New Zealand’s young climate activists are having to innovate as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to restrict large gatherings.
Before the announcement of the Covid-19 alert levels, the school climate strikers had April 3 set for a protest in Auckland. However, under Alert Level 2 restrictions, gatherings of over 100 people aren’t permitted. Now, there's action planned for next Friday.
School Strike for Climate Auckland organiser and Avondale College student Coco Lovatt said it took some work to regain momentum as the lockdown began.
“We’ve had to reshape the way that we do things - turning it from mass mobilisation to behind-the-scenes lobbying,” she said.
“We are going to be asking the children of New Zealand and anyone else who wants to protest for climate action to, instead of taking to the streets, take to the end of the driveway and draw what they want their future to look like.
“The focus for this [strike] is a green response and seeing green, sustainable stimulus projects rather than more roads.”
She said people would then be encouraged to post their drawings online.
Ms Lovatt said the group was also trying to confirm an online question-and-answer session with Finance Minister Grant Robertson after next Thursday’s Budget announcement.
She said advocating for the climate was more important than ever following the pandemic as the country looked to restart its economy. Alongside strike partners 4 Tha Kulture (4TK), an indigenous environmentalist group from South Auckland, the group called for a “Covid green response” in an online petition to the Government.
Ms Lovatt said the petition was started out of “a gut feeling that maybe it won’t go the way we want it to go".
“It's a little bit scary because it's like, we can only do so much and now it’s really down to our leaders.”
But she said organising and hosting things online came with its own challenges.
Aorere College student and 4TK co-founder Aigagalefili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said the open letter focused on “the importance of listening to indigenous voices” when responding to the pandemic in a ‘green’ way.
“There’s a large disconnect between climate change and indigenous perspectives,” Ms Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said.
She said the group would be focusing on what affected their communities if the session with Grant Robertson goes ahead.
“The spectrum varies so largely. What’ll happen in our communities … things that are specific to us.”
Ms Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said part of their work was also about making information about the climate accessible to their communities, such as through spoken word and open mics.
She said she knew the reality of not being able to access devices or reliable internet coming from a low decile school.
Ms Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said it could make participating and organising action challenging, but their “true partnership” with School Strike for Climate group was producing meaningful results.
“They’ve really done a lot of work to learn [about Indigenous perspectives]. It’s different from the activism they used to have.”
The issue of access to technology was also something Ms Lovatt recognised. She said ideas for a video delivering non-partisan climate education via Home Learning TV were being floated.
“Although we can’t talk about our political agenda, it's a chance to bring climate change to the conversation and maybe educate those who don't have devices and can't participate in our strike.”
Overseas, climate strikers had also been taking things online, with activist Greta Thunberg, the founder of the school strikes, encouraging people to continue strike action digitally.
The Kiwi climate strikers won’t be the first in the country to attempt collective action under Covid-19 restrictions either.
Last month, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa protested online out of concern Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza may keep medical equipment out in the instance of a Covid-19 outbreak .
National chair and political activist John Minto said the group originally planned to protest in front of Parliament to ask the Government to take action.
They shifted to a Zoom call as lockdown restrictions were put in place because they felt it was “still important to speak out”.
“It doesn’t have to be that way. People in Gaza are crying out for equipment,” he said.
Mr Minto said going online had enhanced the strike as they were able to hear directly from health care professionals in Gaza. He said this provided a “really immediate” human face to what was happening in the region, and the group was looking at how it could continue it during future protests.
“Without the pandemic, we wouldn’t be talking to these people normally.”
Mr Minto said getting to grips with the technology was a challenge as the group had to figure out how to get over 100 people on a call at once from New Zealand and Gaza.
Dr Lara Greaves, a lecturer at the University of Auckland specialising in political attitudes and behaviour, said moving action online may lower the threshold for people to consider taking part in a cause, at least at first.
“People who protest will carry out collective action when there's something they're dissatisfied with, but also when there's not necessarily a mechanism in the system itself to help them achieve that change or maybe they don’t know about it,” she said.
“For them to get to that point where they have some kind of protest or collective action that gets attention and causes some kind of change, that’s still just as difficult, if not more difficult [digitally].”
Dr Greaves said while traditional methods of protesting are “well-trodden” where there are established ways it's best done, online environments were filled with so many other causes that it could cause fatigue.
It would depend on what the cause was in the end to see if it would be successful online, she said.
Dr Greaves said digital action also lacked the power of a mass of people occupying physical space.
“Just that physical mass of people occupying the space is a really good signal to people that a whole bunch of people think this way … because people are really bad at conceptualising support for different policies."
“The other thing in that is we have a population that doesn't have access to internet devices,” she said, whether for socio-economic reasons or generational differences.
Documents released by the Government yesterday estimated that about 82,000 households don’t have internet access.
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