By Aroha Te Pareake Mead
Is ‘Indigenous Development’ still synonymous with ‘Sustainable Development,’ asks Aroha Te Pareake Mead.
2010 is the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity. A year for every community, peoples, country, company in the world to ‘invest in nature’, but it is obvious there is no agreement on what investment in nature actually means. Indigenous peoples have historically occupied the high moral ground on national and global environment and development issues – we have been the voices for environmental integrity and advocates of sustainable development.
During this 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, it is timely to take stock of the development decisions recently made. Are we still champions of environmental integrity and sustainable development? Or has some indigenous development taken a different path?
Mäori and other indigenous peoples have consistently advocated in international negotiations a precautionary approach to development. In their report to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the National Mäori Congress (“the Congress”) presented fourteen environment and development principles for inclusion in the UNCED outcomes. Among other things these included:
• Environment, development and the survival of earth’s inhabitants are interdependent and inseparable;
• We must treat the environment as a living system;
• We have an intergenerational responsibility to pass on to our children a quality of cultural and environmental heritage that is in no worse condition than that which we received from our ancestors. Indeed, we have an imperative to do everything we can to improve the quality of heritage of our descendants yet to be born;
• The economic utilisation of the environment must not compromise traditional values, the needs of future generations or mother earth’s spiritual integrity;
Consistent with this worldview, six claimants lodged the ‘indigenous flora and fauna’ or ‘taonga Mäori’ claim with the Waitangi Tribunal (Wai 262) challenging the Crown’s assumption that it possesses the exclusive right to own, manage and commercially exploit indigenous biodiversity. The Tribunal’s Report on Wai 262 is due within the next 6-9 months, but in some ways, both the Crown and some Mäori have taken decisions that fundamentally challenge the values articulated by the Congress and Wai 262 claimants.
A case in point is the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Act passed under urgency at the end of last year, just before the climate change talks in Copenhagen. Victoria University Law Lecturer Carwyn Jones noted that while it was absolutely right that the principles of the Treaty were acknowledged in this legislation and provision made to protect the value of Treaty settlements, these ‘wins’ seem to have come at a huge cost.
“It is hard to see how enabling greater damage to the environment itself can be advancing the protection of our taonga (treasured possessions) or our kaitiakitanga (ethic of stewardship), which is so closely connected with the Treaty guarantee of tino rangatiratanga.”
Carbon emissions trading is highly controversial globally amongst indigenous peoples. Investment in carbon markets is not really investing in nature – it is using nature to offset pollution rather than forcing polluters to change to clean technologies sooner rather than later.
“Carbon trading and carbon offsets are a crime against humanity and Creation,” said Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network. “The sky is sacred. This carbon market insanity privatises the air and sells it to climate criminals so they can continue to pollute and destroy the climate and our future, rather than reducing their emissions at source.”
The former National Mäori Congress endorsed the concept that tino rangatiratanga included both self-determination for Iwi and hapü in respect of their own resources and affairs AND self-determination for Mäori collectively in respect of Mäori policy and national Mäori development. The Treaty settlement process has brought considerable gains at Iwi or Mäori level (for some Iwi). However the absence of a national Mäori pan-Iwi assembly or forum to enable sharing of information and discussions about what is best long term for Mäori heritage and sustainable development has created a void in Mäori development and set the precedent for some poorly thought through development decisions. Many of the Iwi development models being promoted are heavily dependent on resource exploitation, and whatever efforts are being made to protect nature are not visible at national and international levels.
Economic utilisation of the environment must be carried out in sustainable ways, consistent with traditional values about the integrity of life and the responsibility to future generations.
Aroha Te Pareake Mead is the, Poukairangi (Rangahau), Associate Dean Mäori Research at VUW and Chair of the IUCN Global Commission on Environmental, Economic & Social Policy (CEESP). She formerly served with the late Sir Robert Mahuta as Co-Convenors of the National Mäori Congress Foreign Policy Committee (1988-1997).
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