I have often said that because I garden a lot, I have a lot of solitary thinking time. “What do you think about?” a fellow gardener asked us here this week. I hadn’t actually thought about that side of things.
We are told that gardening is soothing, good for the spirit and the soul, a welcome antidote to a world that has often felt as if it is spinning beyond our control in the past year. I have no doubt that being surrounded by plants and the cycle of the seasons, by birdsong and the beauty of endless small scenes whether it be a butterfly landing on a flower, the buzzing of bees, the unfurling of a flower bud or the discovery of a plant that I had forgotten about – all these are immediate delights in a chaotic world. Gardens anchor us to a small place in time and space.
But if you take the end product and the goals along the way out of the equation, what about all those hours spent alone in our own headspaces? Our panel of three (Mark, our gardening friend Susan and me) is hardly a conclusive study but we all came up with responses that were remarkably mundane. Mark said he largely focuses on the task at hand. He used to like listening to the radio but since Radio NZ has taken its programming off the local AM band, that is no longer an option. The FM band is too unstable when he is constantly moving. I notice Lloyd mostly listens to music. I used to do that when I was trying to block out the omnipresent noise of the petrochemical industry surrounding us back around 2011 to 2014 and listening to music certainly puts one into a very contained headspace without many external influences. But I prefer listening to the sounds of nature if I can.
My thoughts range far and wide with a constant inner monologue (and sometimes an audible monologue when I talk to myself) but I admit, it is not a particularly profound discussion with myself. At its best, I may come up with the words that had been eluding me in a piece of writing or some clarity of insight into something that had seemed murky and confused. At its worst, I replay grievances in my head – whoever said that gardening is ‘soothing’ and ‘healing’? But in the main, it can be a pretty mundane conversation with myself and I was somewhat surprised to find that, considering I spend large parts of my day in this solitary state. I think that is what Susan was angling at too, when she asked the question.
Of late, in fact since Wednesday December 9 to be precise, that inner monologue has been underpinned by constant low-grade anxiety nagging away at my inner peace. That was the day that our *friendly* petrochemical company, Todd Energy, unveiled its plans at a community meeting in Tikorangi to apply to extend the already large Mangahewa C gas well site from the existing eight wells to twenty wells, making it the largest site in the country, as far as I know. That site is close to us. It is literally on the farm across the road on our bottom boundary.
While some of the Todd Energy staff might be so naïve that they didn’t realise the devastating impact of that news on many local residents, at least some of them knew exactly what they were doing. “Let’s really give the Tikorangi residents a Christmas present this year. Ho ho ho! Hahahahaha!” my inner monologue has some unnamed Todd staff saying to themselves and even to each other.
I spent a few weeks in the garden toying with the Todd Energy Twelve Days of Christmas but I couldn’t get the words to scan to my satisfaction.
“On the twelfth day Of Christmas Todd Energy gave to us
Twelve more gas wells
Eleven more frack jobs (more like eleventy hundred more frack jobs over the next decade) ….
Five Christmas hampers (utility ones from Pak’n’Save)….
And a drilling rig they call Big Ben.”
We fought hard for better process of the gas industry in our community over a number of years – all documented under the petrochem tab you can find at the top at this page. We failed on most fronts and that battle from 2011 to 2014 almost broke me. The activities of the petrochemical companies were devastating on a daily front – it was the main reason we closed the garden in 2013 – as well as draining mentally and emotionally. When activity eased off with falling international prices and the general understanding of the impact of climate change grew, we were lulled into a false sense of relief, thinking that maybe we had seen off the worst of it. It seems not.
In my lowest moments, I imagine myself asking the young person who is the ‘Community Relations Manager’: “Do you have children? What are you going to tell them when they ask you what you did to try and counter the impacts of climate change? Are you going to be proud to say ‘Oh, I did spin and soft-soaped local residents for a fossil fuel company in the dying days of the fossil fuel industry’?”
So there we are. My inner monologue now is trying to focus on how to maintain some equanimity and peace in the face of the ravages of an unwelcome industry. I managed it in 2014 when I realised how close I was to breaking point. I can do it again. I hope. It may be time to get out the iPod and recharge it, to block out the world. Are those Bluetooth earpieces worth getting so I can dispense with the awkward cords? Do they fall out of ears readily in which case I am sure I will lose one in the garden?
What do you think about when gardening? Can you empty your mind sufficiently to turn it into a meditative exercise? Do you mentally plan great works of note? Or do most of us really just plan what we will eat, edit our mental ‘to-do list’, ponder what we have heard or seen and focus on the detail of what we are doing? All that time to think – I feel at least some of us must be mentally coming up with next great scientific theory or planning a work of literature. Or maybe not.
Footnotes:
For the easier to read version of ‘It’s very personal’ – a piece I wrote for the 2017 Frack Off Exhibition, click here.
Our Labour government only stopped NEW permits for oil and gas offshore and in areas other than Taranaki. It is still allowed – encouraged, even, by some here.
All the optimistic talk of ‘clean hydrogen’ being pushed successfully by the fossil fuel industry is unproven technology predicated on the use of gas as a *transition* energy.
Gas is only *clean* (or clean-ish) if the emissions are measured only at the end-point user. There is nothing clean or sustainable about getting that gas out of the ground, keeping it flowing and getting it to the end-point user.
What makes the Mangahewa gas field economically viable is frequent and ongoing fracking (hydraulic fracturing). The ground beneath here has been fracked repeatedly since 2007.
Three years ago, we were 
And so this road *improvement* has gone ahead, no doubt at considerable expense. In vain did we plead for rural amenity to be preserved while meeting the roading needs of petrochemical development. Make no mistake about it. The whole purpose of this super-duper rural road is to service the petrochemical industry, not the locals. Sure, some locals will see a wider, faster, heavily cambered road as “progress”. They don’t care about being able to stand on the side of the road and have a chat to a passing neighbour. I bet they don’t get out of their cars long enough to ever want to walk along the road verge. Presumably they don’t have any children who might, in the past, have biked to school. I am also guessing that they have never lost any dogs to speeding traffic. All they want to do is to get in their vehicles and plant foot, to get to their destination as fast as possible. That is how they see the modern world of progress.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 