A poet and climate activist who has spent the last 18 months cycling and boating around the Pacific in search of stories about climate change is taking a break in New Zealand to write some of the stories she has collected.
Transcript
Boston Poet - Devi Lockwood cycling the world in search of 1001stories about climate change and water Photo: Devi Lockwood
A poet and climate activist who has spent the last 18 months cycling and boating around the Pacific in search of 1001 stories about climate change is taking a break in New Zealand to write some of the stories she has collected so far.
Devi Lockwood, from Boston, Massachusetts, started her journey at the 2014 People's Climate March.
She has since cycled across parts of the USA, Fiji, Tuvalu, New Zealand and finally Australia, taking a cargo ship to her last destination in an effort to reduce her carbon footprint.
Ms Lockwood says her journey has been extremely challenging but has shown her a deeper more personal side to climate change than stories making headlines all over the world.
She hopes her break in New Zealand will allow her to give a voice to the people and places she has visited, like this account from a Christmas spent in Tuvalu:
"High tide after thick rain. The waters lap close to my feet. I'm suspended over a trash heap--coconut husks and tin cans and empty chip bags--in a hammock, breathing in the horizon. If I squint, I can see a rainbow. Tall clouds move south, taking the raindrops with them.
Losite, my host, comes up behind my shoulder. "Devi, we go bath in the sea!"
I wrestle my body from the view and follow Losite and her two sisters as we run across the main road--a sand pathway--to the other side of the island. Soft sand squishes under my toes and I can feel the holes in the ground that were not long ago filled with rain. The whole trip takes less than a minute."
Tuvalu Blue by Devi Lockwood Photo: Devi Lockwood
DEVI LOCKWOOD: It is a work in progress. I have got 443 recorded stories right now and am taking a bit of a break to get some writing done so I am almost halfway there.
KOROI HAWKINS: And what have you found, where have you been and who have you spoken to?
DL: So I started with the September 2014 people's climate march in New York City and spent a month after that travelling and collecting stories from people in the United States. Took a flight from Los Angeles to Fiji and I was in Fiji for two months and then in Tuvalu for a month doing the same work. Kind of living and collecting stories from people I met along the way. And then after being in Tuvalu I left around this time last year to come to New Zealand and cycled from Auckland to Bluff over the course of four months, and then decided in that time to stop flying to reduce my environmental footprint, and took a cargo ship across the Tasman sea because it seemed the easiest way to do it. So crowd funded that money to do it. And got to Australia and then spent five months cycling all the way up the east coast from Melbourne to Townsville. Almost hitched a ride on a yacht to Indonesia but then it didn't quite work out so then I thought alright coming back to New Zealand because visa in Australia is almost up and I really love it here. So it seems like a good place to kind of put on the brakes for a bit and be in one place long enough to get some meaningful writing done about the experience.
KH: And what about this experience has most touched you?
DL: Yeah so I mean collecting stories about water, collecting stories about climate change it is very, it veers into the personal very quickly and it has let me see how kind of the personal is, political is, ecological and that all lines up really clearly. Some of the most beautiful stories hold you and that's I guess my goal for down the line. I want to create a map on a website where you can click on a point and listen to a story someone has told me from that place and the goal will be just that. You know I love radio I love listening to people's voices and just to kind of create a bit of that magic where someone would be able to listen along side me and glean what they can glean from these stories about water and climate change from all over the world and I feel like I am only getting started really although this has been such a big part of my life for a year and a half now.
Devi Lockwood at Punakaike Photo: Devi Lockwood
KH: Yea and one of those points on that map hopefully will be Tuvalu what did you hear in this island that is sort of on the front-line of all of this?
DL: Speaking with Tuvaluans - gosh I was really fortunate in that I got to live with a friend named Losite and so spent Christmas [2014] on the outer island of Nukufutao. So there are eight islands in Tuvalu right and in Nukufutao I spoke with Losite's mother who is a primary school teacher there about her experiences. They had a massive drought I think it was, very recently and Fiji had to send water to Tuvaluans because there was nothing to drink. And so in addition to the challenges that these really low lying coral atolls are disappearing because of the rising tide people would show me wells that fresh water used to come out of them in as recent as a parent or a grandparent's generation and now those wells are just a murky abyss of just like salty muck. And that really spoke I think directly to the challenges in learning about fresh water lenses under the island and how that has been contaminated by a combination of rising sea levels. And then you know its the microcosm of the world there is a lot more people in Tuvalu like ten thousand now than there used to be a couple of generations ago, and so given that there is no central wastewater management in the main island especially in Funafuti that all of that waste runs directly into what might have been the drinking water and so all the water for washing drinking etc comes from the rain. And so I learned so much about water conservation by living that firsthand for a month. It was something I hadn't really thought about before you know coming from Boston where it feels like water is in abundant supply all the time. But I have tried to carry that with me and be as mindful as possible. But it really hit home the fact that different communities experience climate change in different ways and that you know all these experiences are equally valid and important. So many headlines are about weather now and so I guess I am just trying to give a human face to that and make those stories come alive.
KH: On that note, maybe, hopefully not putting you on the spot here if you have got a stanza of something you have already written or are working on that you could share?
DL: High tide after thick rain. The waters lap close to my feet. I'm suspended over a trash heap--coconut husks and tin cans and empty chip bags - in a hammock, breathing in the horizon. If I squint, I can see a rainbow.
Tall clouds move south, taking the raindrops with them.
Losite, my host, comes up behind my shoulder. "Devi, we go bath in the sea!"
I wrestle my body from the view and follow Losite and her two sisters as we run across the main road - a sand pathway -to the other side of the island.
Soft sand squishes under my toes and I can feel the holes in the ground that were not long ago filled with rain.
The whole trip takes less than a minute.
Devi Lockwood on the cargo ship, the Spirit of Singapore Photo: Devi Lockwood
