …… as Western society’s blinkered march to an unsustainable future – in both economic and environmental terms – steadily becomes the reality this country faces, I have become more convinced than ever that the only sensible answer is living within communities.

I don’t mean communes or small, isolated groups of dropouts.  I mean communities which are:

  • large enough to provide all the basics for a good standard of living and entertainment and a productive future for coming generations,
  • but small enough for its participants to be able to exist without dependency on large amounts of resources outside the community,
  • and small enough for the whole of the area to be available and reachable by members without the absolute need for cars (or gumboots),
  • and (crucially important to me) small enough that willing individuals can make a difference to the well-being of the whole community, rather than being just a tiny tadpole in a vast lake.

So with this idea at the back of our mind, my wife and I chose Motueka as our new home. Wonderful climate and environment, friendly people and, crucially, everything we’ll really need within a few square kilometres, to share with the other 6998 residents.

The fourth factor in the list – being able to make a real difference – was reinforced to me a few days ago when exploring some of the parks and walking areas of our new home town. We came upon a wetland park near the estuary, a lovely tranquil setting with pukekos, ducks and tuis enjoying natural-looking ponds and large native trees.

A visitor information board within the park told of its history – how it remained a swamp while the town grew, but a resident named Mr Bensemann (doubtless with a bit of money, but more importantly with a generous community spirit) gradually reclaimed and fashioned it, planted it out, and left it for public use (along with some adjacent sports fields).

And I considered how this is made possible within a town this size, and how such gestures make thriving communities what they are. Within real communities, people value other people’s contributions.

In Christchurch there are some much appreciated reserve areas gifted for public use by early owners, but the bulk of the amenities that I used and was aware of were council owned and maintained; nice but anonymous. They were small parts of the city, which some residents knew about but most never frequented. When a community gets to that size (I suggest perhaps bigger than about 50,000 people) then much of what is contributed by members is lost in the urban spread and the busy commerce that makes up city living.

This verbal ramble is not meant to belittle cities and the work of people who live within them. I did my best while I was a city dweller for all those years, but I doubt that many people noticed or benefited. It will be interesting to see if living in a smaller integrated community will provide more ultimate satisfaction and worthwhile participation. At least it should provide a more sustainable way of life.