There's a Midnight Oil lyric that's been living in my head lately. You know the one. The beds. The burning. The question… how can we sleep while our beds are burning?
Peter Garrett wasn't writing about climate. He was writing about land, justice, and a very specific (and ongoing) wrong that needed to be faced. But it's the feeling in that song that's been staying with me… that discomfort of trying to carry on while something enormous is happening.
My friend has been staying with me for two months now.
He arrived from the Middle East just before the conflict escalated in mid February. He was supposed to be here for 3 weeks. Then the world rearranged itself with flights disrupted, the whole region destabilised, and here we are in April, still watching the news at the kitchen table, his family still in the region, the situation still unresolved. His plans, like heaps of stuff lately, are in a kind of holding pattern.
I wrote about the early days of this in a previous post, how weird it was to be planning a launch event while missiles were flying, that question someone asked me about whether any of this climate stuff even mattered right now, and the clarity of my answer that surprised even me. That post was about the shock of the beginning.
This one is about what comes after the shock and what it's like to keep forging ahead through this.
Sustenance
Six weeks of stewarding this fund through sustained, grinding uncertainty have taught us some things.
The first is that the world doesn't pause in a tidy way. It just keeps being a lot, all at once, continuously. The news cycle demands your attention and then offers you nothing useful to do with it. My friend feels the weight of that more personally and more immediately than I do. Sitting alongside someone who’s going through that has been its own kind of education in what it means to be directly affected by something versus just adjacent to it.
The second is that the ripple effects of a conflict in the Middle East reach into New Zealand life in ways that feel weirdly mundane alongside the human scale of what's happening. We've watched oil prices climb. We've watched things cost more and take longer.
Pip has been tracking the knock on effects closely. For example, how this impacts our food systems: the fertiliser supply concerns, the disrupted shipping routes, the export impacts for New Zealand farmers, the way that will hit all our grocery bills at a time when too many people are already stretched. What she keeps coming back to is how clearly all of it points to the same underlying problem we've been trying to solve for ages. A global economy that is still, despite everything we know, structurally dependent on fossil fuels. Every shock to that system is an argument for changing it. The case for this work shouldn’t be harder to make right now because in some ways, it's the clearest it's ever been.
While I love a silver lining, that’s not one of them... It's more like a grim kind of confirmation.
The Long Game
We've also been sitting with the thought that turbulence tends to open things up.
Not right away and certainly not in the middle of the noise. Pip, who spends considerably more time than me working on what actually moves the dial on climate systems, keeps coming back to what becomes possible in moments of disruption. Research shows us that these tend to be the times when assumptions that have always felt immovable start to shift. The conversations that weren't possible become possible. The political windows that seemed permanently closed crack open.
The organisations we fund aren't waiting for things to calm down before they do their work. They're doing it right now, while navigating the same chaotic news environment the rest of us are. They’re continuing to challenge inadequate policy, build movements, create the conditions for systems change. That mahi doesn't stop because the world is loud. And the organisations doing it steadily, with rigour and without fanfare, tend to be the ones positioned to move when those windows appear. That's what we keep at the forefront of our minds.
The Climatics is here on Mother Earth to back strategic, high-leverage work that builds toward something. Pip describes it as funding the enabling conditions for everything else to happen. I describe it as ‘let’s get this show on the road’.
Still in the room
We're deep in our second funding round right now. We’re working through the applications and we'll have more to share on that soon. What we can say is that the quality of the organisations coming through our process is extraordinary. People with real expertise, doing seriously incredible work, in a moment that needs them arguably even more than ever before.
Stewarding this fund through a difficult stretch means reading the room honestly. We know that people are holding on tight right now - grateful for anything that gives a sense of stability in a world that keeps shifting under everyone's feet. We feel it too.
And it's reminded us again that at its heart, The Climatics is a community. People who decided that showing up together for climate (even imperfectly, even in small ways) was better than not showing up at all. That kaupapa doesn't ebb and flow with the news cycle. It's actually most alive in the moments when everything feels hardest. So this is not a moment where we're asking you to dig deep. It's more of a check-in. We see you. We're in it too. We're sending you a virtual backstage pass. Or a hug. Whichever feels right for you. We're really glad this little band exists.
The gig keeps going. We're still glad we started it.
