Conservation Comment: Change of seasons brings us plenty to celebrate in our city

KIREI SAKURA: A weeping cherry tree cascades over a roof in Kyoto.

Following a recent event management workshop, I began pondering the purpose of events and their relationship to the cycles of nature.

Asked to suggest ideas for a pop-up event in Whanganui (a one-day, sole-site, one-off happening), it could not escape my attention that the history and tradition of events are intrinsically rooted in celebrations of seasonal shift, times of culmination, of harvest and abundance.

Alternatively, events accompany ceremonial occasions, whether religious, commemorative or calendar-based. Rarely did a meaningful event simply pop up, out of nowhere, for no reason.

The logical questions followed: What do we have to celebrate in Whanganui? What are the harvests and when are the times of abundance?

There is a dark and a light side to my answer.

From the dark, the prospect of a future with a rapidly changing climate is not one to celebrate.

Where formerly transitional times of spring and autumn are but fleeting interstices between the deluge of winter and drought of summer; where "weather events" are hardly the kind of events we want to be managing.

A village's prosperity was once signalled by the success or failure of a crop. Yet, in an industrialised farming and agricultural society, the rural land surrounding us no longer informs our timelines. The loss of traditional seasonal food sources, whether inanga (whitebait), tuna (eel), or snapper - species once abundant, now over-fished or habitats destroyed - suggest there's not much to party about.

In other times, equinoxes and solstices were highlights on the social calendar - here they come and go with little fanfare; even eclipses, formerly cosmic portents of doom, pass beneath a cloak of invisibility ...

Download digital-age disconnection from nature - almost complete.

But on the light side, this is an opportune time to consider how we connect with nature and its calibrations - and question how we can improve.

In Japan, the blossom festival Hanami ("flower viewing") is a millennium-old celebration of ephemerality - which, in turn, provides the next season's wine. Nature dictates the time and place of the festival, and generously provides the plonk. Is this not event management at its finest?

Back in Whanganui the kowhai is in full bloom, much to the delight of the tui; the pohutukawa will soon erupt in a fiery blaze across the city; the tempestuous awa will shed her muddied boots and don a turquoise gown ... and in small but significant ways, people seek reconnection with seasons again, be it by simply selecting produce at the River Traders' Market, anticipating the first asparagus shoots, brewing cider from Monty's Surprise, or restoring a waterway so the tuna can migrate and the inanga return.

In this town deemed to be in decline, will creating a one-off pop-up event bring prosperity? Or does the answer to its fortune await our attuning to its nature and asking: Where is the potential abundance for us to celebrate?

-Helen Marie O'Connell is an independent project co-ordinator living in Whanganui.