On the 9th of November, Nga Ara Whetu held its inaugural eco-film festival, screening works which ranged from short student pieces to feature length, award-winning documentaries. Afterwards, Nga Ara Whetu co-director Dr Maria Armoudian hosted a panel discussion with independent documentary-maker and University of Auckland Professor Dr Annie Goldson, artist and senior lecturer Dr Mark Harvey, and the executive producer of Milked Suzie Amis Cameron.
Transcript:
Suzy Amis Cameron: I actually got involved with the film at the very, very end. I was not at the ground level of creating this film. However, I totally would have jumped in with both feet, actually, my whole torso probably. Amy reached out to interview me, and she came out to the farm and we walked around, and she wanted to know how we transitioned out of dairy. So we bought the farm in the Wairarapa in 2011, it actually had two dairies on it. One of them was the most successful dairy in the Wairarapa. In 2012, we watched a documentary called Forks Over Knives, and overnight went plant-based.
SAC: Then we looked at each other and said, oh, so our dream of having this beautiful organic dairy operation in New Zealand doesn’t really fit anymore, and we shut the dairies down. It was really challenging. There still are times when it’s really challenging, especially when we have massive rains. But we have successfully transitioned over to an organic veggie operation.
Maria Armoudian: Are we coming to your house for dinner?
SAC: Come on. We are the largest organic veggie operation in New Zealand currently, which is really exciting. But we were fortunate to be able to experiment. We did grow hemp. We’re talking about getting back into it, but when Amy asked me to be involved, I actually took a very long pause, wondering about, you know, did it make sense to go up against Fonterra? I also have a thing about documentaries that the majority of documentaries make you just want to go jump off a bridge. The main reason that I really took to Milked was the fact that there are actually solutions in the end. So, that’s how I got involved.
MA: It’s interesting. You mentioned Forks Over Knives being the shift because it was a documentary, so maybe can you speak to how a documentary can make a difference because you’ve also been involved in others.
SAC: I have yeah. So I’ve started a new company called Inside Out and we have many different verticals. So we have food, we have fashion, we have education, we have media and we have wellness.
MA: Will you join the board of Ngā Ara Whetū?
SAC: We can talk. But we also have relationships with MIT and Texas Tech and Georgia Tech. So everything that we do is backed by cutting-edge science. So the media arm, it really was an opportunity. The first film that I executive produced was Game Changers, and then Amy asked me about Milked and then I ended up putting my name forward on a docu-series out of Italy called JUNK about fast fashion and how horrific that is on our environment. So they all address environmental issues. I was just in London, premiering a film called Let Them Be Naked, which is about the chemicals in our clothes.
SAC: So Inside Out is about what you put on your body, what you put in your body, what you surround yourself with in your home, and then what happens in the larger community that we call our beautiful wild planet? Just in terms of messages from documentaries, I do think that it’s an unbelievably powerful way of storytelling. You can read a book, you can even go to conferences and those kinds of things. But there’s something about seeing the information firsthand, hearing the information and seeing the information that is unbelievably powerful, and I believe in storytelling.
MA: That’s a perfect segue way for Mark Harvey, actually, because given your work into visuals and your desire for seeing indigenous aspirations, how do you see this fitting within that?
Mark Harvey: Kia ora koutou. So we whakapapa to Taranaki and also the southwest of the North Island, so it’s a really good question. I just want to add that at our house, my partner is a serious permaculture person and so we get told to eat less meat. But it’s wonderful to see your mana, your gardens there, and I bet some of us have eaten some of the vegetables from your plantations so, kia ora. Going back to your question, one of the projects I’ve been involved with was a National Science Challenge-funded project, called Mobilising for Action, under Ngā Rākau Taketake. The focus was forest pathogens, kauri dieback, myrtle rust, and we commissioned and curated and collaborated with producing five documentaries in that project.
MH: And they were all made by Māori hapū community members or iwi hapū members in the areas we were focusing on. So for me, while I’m an artist. For me, it’s whatever medium is appropriate for that context in order to address the kinds of issues, and I’m very interested in conservation, social justice. I do a lot of forest conservation as well, my partner does the veggie gardens, and she tells me to stay away from them. So I do the forest where we live. Documentary making is an essential thing sometimes, when you want to get people to understand and learn and listen and know what’s going on.
MH: We were quite strategic in how we did our documentary-making. We started with one project where myrtle rust is basically destroying most of the ramarama, Myrtaceae trees, shrubs on the East coast, Raukūmara forest area. Graeme Atkins, who is a conservation expert who’s been trying to do a lot of stuff to see what can be done to help try and address it in some ways and find solutions, and I know it’s a very difficult one to find solutions with. But what we did with that documentary is that we were able to take it to policymakers at the time, and go, hey look, this is the story. No one’s giving them any funding for this, they’ve only got one forest ranger in the whole area, I don’t know how big that is. It’s giant.
MH: Whereas Rangitoto has four forest rangers. It’s a mainly Maori community, all that kind of stuff, so inequality came into it, and the politics of privilege. From it they managed to get some more funding. So we used that documentary, bringing a whole lot of other stuff where communities were showing what they were doing as good examples, positive examples of people. Because when you talk about forest pathogens, biodiversity loss, climate change, all these sorts of things, as you say, it can be really heavy stuff, and in working in Māori spaces, if we bring people together, we look at our togetherness and how we can address things together, then we can help to inspire, especially young folks.
MA: Were you able to affect change? You said you mentioned policy changes,
MH: Well I argue we did, yeah. We believe we did. We got a nice letter from the Minister of Conservation at the time, and then, what do you know, there was a whole lot of money that went to the Raukūmara. It would have been that and other factors, but there are many tools in the box. I think just in terms of communicating, getting stuff out there, getting people aware of things, that’s fundamental.
MA: Next time we’ll screen one of those.
MH: Oh sure. Yeah, absolutely. They’ve been to film festivals and things.
MA: Excellent. Professor Goldson, I know you also look at the history of documentary.
Annie Goldson: Well that’s right. I had the pleasure of opening this event today with some great student works, because I do run a course called Documentary and Social Change. Hands up who’s done it, I see a few people. It’s also a history of documentary, which I think is the genre that’s been most associated with social change, not just climate change. I kind of divide the class up into Marxists and feminists, environmentalists, anti-racists, and they choose someone to interview and develop a short documentary. So I had the pleasure of teaching them that.
AG: But I also go through a history of political documentaries, starting with Man with a Movie Camera. A great Soviet film. But my position around documentary is that any social movement has its great anthems, its great music. But I think increasingly they have their great documentaries, but this is a relatively new phase, in so far as the technology has only become more accessible relatively recently. I think The Silent Spring was made, the Rachel Carson book, a very influential book that was made into a film, but probably a BBC Panorama that not many people saw. By contrast, today you see streaming has upped the visibility of documentary hugely, and Netflix is another beast that needs analysis.
AG: But certainly, it has brought films like Chasing Coral and Virunga and all sorts of documentaries about climate change to a broad public, and proven what I’ve said for years, which is that people really like documentary, if they can get to see it, which has always been the difficult issue, really. Certainly as a maker I’m probably known more for human rights documentaries, but actually, as we saw from The Grab and even from Milked, I think there’s so much intertwining of human rights issues along with environmental issues, because it really is the most vulnerable communities that are hit harder, whether it’s through food security or just vulnerability to weather events and so forth.
MA: So why don’t we open it up and see if there’s some questions coming from you guys.
Audience Member 1: Thank you very much. This is wonderful, it’s a great event. Thank you Maria, and all the organizers, thank you very much for the time you’ve put into it. I had a question about the philosophy of the Inside Out. You mentioned having this Inside Out as your theory for multiple branches of activity. I’m particularly interested in what you mean by Inside Out education.
SAC: So it’s anything, what you decide to put in your body, what you put on your body. That can be your clothes. That can be lotion, shampoo, conditioner, toner or whatever it might be, what you put in your surroundings, in your home, your carpet or your curtains. The majority of furniture and curtains and sheets and things like that have fire retardant in them. Our homes are actually really toxic. The things that we put on our body, our clothes are full of these PFAs, forever chemicals, the dyes that people use. The conditioners, the cleaning products. What you wash your clothes in, they all have implications on our health and on the health of our planet. So it’s what we put in our bodies, what we put on our bodies, how they affect us and how they affect the health of the planet. Does that make sense?
Audience Member 1: Yes, it makes perfect sense. So it’s basically somatic, it’s ontological and somatic rather than contextual or political, although it has contextual and political implications at every juncture.
SAC: Yeah it absolutely does, and it’s also education. It’s educating people as to why you would make a change, why you would decide to eat plant-based, why you would decide to wear natural fibers, why you would decide to put natural fibers, to use different carpeting or curtains and things like that. Why you would decide to put a different kind of lotion on. It’s educating the people so they can make different changes, which will ultimately drive industry.
Audience Member 1: Where is education?
SAC: Well, education runs across it. Number one, using media to educate people. I also started a school in California called MUSE School. We start at two years old and go all the way to 18 years old, and it’s an environmental school. It’s passion and interest-based learning. We are currently looking to roll out MUSE Schools around the world. We have a partnership with MIT that has created a device to teach Stem through experiential learning. So it’s not only traditional, it’s not a traditional school at all, but it’s around education and schooling.
SAC: It’s also using media and any other content that we might be creating to educate people as to all of these issues in the world, and why you would want to change what you’re doing every day. Jane Goodall talked about changing small things. I wrote a book called OMD, which is about one meal a day, changing one of your meals a day to a plant-based meal. If any of you all in the audience, if you decided to change one of your meals to a plant-based meal for one year, you would save 737,000l of water and the carbon equivalent of driving from the tip of the South Island to the tip of the North Island three and a half times. Just making that one little change would have a huge impact.
MA: Sounds like, Mark, you wanted to add to that?
MH: I think I do one meal a day plant-based. I was just thinking about this and the system thing. I’ve just come out of a whole lot of Māori economics conferences and things where we’re thinking about bigger issues here. I think what’s really exciting in this documentary that you’re in, and your shorts, is that they offer a potential to arrest the colonial capitalist system. I think we’re going to keep seeing Fonterras and all those kinds of things, people that put forever chemicals in our clothes. We’ll keep seeing that as long as we have the same systems. Thinking from a Te Ao Māori perspective, everything is interconnected. Whatever you put in, is what you get out and that’s probably obvious to a lot of you.
MH: I was thinking about this idea of a mana economy and maybe it’s just pie in the sky, but there’s a nice book that’s just come out, The Economic Possibilities of Decolonisation. Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman have written it, and they talk about how prior to colonisation in this country, mana was a big thing. Where you get surplus, excess capital was given away and given as a mana-enhancing thing. Everything’s mana was crucial. So just a thought there around thinking about Inside Outside, and how documentaries like this stuff have an important role towards maybe helping to get some mind shifts in that way. I’m just an idealist.
MA: Speaking of media, the way that education is constructed today is there’s this whole kind of colonisation of consciousness, being forced into that business world, that profit-making world, as if that’s the value. I think these ideas here could decolonise consciousness.
MH: Just really quickly, we’ve been doing school programmes with our research project using our documentaries as part of that education. That’s been really helpful. So that’s one way to use this stuff. Sometimes it will just go to those who know it and that’s the risk. You know, our own little bubble, but schools, definitely in the current system, we can get to primary schools, sometimes high schools. We have the challenge about the government’s curriculum restructuring going on. But let’s not give up.
Audience Member 2: Thank you to all of you and the presentations in both the films and in the discussion. The question I wanted to pose is, I’m a big fan of education, education’s been my career, I think the people should have more information and more understanding about what’s going on around them, Inside and Out, and documentary tends to work on around the kind of revelatory exploration, like here’s the secret, here’s the real story, here’s the behind the scenes thing. But we have a lot of examples recently, this week and lots of previous weeks, people know stuff, but they don’t give a shit.
Audience Member 2: They’re perfectly willing to take all that information and manipulate it in certain ways and then go do something else entirely. And if you have the U.S, EU, New Zealand in the kind of agricultural markets that we’re talking about, most of those markets are heavily government subsidised in different ways. The real policy issue is getting the governments to reallocate subsidies to other kinds of agricultural industries and projects and whatnot. How do you get the education part and the policy part together in a meaningful way?
Annie Goldson: If I can jump in, having watched Milked a few times. It does seem almost like there could be a market solution if this non-animal milk starts to compete, capitalism does understand markets, so it could be some sort of solution I would hope. That might be one kind of redress to that protectionism of farmers, as you see. But you also mentioned what I think a lot about, which is information overload, how do you cut through and I think it’s always a burden put on documentaries. You’ve got to change the world sort of thing and some documentaries are more agitprop, make you change things. Others are about shining a light on the important issues, letting people decide.
AG: But I also think, having looked at the election, obviously in the US, where people did seem to vote against their own interests and I think probably have, this is sort of going back into the academic legal weeds, but I just bought it for the university library. There’s a book called Disaster Nationalism, which is about the rise of nationalist hatred of the other, be it migrants or Jews or Muslims, etc. You can’t shake your fist or shoot climate change or corporations, really. It’s much easier to take that fear and anger and turn it against these things that aren’t really disasters. There are plenty of real disasters happening, but rather than focusing on those real disasters, there’s this creation, be it trans communities or just these communities that are just attempting to articulate certain things. So it’s an interesting book, it’s there in the library online for those who can access the university library at least. But I think that pertains to what you were talking about. It’s not just providing people with information. It’s also the broader socio-political context, and I think climate change is feeding into this fear.
AG: I think also Covid did it. You can’t shoot Covid either, so it’s sort of like, how do we deal with this rise of fear and stop it, as it did with the Nazis being projected onto a cultural other in such destructive ways. So, I certainly don’t have an answer.
Mark Harvey: Yeah, that’s a good answer though. A lovely thing in Milked was hearing from the farmer who was telling his story. I was very touched by that. I come from a family of farmers, except none of us are farmers anymore. We’re all urban now. I have cousins at Parihaka who are trying to re-engage in that way in Taranaki. We were talking about change, there’s an artist down south called Gaby Montejo in Ōtautahi Christchurch. He did a project with a physics room where he had a big giant spa pool, and filled it full of milk. He got farmers and all sorts of people from different sides of the spectrum to sit and talk and listen to each other and hear each other’s stories. That was really quite powerful.
MH: I think that’s what’s missing so often at the moment is us hearing each other’s stories and actually talking to each other. We’re in these little social media vacuums, and I think we can get more understanding happening by having conversations. In a marae, everyone can talk, and different perspectives are really important. There’s time to work stuff through. For me, that has a heavy imprint on me in how I idealise how we can try and work stuff out with others. It’s not always possible, but I think there’s something in that, rather than top-down information.
MH: Because I might be wrong, but often why people voted for the government we’ve got now, a lot of people felt isolated. They felt like they weren’t being listened to. We hear that all the time why nationalism starts, turning people into victims who might seem other, often because there isn’t the conversation and the empathy going on in my view. We try to do that with our school programs and that works really well. But it’s just primary schools.
Maria Armoudian: I think we have time for one more question, we’ve got a question up here.
Audience Member 3: This is a question about the transition from dairy to vegetables and plants. Were there any troubles and what was the process?
Suzy Amis Cameron: Oh, goodness. Yes, it was very challenging. Our first crop of hemp was amazing. It was taller than I am. Then we had to try to harvest it. Hemp is a very, very difficult crop to harvest. I think we broke three of our harvesters because it’s so strong. So we’re like hemp, this is great. We’re going to grow some more. So we tried something called a no-tilled direct drill. So we weren’t plowing up the field and we planted more hemp, and the slugs came out and they really, really liked it a lot. So we’re like, okay, maybe we’ll just not do hemp for a while. We started growing veggies, mainly brassicas. Cauliflower, broccoli, kale, cabbage, things like that, and there have been two years where we literally got so much rain that our crops were completely submerged.
SAC: So there are a lot of challenges. We now plant a little higher up on the farm, but I think to your question also, and just looking at the precision fermentation, which will ultimately make the cow mostly obsolete, and if the farmers don’t find something to transition to, I think that there are so many, you know, oats. I think that there are a lot of different alternatives. Watermelons, pumpkins, they talk about pumpkins in Milked, but it’s going to be really important for farmers to start to think about what can they transition to. Will it be as lucrative or more lucrative than growing cows to make milk?
SAC: Because if they don’t find something to transition to, and you’re way too young to get this. But there was a company called Kodak, and Kodak used film. When the whole world of filmmaking and taking photos, when they all went digital, Kodak planted their feet and said, no, we’re going to stick with film because film will always be there and film is going to be the most important. And Kodak basically went bankrupt. So if farmers don’t find something to transition to besides beef and dairy, they’re going to end up like Kodak, and they’re going to end up with their pockets inside out and the film talks about the high suicide rate for dairy farmers because it’s a really difficult business to be in.
SAC: And the big dairy companies like Fonterra ultimately put them in debt and there’s no way for them to get out of it. So as challenging as it is to find things to grow, it’s definitely possible. It’s what Jane Goodall said. It’s turning the impossible into something possible.
Annie Goldson: If I could add something, I also think about the economics of climate change, apparently it cost $16.4 billion, Cyclone Gabrielle. And that’s only thus far. If you think of the costs, one thing that I feel, certainly the decision-makers and policy-makers must be thinking about is really the costs to the country of insurance rates increasing, the destruction of arable land, buying all those houses out, just the sheer cost of infrastructure. You would think they’d start to say, well, we only make this much from dairy, but we’re having to pay this much to try and fix the country up. But they don’t seem to think like that.
AG: If you look at the disasters, we’ve seen floods in Spain, we’ve seen the cyclones in the US and then there’s now forest fires in California. We’ve become so inured to it, every week there’s another disaster. But the sheer cost of it just makes me wonder why governments are dragging their feet so much, whether the lobbyists are that powerful
Maria Armoudian: Final word, Mark,
Mark Harvey: The government just got rid of its Just Transitions Unit, the previous government set up a Just Transition Unit to help people to transition from things like mining and things like that. I think it includes dairy. Government intervention to support it. Going back to what you mentioned around having to plant your crops uphill. It’s interesting because I watch my partner planting a lot of stuff, and we’ve been able to live off most of our vegetables, but mainly just used to eat from that a lot of the time. But we have to adapt to where we are.
MH: So every local context is going to be really different. It’s listening to the ecology, the water, that’s a Maori thing too, but our European ancestors did that. Whereas our monocultural systems prevent that and the corporate systems prevent that. So just because it is plant based, or it’s got some nice crops. It doesn’t mean it’s always right. It’s how it’s done and how it’s engaging with the ecology, I would argue.
The opinions expressed in this podcast reflect the speaker’s views, and are not necessarily the views of The Big Q or Ngā Ara Whetū.
