We need our mojo back for nature – Amelia Linzey wants New Zealand to rediscover its pioneering spirit

by Amelia Linzey, Group Chief Executive, Beca

Looking at your personal history, I can really see you are very genuinely driven by a love of nature. And I'm interested to know where that's come from.

I suspect it's inherited, in that my grandfather on my dad's side was quite an eclectic man - a chemist who worked for Crown Lynn Potteries, but amongst other things was also passionate about plants including moss identification and has a moss named after him.

My dad is an engineer by training and then moved into the school of architecture. So, he had that real desire to understand place and also the cultural dimensions of what we create in place, primarily through the built form.

And my mum’s a scientist and science teacher, her disciplines being biology and ecology. A lot of time in nature, a lot of connection to the natural environment; and I think this means the value of our environment has always been there for me.

As a result I’ve always really loved the challenge of understanding how humans place themselves in the environment and/or the relationship they have with it, and I think I’ve found myself working in a discipline that seeks to understand and work with the tensions in that relationship.

It’s not simply that I think you should protect the environment for the environment’s sake, because I fundamentally do believe this, but it is also how you frame what you protect and how you frame what you value.  It’s cultural; it is so dependent on where you’ve come from.

And in New Zealand, with Te Ao Māori, we have the added advantage of a good and distinctive voice in that conversation.

Australia, where I was born, at the time didn’t really have that voice heard. But you still had that huge legacy of a place that had had been shaped by, and had shaped, culture for so long. Reflecting on that, this is something that’s always really excited me. And I think that’s why I found a natural home in a place like Beca, where it is about both the infrastructure and how humans work with, on and within places to make them, create them and occupy them, to establish communities.

What are we doing right in New Zealand when it comes to climate change and nature?

When you work at a place like Beca, you are used to bringing change to the community and environment.

I feel like as a nation we have had periods of leadership and perhaps pioneer spirit where we have been fairly courageous or adventurous about how we drove our environmental thinking. From a conservation point of view – while we have big challenges as a small island country - we have been proactive about what we need to do to make conservation work in this country. For example, we didn’t just look at preservation and protection of our fauna as the focus, we took another step of active intervention to achieve our preservation goals with active breeding, island management and similar, for species such as the tākahe and black robin. In other areas, like our resource management system, we pioneered approaches of integrating land use and resource development with our environmental goals.

I think this shows an energy and problem solving focus to the outcomes we were looking for. While not unique, at the time a number of these initiatives were relatively revolutionary. So historically I think we've been solutions-focused and we've tried to drive a lot of that change. I think we've done similar things in some of the climate thinking early on, in terms of how we respond to this, how we set targets and what we expect of each other.

But I think more recently, we've lost some of our mojo in terms of how we set vision and look to innovate our way towards that vision.
We’re not thinking about the scale of the chronic risk of natural and climate challenges and the inevitable change that we're seeing, versus the near term economic or political challenges, and as a result we are ‘setting these aside’ focusing on more immediate issues.

So what aren't we doing at the moment? We're setting a lot of action aside because we’re saying we “first” need to address the other challenges like cost of living, and nature will have to wait. Instead of seeing those things as interconnected and acknowledging that nature is in rapid decline and can’t wait.

How do we manage both things? I mean you’re pointing out that the climate and nature crisis is going to hurt people financially but how do we get people who are disadvantaged and are more worried about day-to-day survival, into a position where they have the ability to say I need my voice to be heard on this too.

I think some of it is making that linkage and information, so people can see that these things are actually connected.  Change to address inequality should include change to address the inequity in the way we have treated the environment as a third and fourth class citizen.

I think that it's trying to turn around the way we look at the problem or to broaden the way we look at the problem and realise that certain elements need to be addressed in parallel.

It's really difficult to think about how you do that in a way that doesn't sound dismissive of people's near term challenges, however, those who are worrying about their existential wellbeing day-to-day are probably not the big carbon emitters in our society anyway. So it's a little bit of being responsible for your own contribution and being live to the fact that your contribution is proportional, usually, to your economic conditions.

You went to the Building Smarter meeting in Queenstown, and it seemed to be tackling the question how do we combat the fear of change that people have?

I've been fascinated by this for a long time. I've got this theory about change, that when people are standing far away from the change, it looks ‘doable’, even really exciting. And then as it gets closer, it can just look overwhelming.  And then once it's behind you, people actually forget about it as change and it instantly becomes ‘how it has always been’.

All of us imagine our future lives are largely static and therefore change can be seen as a threat to that. This is even when we think about the change we have already seen, (e.g. the loss of flora and fauna) over our lifetimes.

So, there are two things I think we need to focus on to overcome the fear of change. One, is how we help each other to see that while people like the concept of ‘constant’ for certainty, that condition is never true.  And second, in the context of our environment, that if we do nothing now (e.g. don’t change), change will happen to us and it will be catastrophic (the danger is inherent in the ‘safer’ status quo).

And so how do we focus people's minds to the scale of change that we've baked into our systems now, and then how do we evaluate projects for change against that and look for ways to intervene and be courageous to make that change to get the outcomes we want? 

The truth is we don’t get a thriving economy without a thriving community, and we don’t have a thriving community without a thriving environment. We need to fix the fundamentals of this relationship, or we will just be chasing our tails. We need to focus on the environment and future we want (the outcomes we are working towards). We then need to actively consider and embrace the change we need to achieve that.

Toitū te marae o Tane Mahuta, toitū te marae o Tangaroa, toitū te tangata.

If the land is well and the sea is well, the people will thrive.