Like many twenty-something year olds, still glowing with hope, I came out of my bachelor’s degree all bright eyed and bushy tailed, with dreams and ideas about how I was going to save the world. 

Or a bit of it, anyway. 

The natural environment had always held a pretty hefty residence in my heart. I’d grown up tramping which had resulted in a feeling of kinship with, and kaitiakitanga over, the earth, its flora and fauna. So it followed that I chose to study Geography and Environmental Science.

In fact, my hopes and dreams were so Millennial-grand that I decided I needed at least a master’s in order to get where I needed to be. I was positively dripping with inspiration when it came to my master’s thesis. But by the end of it, I was depressed and despondent with no energy left to fight the big fight. 

So what went wrong? 

Well, for a start my thesis topic ended up being The Environmental Ethics of the Corporatization of Agriculture through Genetic Engineering (GE). A gnarly one, right? If only I’d known how all those hours reading about multi-national corporations and synthetic pesticides would chip away at my soul. 

When I started, like many New Zealanders, I was anti-GE without really knowing much about it. Throughout the research process, I had to put aside my biases and approach everything objectively, with the eyes of a scientist. This was easier said than done but I think I did a reasonable job.

Regardless, what I read (and I read a lot – my thesis was basically a giant literature review with a few interviews thrown in for good measure) about the environmental impacts of large monocrops, large farms in general, the corporate control of agriculture and genetic engineering still gave me the willies. In fact, by the time I’d finished, I was so disheartened by the scale of the problem that I had to take myself off for a month-long walk along the Camino de Santiago to restore my faith in humanity. 

[You might be thinking, ‘but this isn’t relevant to us here in New Zealand, we’re GE-free.’ Right, we’re GE-free for now, but there are many agricultural researchers here carrying out GE trials, who would love the country to be adopting the technology – and the problems I’m talking about are so much more than just GE.]

When I returned, I half-heartedly applied for environmental jobs but most of the positions I was qualified for were corporate and I found myself subconsciously botching the interviews. My gut knew better than my brain and, it seemed, was protecting me from climbing a slippery ladder of heels and lipstick that would have seen my fresh air drinking, tramper’s heart shrivel and choke as I was forced to compromise and swallow my values.

But I’m not going to get too cynical here. This is a story of hope. At least I hope it is. 

While I came away from the experience knowing what I didn’t want, I also came away with a crystal clear picture of what agriculture needed to look like in order to feed the masses while working with the natural environment instead of against it.

The picture was beautiful. 

Farms shrunk to sizes that could be managed sustainably using organic methods, employing locals and selling to locals.  

These small farms grew a wide variety of crops according to their climate and soil type, diversifying to reduce economic risk to the farmer while also reducing the vulnerability of individual crops, or species of livestock, to pests and diseases.

Regenerative farming practices restored the soil to its former glory, earthworms and microorganisms reigned, erosion and leaching nitrates were non-events, the nutritional value of food was increased.

Permaculture principles, companion planting, no-till and low-till farming, pollinators of all species supported and encouraged… 

The potential for a system that provided an abundance of fresh, healthy food in a way that had no negative consequences for human or environmental health was huge. And yet this picture is something we have to fight for. 

What my Master’s boiled down to was a polarising argument within which your stance would be decided for you based on whether or not you ‘believed in science’. Those who believed, would naturally be in favour of all manner of innovation, including genetic engineering and the use of synthetic chemical inputs. If you questioned the sustainability of these innovations and the potentially far reaching implications on both human and ecosystem health, you were shunned into the pseudoscience camp and given a tree to hug. 

At least that’s what it felt like. 

I wanted to be a given a tree so that I could bang my head against it. 

I wanted progress, I wanted innovation, but I also wanted sustainability, and a holistic approach to agriculture that incorporated the precautionary principle. Couldn’t we have both? Was I being too greedy? 

I’m sure there are many scientists who approach their field with more of a holistic than reductionist world view. In fact, some of them were my lecturers at university – excellent people. But by and large, the economy demands growth, growth is synonymous with progress, progress is seen to be in the form of innovation, and the very definition of innovation requires forward momentum towards new ideas, new technologies, new ways of doing things. 

But sometimes all these shiny new ideas can reflect a little too much light into your eyes and blind you from seeing that some of the traditional ways of doing things were more than adequate, maybe even better than what we’re doing now. 

Yes, we live in a capitalist society and at the end of the day everyone’s got to make a buck. But since when did it become ok for massive corporations to be controlling what we eat? When did we give that power over to them? 

That something so fundamental to our survival, our hauora, something that brings us together as humans, the only species in the world that eats socially, be laid in the hands of the 1%, whose only priority is number one and the lining of their pockets, is simply mindboggling. 

The production of our food is something that can be done in a way that works with the environment instead of against it. 

So why isn’t it? 

Money? 

Is that really the only reason? I don’t think that’s good enough. 

The choice doesn’t have to be between science and tree-hugging, or between progress and stagnation, or profit and poverty. 

We can have both. We can have a thriving economy and a healthy environment while growing our own food in a sustainable way. 

But right now, we’re doing it wrong. 

So, c’mon New Zealand. Can we please try and be clean and green for real?