Blog 2: by Stacey Gasson
It’s amazing how much ground you can cover over a cup of tea, especially when you’re drinking with Mark Amery. Mark and his partner Hannah, and their three children, aged from 2 to 8, are part of ‘Kakariki Street’, Paekakariki’s entry in Kapiti Coast’s Greenest Street competition. Mark is an arts critic, curator and journalist by trade.
Representing his street on Beach FM a couple of months ago, he commented that perhaps the biggest thing we could do for our environmental footprint was reduce our consumption. When I asked him to talk more about this, he laughed and claimed that he was “the most ridiculous person in the street to interview” as he is neither practically skilled or a gardener. But he’s also a thinker and a conduit (“I’m more of a spreader than a do-er”), creating the forum to bring people together, be that art or legendary local parties. Jumping straight in, I asked Mark what living sustainably meant to him. His answer set the tone for the rest of the conversation:
“Being sustainable is about living a better life in your community, a better community… it’s having a richer life. A rich life is sharing things with others, learning from them and about yourself, seeing things grow and change. Not about working to get the money to buy the gadgets”.
Community and resilience are common threads in many of the Greenest Street blogs. Mark grew up in a little commuter town north of Auckland which “…had a great natural environment but was lacking that great sense of people in a community that Paekakariki has. Paekakariki has an interesting sense of edginess and diversity”. Living in Paekakariki has been a very conscious choice for Mark and Hannah. For Mark, it’s about having more freedom and control over the way he lives: “Cities tend to be more governed around consuming and going out. A small community forces you more to create those things or share them as you’re less able to purchase them”.
In a village with more than its fair share of artists and craftspeople, creating is something Paekakariki does well. It’s also a place where making your living outside of the 9-to-5 employment model is not uncommon. Mark says,
“I often have local conversations around why we’re working more to consume more. Why is this a sign of an advanced society? We can have a satisfaction in working less and sharing more”.
For example, Kakariki Street’s Wednesday working bees have encouraged tool sharing, which Mark really enjoys: “I think that we’re culturally quite possessive, but sharing has something special for me. It’s funny – we teach our kids to share and then we grow up and lock our toys away!”
Moving onto the subject of capitalism, Mark notes that all this resource- and skill-sharing could be seen as a threat to the system and how it works. And yet, the slightly seditious undertones are only due to the exponential growth curve capitalism has taken in recent years. “Our grandparents’ lives were so much more sustainable, so [these ideas] are actually not that radical or long ago (even in our lifetime, for some of us). Downtown, big, shiny buildings aren’t the glamorous symbols they once were given that we’ve just left a decade that started with the destruction of the Twin Towers and ended with financial collapse”.
Following Mark’s work in a distracted kind of way, I’ve noticed that via the public art programme he’s currently co-curating and organising, Letting Space, he’s working with several artists who comment on our society and economic systems. When I asked him about the parallel between his work and life, he admitted that it wasn’t something he had thought a lot about until recently. Thinking about it increasingly however, “I have a strong feeling that we’re moving into a different era for art in which artists are returning to a more active part of society with a genuine social and political care for the world, not just creating consumables for sale. Thinking about trends in art over the last decade and into the future I’m excited that artists are pushing ideas in a way that allow the public to participate more.”
An interesting current example is an artist who is setting up a real estate showroom for an apartment complex on Mars, complete with an actor as real estate agent. “It sounds comical but actually explores how we market and think about our future and dreams. Interactions between the public and the agent ask us how we want to be living. How do we see the future? And who has responsibility for shaping how we see the future?”
Following on from this idea of dreams and shaping our futures, I ask Mark what he wants for his children. He’s initially uncertain beyond the desire we all have for our children to be happy, then he says, “Living here marks out some of the things I want for my children. Coming through such a time of accelerated change – the sense of protest in the 80s, spinning around for the last 20 years and only just starting to look forward again (or that’s how it feels to me at 42) – I’m now thinking about what I want for my children. I’m blessed to have a partner like Hannah who is so grounded in the earth. I didn’t grow up that way”.
Stacey Gasson is the Sustainable Communities Coordinator with Kapiti Coast District Council and one of the organisers of the competition. This blog is part of series profiling participating households and their projects.
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Kapiti Coast's Greenest Street: Living a Richer Life, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating Tags: Community, green design, green streets
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