A collaboration between ecologist Will Godsoe and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
9 December 2024
At an undisclosed location on the campus of Lincoln University, on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, I enter a neglected bike shed whose interior can be charitably described as… punk. The “floor” of asphalt is a mess with leaves. Then again, the shed is surrounded by student dorms, so the old leaf smell is comparatively nice. I unplug my ebike, sneak past the other bikes in the shed, and shove open the heavy corrugated metal door.
I think of my e-bike as a hedge against disasters, big and small. On the one hand using bikes like this is one strategy to mitigate the pollution that causes climate change (i.e. a big disaster). On the other hand biking reminds me to fit exercise in my schedule to reduce my high blood pressure (a potentially personal disaster).
I don’t have to look that far for a reminder of disasters. On my left is the site of the old Hilgendorf Building. In 2009 this concrete University building was named a “brutalist classic”. The 2011 Canterbury earthquake damaged the building so much that it was abandoned. It was a skeleton when I first came to campus in 2014, then a demolition site, then a lake. Ten years later I zoom past its replacement, Waimarie – coated head to foot in solar panels.
I then zip into town along a broad and sealed bike lane following an abandoned railway line. Along the way, I keep an eye out for old friends cycling towards Lincoln. There are a couple of friends that I’d probably lose touch with in the absence of such opportunities. I’m rewarded by a beautiful sunset over the Southern Alps.
When I get to my daughter’s school the parking lot is a massive traffic jam of cars, but we soon saunter past and go down the “southern expressway”: a new bike lane towards town. There is presumably another traffic jam between Riccarton Road and the Riccarton Mall, but I don’t give it a second thought.
It’s Friday, so we stop for pretzels in Punky Brewster, a pub in an old warehouse along the bike trail. My wife meets us and we bike through Hagley Park and past the electric tram to get to a community event in town. At the memorial bridge we spot Mulletman and his unicycle show. Not wanting to miss “the world’s leading expert in follicular entertainment” we park our bikes right next to the show and watch for a few minutes. We are then right in town to look for a family outing, such as dancing at the dance-o-mat or a busker’s festival.
Biking through Ōtautahi gives me a vision of the future. I say this guardedly. These days it seems like visions of the future all concern dystopias – versions of a future where the only things worth talking about are wreck, ruin and the apocalypse. It’s easy to draw a dystopian vision of Christchurch where the recovery from earthquakes is the cherry on top of all the other worries of the world. However, biking through Christchurch (on the right cycleway) can be sunny, socially dreamy and cosy – at most it is apocalypse adjacent.
Instead of a dystopia, biking through Christchurch is closer to what novelists have started to describe as solarpunk. It is a vision of the future where disasters such as those caused by climate change occur, but people find value in building a better future in their aftermath.
This can be on a global scale like in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, where the pollution causing climate change is arrested using tools ranging from airships to bureaucratic banking reform. Or it can be small-scale like in Susan Kaye Quinn’s Planting the shell bones, in which the main character hides in an old light house and covertly creates new oyster beds with sea shells.
Compared to fictional solarpunk, Ōtautahi’s better future is down to earth, visible and in some cases quite literally concrete. It includes reminders of the need for disaster preparedness, including a litany of broken buildings and carparks from the 2011 earthquake. These are placed side-by-side with the tools to reduce the pollution causing climate change.
There is new technology (such as my ebike), changes in policy that make me free to use that technology safely (thank you bike lane), and nudges to do things I value (stop for sunsets, and an easy trip into town for a show). It’s a future of electric trams winding their way through downtown, and the residential red zone rendered uninhabitable by the earthquakes transitioning to a regenerated green space.
The future is often unimaginable, sometimes hopeful, sometimes big and scary. Taking a bike ride through Ōtautahi reminds us that unimaginable things happen and we need to get on with them in our lives. With any luck we’ve already prepared for them. Some of the unimaginable things will be bad – like the decade-long recovery from the earthquake. Some of them will be great – like biking under cherry trees to get to downtown festivals.
Will Godsoe is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini who seeks to better forecast how species will respond to climate change and other environmental disturbances.
Jean Donaldson is a designer and illustrator who works with Toi Āria: Design for Public Good. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at https://jeanmanudesign.com/.