John Oliver reveals the official Metalbird sculpture of the winning Bird of the Century. Photo / Supplied
Despite it all, some really good things happened this year. Simon Wilson selects a few.
Sure, it was a bad year. The storms were awful, and even though the northern hemisphere had its hottest summer on record, the fossil fuels lobby tried to sabotage the climate conference, COP28. Things were terrible in Ukraine and even worse in Gaza and Israel.
But it wasn’t a bad year everywhere, not all the time and not for everyone. Good things happened too. Here are a few of them.
Who even knew the pūteketeke existed? Thanks John Oliver, not only for drowning our Bird of the Century competition in global laughter, but for helping raise $600,000 for Forest and Bird. On balance, fabulous.
Oliver is a famous guy. The bird, for everyone not familiar with the wildlife of our southern lakes, remains a mystery.
In early November, a bunch of ambitions New Zealanders launched a plan to restore indigenous forest to an area about the size of the Waikato. That’s 2 million hectares – 8 per cent of the country – replanted within 10 years.
The project is called Recloaking Papatūānuku and is the brainchild of lobby group Pure Advantage, whose board includes Sir Stephen Tindall, Dame Anne Salmond and Phillip Mills. Global consultancy McKinsey & Co turned the idea into a plan, working closely with scientists and experts in te ao Māori.
Pure Advantage says the plan is “not a substitute for urgent and deep gross emissions reductions”. But it notes that to meet our climate-action commitments, we’re looking at a bill of $24 billion in international carbon credits by 2030. Not acceptable, or possible.
Recloaking Papatūānuku, it says, will “reduce our reliance on those offsets while also restoring biodiversity and enhancing landscape resilience”.
Between now and 2100, Pure Advantage expects its project will capture the equivalent of 20 years’ worth of current emissions. That should more than eliminate our offset commitments, which means the project will attract overseas investments.
The cost estimate is $8.5b-$12b, between now and 2050. Not cheap. But the damage done by climate change is far more expensive: Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland anniversary weekend floods, according to Treasury, will end up costing us $9b-$14b.
Recloaking Papatūānuku was showcased to the world at COP28, shortly after New Zealand was awarded “Fossil of the Day”, and won praise from global climate leaders like Britain’s Lord Nicholas Stern.
Can the environment be put to work for the economy and make the country more beautiful and more resilient at the same time? Can it be done in partnerships with all the kaitiaki of the land, Māori and Pākehā? Recloaking Papatūānuku says yes.
New Zealand company Emrod has discovered how to transmit electricity without wires.
The technology is called power beaming and, if it can be scaled successfully, it will help connect remote wind and solar projects to the grid. That might be at a local level, transmitting power from an isolated hilltop, or it might be global, using solar farms in the Sahara to power cities blanketed in Ukrainian snow.
“For some reason,” says Greg Kushnir, Emrod’s chief executive, “there’s a cognitive gap for people. They have no problem believing they can pick up a phone – which uses electromagnetic waves sent via satellite – to communicate with people all over the world and send information. But it’s hard for people to accept you can do the same with energy.”
Emrod is one of several companies supported by Ara Ake, the “future energy centre” set up in Taranaki by the previous Government. It has presented the space-based version of its technology in Europe and, in October, gave a terrestrial demonstration to Government officials and industry leaders in Auckland.
This may not seem like good news to everyone. In Arizona, a herd of large, long-legged, pig-like furballs called javelinas have been digging up a golf course. This follows news from earlier in the year that a pod of orcas was ramming boats off the coast of Spain.
Nature is fighting back.
The greenkeeper shared his outrage on X, formerly Twitter, and got 24 million views in a few days. But to his surprise, many people were rooting for Team Javelina. They said the animals were native to the American Southwest and the golf course had destroyed their habitat. Not the other way round.
Javelinas, also called collared peccaries, dig up the ground looking for roots, which are a source of water and food. It’s what they do.
Golfers said they should do it somewhere else.
Imagine catching an aerial cable car to work, the traffic stuck on the motorway beneath you while you enjoy the beauty of the city. Who doesn’t want their commute to be more fun?
Commuter cable cars, or gondolas, are common in parts of Latin America and Europe. The Austrian company Dopplemayr is building one in Paris right now, at a cost of only $50 million per kilometre.
The same company wants to build them here too, and this year it identified 10 “suitable sites” in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. No word yet from the new Government.
Despite the tough economic times, the cable cars are not alone. Quite a few other dreams to build a better future have been floated in 2023.
Auckland Council is considering four proposals for a new stadium, three of them on the waterfront.
There’s a beautiful plan for parkland and “intertidal” features on Wynyard Point, site of the old Tank Farm.
Funding has been approved for work to start on some key cycleways and it’s not clear if the new Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, has the power to stop them.
There are 8 billion people in the world and we’re getting more lonely. In May, the US Surgeon General called it a “loneliness epidemic”.
It hits young people the most – 79 per cent of 18- to 24-year olds in America report feeling lonely – but it’s hardest on the old. Loneliness can make illness more severe and death come quicker.
There are lots of causes, including a trend for people to live alone, post-Covid social disintegration and some things you might not think of, like out-of-touch urban design.
In Florida, researchers strapped sensors to volunteers and sent them walking around a nice new park. Their stress levels went up.
The volunteers said the park didn’t make them feel welcome: it was clean but empty, green but with nothing to do and no reason to linger. So the landscapers came back and installed tables and chairs, photographic displays and other things that would prompt people to stop and maybe interact. It worked.
You can’t force it, though. Sometimes we want to talk, sometimes we don’t. But what everyone probably wants is for it to be easy to have a casual encounter when they want to.
Urban designers are trying to keep up. They now say park benches should not be side by side (too isolating), but not face to face either (too confrontational). Put them close-ish and at angles. You can see that with some of the new seating on Queen St.
In Salem, Massachusetts, they have park benches with “Happy to Chat” signs. Sit there and you’re up for a conversation. “Plauderbank” benches do the same thing in Berlin.
In some supermarkets in the Netherlands, Canada and France, there are slow lanes at the checkout, for people who want to stand and chat. Volunteers hang around to get the conversation started.
This year in the Swedish city of Luleå, where loneliness hits hard in the winter months, they started a campaign called “Säg hej!” (Say Hi!)
Apparently Swedes keep to themselves too much and they want to change that.
It makes you feel “more seen and a bit more like you belong,” says Åsa Koski, who works for the council and dreamed up the idea.
“Research shows that it has an effect on health and often an effect on wanting to help each other. If you say ‘Hi’ to your neighbours, you are more likely to help them.”
Also this year, British artist Andy Field published a book about it. Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person “combines history, science, psychology, queer theory and pop culture with a love of urban life”.
Field, who may be braver than most of us, recommends going for a walk, hand in hand, with a stranger.
In March, at Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland, Harry Styles sang “Tūtira mai ngā iwi” and held the mic out to the crowd. He probably expected “tātou tātou e” in response.
Forty thousand people sang the whole song back to him. Talk about standing together. It’s on YouTube.
Mātauranga Māori – traditional knowledge – and western science have been working together to rescue mussel beds in the Ōhiwa Harbour, in the eastern Bay of Plenty.
Research head, Professor Kura Paul-Burke, told Whakaata Māori in October that working with kaumātua “allowed us to access the deep, intergenerational Māori knowledge of the harbour with people who have a lived connection with Ōhiwa as a mahinga kai”.
She said that between 2007 and 2019, the kuku (mussel) population in the harbour fell from 112 million to just 80,000. The main reason: an explosion of predatory pātangaroa, or sea stars.
“Fifteen sea stars per hectare is a balanced number, but we had 50,000 per hectare.”
The collaboration led to the discovery of more than 16 million kuku thriving on a traditional mussel bed previously thought to be lost. The old people worked out where to look.
Politics aside, how do you help children living with poverty, violence, substance abuse and cultural alienation? I Have a Dream, which styles itself IHAD, has an answer. It works with tamariki and rangatahi in four schools in Whangārei and this year extended to another in Upper Hutt.
IHAD calls its kids Dreamers and it teams them up with “consistent, caring adults”. They’re called Navigators.
Navigators and Dreamers create “deep, high-trust relationships” with each other, through classroom support and in a whole range of adventure, cultural and community programmes. The Dreamers start young and over time are helped to “increase their abilities and find success for themselves throughout their educational and life journey”.
The rewards are legion and they’ve even been measured in financial terms. Sir Bill English’s ImpactLab reported in November that IHAD has created $5.8m of social value in Whangārei, with a social return of $3.60 for every dollar invested.
The cycle can be broken. In 2023, I Have a Dream celebrated 20 years of proving it.
It got greener, with more art and more nice things for pedestrians: central Auckland is coming alive.
Te Waihorotiu, the stream that once flowed with an abundance of eels down what is now the Queen St valley, has inspired the art installation in the brand-new area at the bottom of Myers Park, stretching up the hill towards Karangahape Rd.
A large and very tranquil wooden seating area is set around a puriri tree. In the underpass beneath Mayoral Drive, once dark and dangerous, Graham Tipene and others have created a soundscape of horns, flutes, birdlife and thunder, with tuna pots suspended above and neon fish twisted inside.
And chain mail. Well, not really chain mail. It’s the sea, rendered as a series of hanging, curved sheets of “bio-mesh”, coloured like sea water, waving in the breeze, made from the material invented for the armies of The Lord of the Rings.
All the cultures of this country, come together as one. Or something like that. It’s called Waimahara and it’s very beautiful.
Not so long ago, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne launched an online magazine called Reasons to be Cheerful. He calls it “a tonic for tumultuous times” and it contains good-news stories from around the world.
The site now includes the subgroup We Are Not Divided, with tales to remind us “how skilled humans are at overcoming division”, and Now Anything is Possible, which considers options for a better world in the wake of the pandemic.
Reasons to be Cheerful offers a daily dose of the feelgood, with a free newsletter.
Taylor Swift. We bow before her and she raises us up. The singer, the songs, the lyrics.
She’s got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel, the other on my heart.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban design, social issues and culture, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Much of the South Island is set to plunge below 0C tonight and tomorrow.