Book review: Mike Joy is a freshwater scientist at Victoria University Te Herenga Waka and an environmental activist renowned for irritating the dairy industry, regional councils and the occasional prime minister. But one of the less expected pleasures of this smartly written memoir is the relating of his rollicking younger years on the way to academic respectability.
You imagine his parents slumped with exhaustion over their questioning, pull-everything-apart child. Fortunately, he learnt how to put things back together and was able to internalise his father’s motto of never paying someone to do something you can do yourself.
Joy applied that handiness to his passions: sound systems, vehicles, firearms, and eventually houses and yachts – he owns a 1932 kauri ketch. A firearm incident was one of many teenage high jinks: Mike plus mates infiltrated an air force base to reach a dump containing guillotined machine guns. With enough such parts, they found, you can build one working gun.
They built a beach buggy from car parts, too, and Joy was arrested because he was driving when the enraged police officer arrived. The local council attested to the boys’ actions to repair the damage they’d caused the ground, a grass strip beside a river, but Joy says his lawyer didn’t present the letter. Joy was convicted of wilful damage. “I felt incredibly let down by the system that I had believed in,” he writes.
Similar disillusionment and a strong sense of justice permeated his later years when he became increasingly “angry at what my research showed was happening to our freshwater, and the abject failure of the systems set up purportedly to protect the environment”.
Despite Joy’s current appearance, which might be described as scruffy hippy, there was little of the substance abuse that ran through many others’ teenage years in the 1970s. He looked mainstream, including in the 80s when he channelled actor Tom Selleck with moustache and grey Velcro shoes. While at school, he funded his car with work at a bottle recycling factory and became its foreman on leaving school. Joy later drove taxis, which in the 80s involved dodging drunk drivers. He spent six surprisingly boring years in the SIS, surveilling Soviet diplomats. They took advantage of diplomatic immunity to speed dangerously, so Joy was in petrol-head heaven tailing them. He worked on farms here and in Australia, witnessing multiple livestock scrotum knifings and other instances of animal cruelty that might account for his vegetarianism. He owned a milk run, too.
Eventually, at the relatively late age of 33, Joy and life partner Alli began studies at Massey University. There was a field-assistant stint on subantarctic Campbell Island, where he was chased by sea lions, sat eye-to-eye with royal albatrosses and lolled beside elephant seals. He earned a PhD and became a lecturer, turning his fulsome energy to native fish ecology and teaching environmental science. His critics, of whom there are a few, might note that he’s a credentialled scientist, well published and known for pioneering accurate computer models fed with data gathered during years of fieldwork to predict where freshwater native fish should be present.
But often the fish are absent. Sediment fills the rocky cracks they need in stream beds, or excess nutrients from fertiliser or wastewater fuel algae that gobble the oxygen a healthy stream food web needs. As conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
Joy, who’s 65 this year, sees the death marks and tells people. Once, a Federated Farmers spokesman praised him for giving a talk: “Thanks, mate. I didn’t like a single effing thing you said, but you’ve got big cojones coming here to do this.” Then there was the time Joy gave stats on our at-risk species and lake and river pollution in the NZ Herald, leading a BBC TV interviewer to grill then-prime minister John Key about the country’s tarnished 100% pure brand. Key replied, “He’s one academic and, like lawyers, I can provide you with another one who would give you a counterview.”
At a Key campaign appearance, writes Joy, his then 82-year-old mother managed to corner him and say, “I think you know my son.” In jovial campaign mode, Key happily asked, “Oh yes, what’s his name?” When she gave it, Key’s smile disappeared as though someone had wiped an eraser over it, she said. Key scowled and said, “Oh yes, I know him. I disagree with what he says about our water.” She replied, “Well, my son has a PhD in freshwater ecology and he is an expert in the field.”
As for providing that counterview on freshwater health? “Somehow,” says Joy, “he never got around to it.”
The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir by Mike Joy (BWB, $39.99) is out now.
