Twilight of an ancient knowledge

For centuries, New Zealand's Maoris have used intimate observation of nature to harvest eels and predict the weather. That marvelous legacy is endangered by climate change.

Editor's note: Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being here.

By Durrell Dawson

Read more: Politics, News, New Zealand, Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet

May 5, 2006 | When the first Maori came to the Pacific shores of New Zealand from East Polynesia roughly a thousand years ago, they found a temperate climate and pristine coastlines that stretched for miles. Their idyllic new home had no other humans and no natural predators. Over time, even after settlers arrived from Europe, Maori lived in New Zealand as tangata whenua, or people of the land, and built a detailed base of knowledge that incorporated the wind, the stars and the attributes of plants and animals.

But today, New Zealand is no longer the same land. National icons like the kiwi bird have declined in population, pollution levels have increased and residents report subtler changes: Wind blows much more strongly from the southwest than it used to, some plants bloom at earlier times of the year and the weather is increasingly unpredictable.

On a remote hill about an hour northwest of the metropolis of Auckland, climate scientist Darren King grasps the branch of a pohutakawa tree, which towers over him and the rolling green hills that serve as a barrier to the volcanic, black sand-lined Piha beach. Pohutukawa trees across the two-island nation are typically ablaze with red, festive-looking blooms during the summer months of December and January, earning them the nickname of the New Zealand Christmas tree. But King stands in a sea of green trees and shrubbery, none brightened by fire-red blossoms.

"It is odd that these trees are not as bright and covered in flowers as they would normally be -- so who knows, maybe the trees know something we don't know," he says with a smile.

King, a scientist of Maori descent, works as a paleoclimatologist for New Zealand's premier climate research agency, the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, and is trying to make sense of these changes. Most of his research depends on the hard data of his country's climate records; for instance, he refers to isotopes found in caves as part of his effort to reconstruct past climate and temperature records for parts of New Zealand. But for the past three years, through a joint project with two Maori iwi and NIWA's Maori Research Unit, Te Kuwaha, King has been working to document Maori knowledge of local weather and climate. The project is a far cry from King's world of figures and measurements, but he believes Maori knowledge can contribute to scientific understanding of the local climate and atmosphere.

"Those local observations can provide us with quite an important baseline for comparing what we see now," King says. He has reviewed oral histories and songs and found historically accurate references to major environmental events, including a devastating landslide in 1846 that swept away the village of Te Rapa and its Maori chief Te Heuheu.

According to traditional Maori beliefs, the environment is rife with clues that hint at larger phenomena. Everything is interconnected in the Maori view of the world, from the cries of birds to the shapes and colors of clouds. The tribes, or iwi, use these clues in deciding when to plant, harvest and fish.

The pohutukawa tree and its bright-red flowers are used by many northwestern iwi as predictors of a long summer marked by drought. Traditionally, Maori refer to several such indicators and make weather predictions, using what King dubs "consensus-based forecasting." This type of forecasting has been used worldwide by indigenous cultures that rely on nature for their livelihoods, from the Arctic and Samoa to Peru and Zimbabwe.

These systems have been developed over centuries, relying on a sort of trial and error, and King says that if their indicators didn't work, the Maori wouldn't have continued to use them. But now that New Zealand's weather patterns are changing, many of the elders King has spoken with say the indicators are less dependable.

The Ngati Pare iwi once relied on the native brown parrot, or kaka, to predict stormy weather, but now that the birds are rarely seen in the North Island's forests, they find it harder to make their forecasts. Eels, one of the largest components of the traditional Maori diet, begin their migration cycles at increasingly idiosyncratic times, making it difficult for locals to catch them. An iwi on New Zealand's eastern coast is known for its crab-catching abilities, but the main harbor where they fish has become choked with the sudden spread of mangroves, possibly because of warmer temperatures. And in some areas the cabbage tree, which Maori tribes sometimes use to forecast a dry summer, is flowering much later in the season than normal. King believes local changes like these may reflect larger-scale climatic changes taking place in the region and around the world.

"Environmental changes in association with increasing variability in local weather and climate are making interpretation of environmental indicators more difficult," he told me in an e-mail. "From the unusual flowering times of local flora to the changing arrival times of migratory birds, to the increasing changeability of local winds, these altered patterns are throwing into question the reliability of age-old understanding."

Human impacts like deforestation and agriculture could explain some quirks in the local environment, like the diminishing number of kaka birds. But some changes may be the result of larger climate trends.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's foremost authority on the effects of global warming -- has seen global temperatures rise over the past century as a result of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, the IPCC says, it sets off a chain reaction of environmental changes, resulting in more rainfall in some places, more evaporation and arid conditions in others, and contrasting air temperatures and pressures globally, leading to shifting wind patterns.

These climate changes affect local biodiversity. And the IPCC warns that the world's traditional and indigenous communities are among the most vulnerable to shifts in the environment. In many areas, climate change is already taking its toll.

In Ecuador, mountain communities are becoming parched as their glaciers vanish. On the opposite end of the spectrum, communities in Bangladesh and the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati face inundation from rising sea levels. Malaria is reaching parts of east Africa for the first time as mosquitoes find their way to warming locales. For cultures like the Maori in New Zealand, it's little developments like these that have the potential to wreak havoc.

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In the coastal town of Otaki, the Maori people are already struggling to reconcile their knowledge and culture with the signs of climate change.

Georgina Kiripuwai Te Aomarere shares her cultural knowledge at local Maori college Te Wananga-o-Raukawa, where she serves as a kaiawhina, or supporter. At 89, she is the oldest member of her iwi and one of the oldest people in town.

Te Aomarere remembers that on a November day in the early 1920s, her mother predicted there would be a late-spring frost the following morning, which would ruin her recently planted garden. Her mother took action, lighting fires around the garden and letting the smoke blanket her crops. Sure enough, when morning arrived, there was a light frost on the ground. The garden of potatoes, peas and beans were spared because of the heat from the fires, and were used to feed the family at Christmas.

"They had to know all these things because, it's not like now where you have a weather report, weather forecast on TV and what it's going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next day," says Te Aomarere, as she reclines in the living room of her mother's house. "So they were able to tell by different things in the atmosphere and watching the sky what was going to happen."

Her mother, she says, knew when the wind would blow from the south, and would predict rain when she saw clouds hanging over a nearby island. Today Te Aomarere is known as "Auntie Kiripuwai." In her work as a kaiwhina, she shares some of her knowledge of Maori culture, but she readily admits she knows little about the Maori system of environmental indicators. With colonization came the assimilation and gradual dissipation of traditional Maori culture, and the dilution of the cultural inheritance for Maori of Te Aomarere's generation and the generations that followed.

Next page: A monument was erected at Auckland's historic One Tree Hill as a memorial to a dying Maori race