I am noticing we are talking about the weather a lot at present, and not entirely because we’re all savouring the last of the summer wine and the lazy summer beach season.
The Hauraki Gulf’s shuttling kaleidoscope of atmospherics, everything from burnished silver and rose golds to deepest tropical blue, is indeed mesmerising.What’s not to like about children, tanned and sun-bleached, eeling in bottle-glass waves, long sunsets over the gulf’s myriad of landforms, the exquisiteness of Motukorea / Browns Island almost unchanged since Auckland’s founding father John Logan Campbell lived there in the 1840s. Devonport’s North Head where, more recently, some of us flung ourselves into the water in front of American submarines and demanded we keep ourselves nuclear free. Ungrateful as we were.
Now we have to reconcile all this with the world as it has become in the last three months, in the face of the unsayable realisation that we may have passed ‘peak humanity’ and that there may be no way back.
It’s as if we are not talking about it because we are holding our breath.
Which is an allowable intellectual assessment but unworkable in the long term. It was Einstein who said that whatever weapons we waged the Third World War with, the fourth would be fought with bows and arrows.
“Cut and run,” seemed to be the answer, The Guardian’s lead story said this week, answering its own question about how former allies will adjust to the US’s radically altered relationship with the world and the unimaginable wrecking ball that’s hitting its own social and creative fabric just as viciously as the sealing off of trade and America’s deterrent alliances of a century.
It’s good news that some of us are finally responding. In the UK, American academics are queuing for jobs. Struggling German factories are being repurposed for defence. The Netherlands has pledged a third annual budget of over €2 billion for military support in Ukraine, including $540 million for drones. The Dutch government is also in favour of setting up a tribunal devoted to the crime of aggression, which would be based in The Hague.
Canada – the world’s second largest country by land mass and steely-eyed in its rejection of a future as the 51st state of the US and handing its rich resources over to Big Brother next door – is quietly getting on with an uncharacteristic burst of flag-flying and patriotism as border crossings with its bellicose neighbour have slowed to a trickle as wealthy Canadians stay home.
The long North American alliance may be dead; the US more politically aligned to Moscow than Ottawa and, as of this week, territorial ambitions are almost the only game left in town for the US administration’s greater world presence. Wall Street is suffering, for what it’s worth. There’s book banning and not even the Smithsonian and artists are spared. Apparently that’s par for the authoritarian playbook.
With astonishing rapidity, everything is pointing to a no-longer-covert class war in which authoritarian heads of state, would-be emperors and latter-day oligarchs hold the cards and the intricacy and diversity of our global society won’t hold up, however deep the bunker.
Lawlessness is contagious. Blind faith and dystopian fiction is fashionable but blunts the options.
If you were looking, and lots of us here on the island were, it has long been obvious that the edifices of centralised government, bureaucratic empire-building and capitalism’s abdication from robust regulatory standards across the board was not sound and that sooner or later communities would find themselves having to rebuild society from the grass roots up.
For that, collaborative groups would be looking down the barrel of supply chain disruptions for almost anything from spare lawnmower parts to the anticipated structural problems of global food conglomerates (akin to the global financial crisis) including weather events and the threat of synchronised crop failure.
In the know, governments in China, Japan, Switzerland and Norway have invested in stockpiles of grain, building reserves against disaster and buffers to prevent prices from surging.
I suspect that our own once-robust manufacturing and food production sectors have been gutted by the practises of supermarket monopolies when it comes to small suppliers, and the more we consciously demand supermarkets seek out local sources and behave respectfully to local businesses, the better all round.
As certainties tumble all around us, resilience planning for community and household reserves will serve us well in a crisis.
We need to get our breath back and start making decisions for ourselves, with all that implies. ‘Might is right’ won’t be fair – and is getting alarmingly real.
• Liz Waters
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