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Vic Mills takes a photo of himself and his grandchildren, the mokopuna, and puts it in front his computer camera.
“That’s my primary focus at the moment … What kind of world are these people going to live in?”
He wonders what they’ll eat and how they’ll work. “We need to get back to simplicity in our use of planetary gifts, like our food, sunshine and so on.”
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Vic Mills, 79 years old, was an artist before retiring. Now he is part of a reforestation project on the Otago Peninsula, building tracks and benches and planting trees for a ‘’Future Forest’’.
Mills is one of the 200 members of the Seniors’ Climate Action Network (Scan) – a group made up of mature Dunedin citizens who want to leave behind a legacy for their mokopuna. They have been working together to promote urgent climate action and a low carbon future since 2014.
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The group formed because they were concerned about the lack of climate action policies at the 2014 elections.
“We felt that we needed to do our own thing to try and raise awareness,” Donna Peacock, one of the founding members, says. Peacock’s original thought was to create a grandmothers’ climate action group but she wanted to open it up to seniors who may not have grandchildren as well.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Scan (Seniors Climate Action Network), is a group made up of seniors from Dunedin who are using their retirement to fight climate change. Delyth Sunley, Neil Peacock and Neil James are left to right.
She started the group with her close friend, Patricia Scott, who said, as grandmothers, they “felt we had an opportunity to influence our grown-up children and grandchildren”.
Both women have a strong background in community involvement, were school teachers and took te reo Māori classes to support their work alongside tangata whenua.
The group was initially made up of 20 members. After some publicity in environmental circles, the group grew. For one member, Neil James, “the opportunity to contribute from our own experience, which reaches into the past […] was one of the things that attracted me”.
As Scott explains it, they “were deeply concerned about the damage that was being done to the environment, the loss of biodiversity, the pollution of soils and water, the overfishing and damage to the soil from farming and forestry”. In order to address climate change, a “new message of resilient communities concerned for the wellbeing of the whole community and the planet” was needed.
Peacock recalls feeling so frustrated at the tight timeframe allowed for submissions to the Government’s call for climate targets that she had to act. “I went out with tiny slips of paper all printed up with Scan on the top and I went around [George St] asking people if they knew about climate change and if they were worried about it.”
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Donna Peacock, cofounder of Scan, rides her bike to Dunedin’s Octagon on an electric bike to hand out climate change pamphlets.
Peacock thought that she would be laughed at by the street. Many people were concerned about the issue, but didn’t know what to do. People could sign quick submissions using the Scan handouts. “We’ve done a lot of that and submissions galore.”
Despite the challenges of the Covid pandemic lockdowns towards the end of 2021, the Seniors’ Climate Action Network submitted a 49-page Emissions Reduction Planto the Ministry for the Environment. The submission calls on the Government and regional and municipal councils to adopt actions to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2030.
Said Mills: “We are actually focused on the fact that we have got a limited bout of life left, yet we have got an enormous amount of experience behind us. We believe the younger generations benefit from the knowledge we have.
“Of course, we have time on our hands very much more than some of those people concerned with work and education.”
Mills plants trees in his spare moments to help create a future forest. “That kind of personal development is something that we love to do and it is essential for keeping us young,” he says.
Mills was part in a 2021 effort when 18,000 trees were planted near the Harbour Cone on Otago Peninsula.
Scan would like to live a simpler lifestyle with less plastic, less cars and less energy. Its members believe that consumption is “overshooting planetary boundaries”, that humans are using more resources than the planet can provide to support ecosystems that life depends on.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Dr. Ivan Johnstone works at the Scan website.
Dr. Ivan Johnstone, an Scan member, has studied sustainability in the latter years of his academic career.
“The lack of action does not bode very well for the future,” he says. “I carry myself as a pessimistic optimist.” He says the group is concerned about the individualistic values that have developed with capitalism.
Johnstone has been creating a website called Scan to allow the public access to their resources.The declaration of climate emergency has amounted to “no action”.
Sue Novell, one of the authors of the Emissions Reduction Plan, said, “I wish the Government would act like [it has]The Covid crisis: Take a look at the experts’ advice, implement their recommendations, and create a plan. [Then] we wouldn’t feel like we are sort of rudderless in that area.”
Young people “see the older generations have brought them to this state and they don’t see a future … the actions we can take now are important”, she says.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Sue Novell is at home during a Zoom call with other Scan members.
Some members are uncomfortable talking about climate change with their friends.
“They know the issues but … they don’t want to think about it,” says Johnstone. Peacock also agrees, pointing out that climate issues can cause damage to friendships.
“I certainly have been supported in just simply turning up to a meeting and being part of a group that is there that I can spout off to, that I can learn from, and so on,” says Mills.
Looking forward, Johnstone says, “I think we need to emphasise that there is positivity in thinking in terms of local communities … we hope the Government is going to do the right things by us, but if they don’t, at least if we focus on community, as communities, we will continue to thrive.
“Change can appear from the top down from the Government … but there can also be a bottom up approach from local communities upwards.”
Novell encourages young people to “get together with friends and your local community and find out what your strengths are”.
Scan will be focusing its efforts on 2022 to make its research and resources easier to access via digital platforms in order to communicate the urgent need to address climate change. Scan encourages seniors outside of Dunedin to set up their own area as “older people have much to give, especially values, skills and love of community”.
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