With my hands in the soil, I surveyed the destruction. It was a Saturday morning, early winter, and I’d stumbled down to an A Rocha Aotearoa NZ event, to work on a section of creek damaged by the January 2023 Auckland floods. We moved branches that had snarled on the ground, shifted by the force of the floodwaters. I made conversation with the others in the group: some I knew from Church (and one was my grandmother) but most were strangers.

After an hour or two of weeding and branch removing, it was time to plant. I followed instructions, being generally ignorant of the ways of plants. Sedges go right by the edge of the creek. Spread their roots out to bind the soil. Then little trees, further in; delicate as I shook them out of their plastic pottles.

I spotted shreds of litter on the bank: a chocolate bar wrapper, half a plastic cup. It’s good, I guess, that some of these single-use plastic items are slowly being banned, with a new wave of regulations begun on 1 July this year, but the millions we’ve produced already will persist:
in landfills, waterways and oceans. A sad thought.

But I’m trying to linger with the trees, or perhaps just the idea of the trees. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the environment and climate change in the abstract. I’ve written three or four articles about plastics and composting and climate change just in the last month. It’s so easy to think about the problem, to feel vaguely guilty that my favourite
snack (salted seaweed) comes wrapped in four layers of plastic.

I know that this morning of placing my hands in the soil, looking closely at just one place that is changed by all the people living around it, is not a solution by itself. At most I can say — that a deeply broken and twisted relationship to the land has been improved, and for now. But something did change here. There are some plants making their home in the soil, becoming a habitat for the tūī I glimpsed earlier this week. Today, more than yesterday, they
sing their mirthful song in the grey winter twilight.

Planting trees is something obvious, something practical, and it makes a nice change from my weekdays before a screen. Like most people, I find the little picture more approachable than the big. When I try to think at scale, I find myself surrendering to my helplessness, to the enormity of the problems we face — even though I know how unhelpful it is to surrender.

So we try not to surrender. We do small things, and we keep at them. It takes eight people a morning to clear just one section of stream bank — one of the many bodies of water that find their way through New Zealand’s biggest city — and this morning’s planting will continue to need tending. Magnify that by the natural and human disasters on seven continents, for eight billion people. Remember that there is work ahead. Remember that change comes when people do that work together. Plant the tree anyway. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 284 August 2023: 26