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INTERVIEW WITH GINI BLAIR (RESTORATIVE JUSTICE etc)

INTERVIEW WITH GINI BLAIR (RESTORATIVE JUSTICE etc)

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Interview with Gini Blair (Baha'i) about Restorative Justice and other topics.

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Ginny Blair is a Hawke's Bay resident with an interesting life story. She grew up in Ghana and traveled extensively during her youth. She became involved in restorative justice and worked with indigenous communities in Australia's Northern Territory. Ginny is also a member of the Baha'i Faith and has been involved in the Virtues Project. She currently works as a lead facilitator for restorative justice in Hawke's Bay. Restorative justice involves bringing victims and offenders together to have conversations and find solutions. Kia ora, kia rana, tā wafa, māloa lalei, nī sābūla wanaka, namaste, ni hao, konnichiwa, kumusta, and hello, I'm David Brown Carr. And I'm Sandra Brown Carr. Welcome to a special report here on Radio Hawke's Bay. Later in this program we'll talk about the life of one of the 20th century's giants of environmental activism, who had very strong links with Aotearoa, as well as with the Baha'i Faith. But first, David will talk with Hawke's Bay resident Ginny Blair about her interesting life, starting with her childhood in Ghana and culminating in her work in restorative justice here in Hawke's Bay. We'll also hear about the time she spent in Rome and Sardinia, her work with indigenous communities in Australia's Northern Territory, her nine years as Youth Justice Coordinator in Taupo, and her involvement in the Virtues Project. According to Ginny's LinkedIn webpage, her work has always been about relationships with people, many of whom are struggling in a range of ways. Supporting and advocating for children, individuals, families, and communities affected by life in general and all by constantly changing government legislation and policies has always been the area of challenge for her. Finding solutions and working alongside clients to come up with their own solutions and supporting them has always been her focus. Ginny deeply believes that everyone carries their own solutions within, and that her role is to bring those to the surface and implement. Ginny has been a member of the Baha'i Faith for many decades, reflecting her belief in the oneness of humankind and the eradication of racial, religious, national, gender, and other prejudices. Recently David interviewed Ginny by Zoom. I was born in Hamilton in 1947. That was just shortly after the war. My father had spent nearly four years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Hong Kong. Wow. So when I look back on my early years, I can see that my father was very damaged by that. Anyway, he married my mother, and myself and my brother were born in Duke Hall. So he started off his life as a farmer. He got a ballot farm, but he was destined for other things in the long term. He was a Kiwi, right? He was Kiwi, yeah. And his uncle, Brendan Gisborne, I think his father was one of the first lawyers in Gisborne years and years ago. So he was a Gisborne boy. But I do recall, if I remember correctly, which could be quite wrong, that you did have a childhood and youth outside of New Zealand? Yes. So my father joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. His first posting was India, which he went to on his own, but then the second posting was Ghana, which is in West Africa. And we all as a family went there and had five years there. How old were you when you went there? I think I was nine. Yeah, that sounds all right. Because when I was eight, I had polio. I think it was after that. Yeah, so I was nine. Why was he posted to Ghana? At that time, it was probably still a British colony, right? No, it had got, in 1955, 57, it had gained independence when we got through. So they had their own independent nation, and President Kwame Nkrumah was the first president. So we were there in the very early days of being a British colony of England. I think it was one of the first colonies, the British colony, to be decolonized, to be given its freedom. I do remember Kwame Nkrumah. He was quite a well-respected African diplomat at that point, a politician. Yes, he was. Statesman, yeah. Yeah, I met him a couple of times through various things. And yeah, he was charming. He was a lovely man. So you were there for five years, you said? Yep. And then what happened after that? Did you move back to New Zealand? So I came back to New Zealand and went to boarding school here because there was no secondary school suitable in Ghana. So I would come back with the forwards once a year from Ghana to New Zealand for school and then go back at the end of the year. It's a long way to go, you know, especially with that. Yeah, three days to take. There were about 15 stops along the way, in planes with propellers. Yeah, those were the days. Those were the days of travel, my goodness. Yeah, so it would be like Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, Singapore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Mumbai, I think. I can't even remember all the stops. It must have been Bahrain, I think, was another stop. Athens, Rome. Madrid. Cairo, Tano in northern Nigeria, and then across to Nicaragua. Yeah, it was days. Were you travelling by yourself? Yes. Wow. And how old were you? You know, you can't have been that old when you were travelling like that. So I think I was 13 when I did that first trip by myself, yeah. Yes, yeah. But I'd done that other travel. I'd travelled before, so I sort of knew the ropes. It wasn't so frenetic as it is these days. It was a much more relaxed sort of a process. But that's been very tiring. Did you have like stopovers on the way? I would just stop for an hour and refuel in most places. I used to end up staying a night in Rome most times. But, you know, I just did it. Just one foot in front of the other really is how I would approach it. Right. How many times a year did you stay? Once a year I'd go back at Christmas time for the school holidays. And then you'd come back to school, what, in January, February? Yeah, so the beginning of February, somewhere around there I'd come back. And then go home again at the end of the year. One year my parents came out because they had leave. So they were out a couple of months or something. Yeah. And where were you, what school were you at in New Zealand? I went to a place called Natawa, which is down near Martin. Martin, yes. We had a summer school there one year. That's right. I organised that. Yeah, all my family on my father's side, all my cousins, they'd all sort of gone there as well. So it was a bit of a family tradition to go to that particular school. It was all right. I didn't like it much. So when you graduated from that, was it a high school? Yeah, quite. But I did a final year of school at a school called St. George's in Rome. It's an English school. Oh, okay. Which is really interesting. In what we call the sixth form or the seventh form, there were 47 nationalities. So it was really an international school. I just loved that about it. Israelis and Palestinians and all kinds of people, all working harmoniously together. And a high school in Rome, especially. A British school, yeah. Yeah. And of course, Rome is just a wonderful place. I mean, Sarah and I visited there several times. We just love it. Rome has a very big place in my heart. And I've still got friends that I had from back then, which is really cool. And what happened when you finished high school? My parents had separated at this point. And so we went to England. And then my mother and my brother, who'd been at school in England, returned to New Zealand. And I stayed on in London and did what in those days was called a secretarial course. Learning typing in shorthand. So typing has come in useful, the shorthand not so much. That's completely forgotten it anyway now. And so I stayed on for another nine months. Then I came back on a ship with my cousin who was returning to New Zealand. We came back on an old ship called the Rangitane, which is long since gone out of action. What year was that? 1964 or 5. Yes, I didn't want to come back, but I really loved London. That was the early days of Beatles and Rolling Stones, you know, all of that. It was a lot of stuff happening around London. So coming back to Hamilton was a little bit of a letdown really. Why? I can't imagine why. No, no. After London. Yes, because I used to hang out around Chelsea and Kings Road and all those places, you know. Buy all these funky clothes and came back wearing linny skirts. Which hadn't quite hit New Zealand at that point. But anyway, that was back then. So when you came back to Hamilton, what did you do then? I got a job because I travel quite a lot. It was quite unusual for somebody my age to have done as much travelling as I'd done. So Air New Zealand, what was BIC and Qantas had shared premises in Hamilton. I got a job as their gofer really, working for them before they all split off and went in their different competitive ways. So that was for about four years, five years. I got lots and lots of incredibly cheap travel. I could go up to Fiji for weekends and over to Australia for weekends for very few dollars. Which I did on a reasonably regular basis. Then I went back to Italy. I had a good friend there who lived in Florence. So I went there. My Italian wasn't particularly good, so it needed to get better. It was going a little bit better over the period that I was there. Then did a bit here and a bit there and worked in a few nightclub type places and bars. Then I got work over in Sardinia. Okay, which is fairly lovely even though it's a separate island. Yeah, yeah, Porto Churchill, which is a very posh holiday destination for the rich and famous. What year was this? 1969, 70, around there, those years there. So you certainly had an unusual childhood growing up, youth into early adulthood. I think when I was at school, there might have been three people who'd ever been overseas in the whole school. It was very expensive, but it's certainly exploded since then. So how long were you on Sardinia? About a year, I think, working there. Then I actually ended up coming back to New Zealand because my brother had been in a really serious accident and wasn't expected to live. By the time the police found me, he had actually kind of come through the worst of it. So he probably wasn't going to die, but my mother was pretty distressed and distraught about it, so I returned to New Zealand. Is this your younger brother? My younger brother. Yeah, he was hit by a drunk driver on his motorbike and lost three inches out of one of his legs. Wow. Yeah, so that was a fairly traumatic time for everybody. Then I decided to go to university. So then I went to Waikato University and did a degree there in social work and didn't quite complete it and completed it a few years later at Massey. Gosh, so much happened in those years. I can't even get the timeline particularly right. So then I went to Massey, finished my degree and had been working for Child, Youth and Family based in Topol for a number of years, working in care and protection and also youth justice. Youth justice was the part that I really enjoyed. How long were you in Topol? A few years, weren't you? No, about 30 years. Wow. Then I got married, had children, had two beautiful children, got them all grown up and then somewhere along the line my marriage fell apart. Sometime after that, a year or so later, I went to the States. I went and worked in the States in California for a year. What were you doing there? I've been heavily involved in New Zealand in the Virtues Project. Oh, okay. So you have to explain a little bit to the audience what the Virtues Project was. The Virtues Program was started by an amazing couple from an American couple and it was looking at what we are all born with and potential. We're all born with all the virtues and they developed a program to help in schools or in the home of how to bring out those virtues in our children. So to develop children by using the language of virtues, so it's kindness and love and sincerity and integrity and honesty and truthfulness and all of these and to really understand what those were. So I've been doing it. We've done a lot of work in the schools in the Topol area. A lot of them were using virtues as a means of correcting children's behavior rather than disciplining them or punishing them, calling them to their higher being. Anyway, so a friend of mine and myself, she'd already been doing some work for this company in the States and then they asked me if I'd like to go as well. So I went up and we were there for a year. You were involved with the Virtues Project and at some point you became a Baha'i. So I became a Baha'i in 1975 and the Virtues Project came in the 90s. I think the first time Dan and Linda, the founders, came to New Zealand was 1992. Pop-ups or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were in Wellington and I went to a workshop down in Wellington and that's where I first heard about them. So the Virtues Project program is not a Baha'i program but it is a Baha'i-inspired program. Anybody can be involved in the Virtues Project? Oh, absolutely. And there's quite a few schools around the country that use it and families that use it. There's a whole lifestyle that you can develop around using virtues and bringing up children and it's very powerful. So that's still going strong around the world in New Zealand? Yeah, absolutely. I don't know how many languages it's in now but over 50. And there's lots of information online, virtuesproject.org I think it is. And also Stephen Brown, our natural friend, Marston has put together some songs on a CD about virtues, different virtues. That's right, that's right. We might sneak one or two into the program. Yes, nice, do that, yeah. That's right. You're tuned to Radio Hawke's Bay and this program is all about local resident Ginny Blair. Let's continue listening to David's recent conversation with her. And so how did you become involved in restorative justice? This obviously is something which is really important to you and also increasingly to the way in which our justice system works. Yeah, so before I became involved directly in restorative justice, I'd worked in youth justice for a number of years. So that was about the business of young people who committed offenses being held accountable and putting things right with their victims. And so we'd have family group conferences with the victims and the young offender and his family and whanau. And it was a really, really good process. Unfortunately, after a few years of doing that, eight years, nine years I think I might have been doing it, the government started kind of reducing the funding that was available for us to kind of do the kinds of things that needed to be done. And really, I got so disillusioned. So I left. You found a little taupo? Yeah, we sort of covered Turingi and Tokoroa and all that way around there. Yeah, so then I put an ad on Seek saying I was looking for work in the north of Queensland, the Northern Territory or the north of Western Australia. I had some really good offers and one that I took out was with an NGO based in Darwin. And I really loved that because I was responsible for the delivery of programs to remote communities. So I had the opportunity to travel to many remote communities in the Northern Territory. Would they be Aboriginal? Oh, Aboriginal. Absolutely, Aboriginal communities. And I fell in love with Aboriginal people and the culture completely and saw all the things that were wrong with what was going on over in Australia in terms of the way that the system treated Aboriginal people and all of that. We were trying to empower them to be responsible for their own futures as much as is possible rather than just continuing to be dependent on government handouts and all of that. So there were many, many programs that we ran in the community. So I was very fortunate to travel to a lot of communities in the Northern Territory, spend time with people and get to know some of the, particularly some of the elders. But having said that, they've had so many people coming and going, coming and going. It takes a while to build the trust for them to build trust with you because they've had so many people coming and going. And what sort of work did you do with them specifically? So we would have housing programs, money management programs, drug and alcohol programs, violence programs, men's programs, different programs aimed at women and all. So we would be employing specifically people to do that work who had the right skills. I found that employing Maori was really, really beneficial because Indigenous New Zealanders and Indigenous Australians connected really quickly and big trust was built very, very quickly. That worked really, really well. And a couple of the guys that I had were music therapists and they did fantastic work with young Aboriginal men, getting them to write music, perform music, record music, all of that kind of stuff. It's just giving them a focus that they wouldn't have had otherwise. That was really powerful. And they were all told that they couldn't go into the music room if they were drunk or stoned or anything like that. So when I drew the music, they had to make a few changes along the way. So it was all that kind of thing. So where did you find these Maori people who could help you? They would apply for the job or they'd hear about some of the stuff we were doing and they'd come and approach me. There's quite a lot of Maori people up in Darwin or in the Northern Territory. Oh, really? Yeah, doing all kinds of work. So I don't know how it just sort of happened, just this one and that one and word of mouth and all that sort of stuff. I never advertised in New Zealand or that thing. So how long were you up in the Northern Territory? I was up there 26 and 7 years and unfortunately I got really sick and needed to go to Sydney for treatment and that all took a long time. So I ended up returning to New Zealand. I wasn't sure that I'd be able to manage myself in the Northern Territory after that, so I resigned and came back here. Yes. So what happened when you got back? Because obviously you're very much now involved in restorative justice again, but in Hawke's Bay. I still wanted to work when I came home and a friend of mine actually rang me and she said, I've got just the job for you, so I had a look at it and I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. They shortlisted me and they offered me the job and so I've been doing that now. The job was lead facilitator for restorative justice. I've been doing that for six years now. And this is for an organisation called Te Puna Wai Ora? Yes, that's right. Are they government funded or are they independent? We're an NGO, so we're funded by the Ministry of Justice. And there's different organisations around the Motu that deliver restorative justice in different areas. So we deliver restorative justice from Wai Ora to Central Hawke's Bay. Yes, so it's, in my view, one of the best things about the justice system because it's about bringing people together to have conversations. Victims and offenders, the opportunity to sit down and talk and have a conversation and for victims in particular to have the opportunity to ask questions about why me and what happened and all of that. So we get all our referrals from the court and that's when there's been a guilty plea. It's not a guilty plea, we don't hear about it. The judges are assuming at that point that it's pleading guilty, that there's some accountability or remorse present and it comes to us. So we're nothing to do with the courts or the police. And then we go through a process of talking to the different parties, assessing what risks there might be and seeing what their motivation is to do restorative justice because this all happens prior to sentencing. And so we're very mindful that you can do restorative justice to look good. So we need to sort of unravel that a little bit and just make sure that the motivation is about accountability and remorse. So we bring everybody together in a completely confidential meeting. Both parties bring support people, which may be family or family or friends or whoever. And they have that conversation, which all we do is guide it really. And then a report goes back to the court and the police and everyone once we've had the meeting. We spend quite a bit of time on outcomes. So looking at what needs to change so that this doesn't happen again, whatever it might be. We have what we call standard cases. So that's kind of burglaries and car accidents and those things where generally where the people involved didn't know each other. So those are really important ones for them to have an opportunity because the system itself keeps them apart until they're referred to restorative justice. And then we can bring them together. And then we have family violence as well. So family violence clearly is where people know each other. So that's a different level of accreditation. It's a high level of accreditation and skills. And that's where we do a lot of family violence. So how serious does the offence have to be? I mean, do you deal with murders or? Yeah, we do. I mean, we deal with quite a few deaths as a result of car accidents. And there's a lot of work that goes into those because we need to be sure that everybody wants the same thing really, which is sort of closure and healing and understanding of what happened and how did that happen and so on and so forth. With family violence, it's the same thing. It's those conversations. And often for the victim, which is usually women, they often are able to say things to their partner or ex-partner that they've never felt safe enough to say before. So we kind of support them to see if they can say things that might help their partner, particularly if they want to have an ongoing relationship or if there are children involved, to have a more amenable kind of relationship, communicate better and so on and so forth. We spend a bit of time on that. And all of that information goes into reports that go to the court prior to the sentencing. So, yeah, we've done murders, but that's not often. There is serious offending. So we do do post-sentence stuff so that somebody kept getting to the end of maybe a long lag for a serious offence and victims might ask if they could meet or the person might say they'd like to meet the victim. So we facilitate that, bring people together so that the person leaving jail is able to reassure the victims or the families of the victims or whatever that everything's okay. You don't have to worry about me when I get out. It's that kind of thing because people are often very frightened about what's going to happen when he or she gets out of jail. So it is a good process. It's so many more people should do it. It's a bit scary. I think you need a bit of guts to do it. And sometimes, of course, we make a decision, this is not suitable. This is absolutely not suitable and just advise the court that we're not proceeding. Do you have any sense of the success of the program once people have been through that process? I can't say that specifically about what happens in Hawke's Bay, but research done by Ministry of Justice, and I haven't seen recent figures, but it was quite high, up in the 80s, 80% and higher for Pacifica people, the success rate, and Maori was high, slightly less so for other people like Pakeha. But those figures are a few years old. Pacifica people are amazing to work with, absolutely amazing to work with because they are so able just to give. It's very, very moving that they have that, which Pakeha in particular don't really have. We want our pound of flesh. We don't necessarily want to forgive, which frees you. For the people that do the forgiving, they're free of it. The people who, the offenders, they're still punished in some way, like a jail sentence or fine or whatever? Yeah, so what our reports do is put information in front of the judge that the judge wouldn't otherwise have, particularly in terms of the impact on the victim, but also the explanation because whatever's happened, there's always a back story, and it's the back story that informs us as to whether this is viable, whether this should go ahead or not. So every charge has a maximum sentence attached to it, and sometimes there's no choice. The judge has to send them to jail, but less and less. A lot of them are locked up, they're remanded in custody, but at the time of sentencing, they're released on time served. They might get home detention or other things, but judges and the courts are really trying to keep people out of jail at the moment, partly because of COVID and the shortage of staff and things like that. Yeah, the restorative justice is something that just doesn't take place in New Zealand. I mean, I believe it's used worldwide, like in Canada, the UK, probably other places, Australia, no doubt. Yeah, only some states in Australia, actually. Victoria uses it and New South Wales, but I'm not sure about anybody else. But that's just my ignorance rather than that's a fact. It kind of started way back in 1989 with the act that the government brought in around the youth offending, the Children and Young Persons Act 1989. That was the start of the restorative kind of process in terms of criminal activity. Then it morphed into using it for adults about 10 years later, I think. So how many of you are there who do this in Hawke's Bay as a district, or do you have other people as well? Oh, yeah, there's one, two, three, four, five, six of us who are facilitators. Two of us are family violence accredited, and the others, somebody in Wairoa, somebody in Central Hawke's Bay, and the rest of us are based here. So they're mainly contractors. I allocate work to them as it comes in, and they do it often in conjunction with other work that they do and so on. Do you have to travel around Hawke's Bay, or are you mainly based here in Hastings, Napier area? Most of the work's here. Occasionally, I go up to Wairoa, particular cases, or down to Hawke's Bay. And the other facilities also travel. So we just travel as needed, really. Happy to meet people in their own homes and things like that. So how long have you been doing it now in this area? Six years. Okay, yeah. And how long do you think you'll be able to keep it up? Well, I've actually decided to retire from the full-time position that I'm in at the moment, but I will do some contract work, maybe. I'll have a little break between now and Christmas, and then I'll go back into it next year. Hmm. Are you thinking of writing your memoir? No. I don't think so. I don't think that would be terribly interesting for everybody, really. You've lived and then traveled to many interesting countries, probably quite unusually for a Kiwi. Yeah. I mean, now I think most Kiwis are traveling all the time, but back in the early days when I was a child in the 50s and 60s, yeah, it was pretty unusual. It really was. One year when I was coming back to New Zealand, I didn't come back the usual way. My parents had decided that I should go to South Africa and stay with family friends of theirs whose names I can't even remember. So anyway, I did that. But that was 1962 or 63, and I spent a week in a place called Krugersdorf, and it was in the middle of apartheid. And coming from Ghana, which is just so different and into South Africa, I went into total culture shock. I absolutely hated it. I hated the way I saw white South Africans treating black South Africans. It just distressed me so much. And the guns and the lights and the fences and the fear on both sides was just awful, really awful. I haven't actually been back. I just can't quite muster the enthusiasm to go back to South Africa, even though I know it's completely changed. But apartheid, just seeing a little bit, I thought, no, this is so wrong. Do you have any feelings about the future of Aotearoa as a multicultural society? Are we making progress? I hope so. I think it's the most exciting thing. I mean, I think for us to have all the Pacific people that are here and the Māori Renaissance, it's born of a bit of work. I think it's incredibly exciting. Totally supportive. We're all leaves on the same tree, for goodness sake. Absolutely. We just bring our beautiful differences, and the things that aren't good, we can leave behind. We don't have to hang on to things because they've always been there. Let's drop them all. Yeah, no, restorative justice is the way to go in the justice system because it's about bringing people together. And have you found the Justice Department's been very supportive of what you're doing? Yeah. I mean, any government department is a massive bureaucracy. It's quite hard to have any sort of organic movement from the government department. It works. It works. Is there anything else you want to say, Jenny? It's been really interesting talking to you. No, you know, I just feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity that I've had since I've been back in New Zealand, this work. You know, my children are in Australia, so it's not so good, but I get over there on a reasonably regular basis. Have you been coping during COVID? Have you been okay health-wise? Yep, totally. Totally. I worked all the way through. I mean, even in lockdown, we were still able to do some work. We can't go into the prison now, of course, because of the COVID situation there, but we do everything on AVL. AVL or Audio Visual Link. Okay. I actually, I got it. I went to Vietnam about five or six weeks ago now and got it on the second day. Oh, wow. I wasn't sick. I just felt a little bit weird, and I tested and it was positive. Then I had to self-isolate in a hotel room for four days just so the others wouldn't get it. I didn't feel sick at all. It was really frustrating. So you've had no after effects or anything from that? No, I was a bit tired. When I got home, I was really, really tired. So I went and had a vitamin C infusion, and that seems to have helped me a lot. Good. I'd say you're feeling better now. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm working and carrying on. So what were you doing in Vietnam? I just went with a group of friends. Just a holiday, basically? Pretty much. I had my connection with an orphanage up there. I didn't actually get to see them this time because I was sick. But anyway, yes, I had a connection with an orphanage up there, and I just really like Vietnam. I think it's an amazing country. I think it's got an extraordinary history, and they're just beautiful people. I think there's been quite a few Kiwis who've had connections with Vietnam over the years. It's a fascinating country. It's just fascinating. History is amazing. Well, Jenny, thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking your time out of your morning today to talk to me. This has been very interesting for me because you're a very interesting person, despite what you say about yourself. You've lived and visited so many different countries, and you're involved in these really interesting things like the Virtues Project and restorative justice. You're quite a unique personality, I think, in the Hawke's Bay region. Oh, thank you. I think I'm fairly ordinary, but I guess that's what we all think. Yes. Well, thank you, Diana. That was David talking with Hawke's Bay resident Jenny Blair about her very interesting life. And Virtues Project is all one word. And you're listening to Radio Hawke's Bay. With the ascension of Prince Charles to the British throne, it's timely to acknowledge his strong lifelong commitment to protecting their environment. The Guardian newspaper recently asked, will Charles III be as green a king as he was as a prince? It recalled that in 1970, the young Prince of Wales made a speech warning of the dangers of pollution, and said that society must deal urgently with the cost of cleaning it up. Charles later recalled that speech he made when he was 21 was greeted as dotty at the time, but today it seems quite prophetic. But did you know that much earlier in the 20th century, one man championed environmental activism and had a very strong connection with Aotearoa? His name was Richard St. Barb Baker OBE, who was born in 1889 in England and became a biologist, botanist, environmental activist and author. And he contributed greatly to worldwide reforestation efforts. In 1922 in Kenya, he founded the Men of the Trees, the first global conservation movement. The organization is still active today as the International Tree Foundation, whose many chapters carry out reforestation internationally. St. Barb, as he was known, was the author of some 30 books and numerous articles, and was a committed Baha'i who rendered service to the Baha'i faith for more than 50 years. St. Barb received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1971 from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. This honor was followed by his appointment by Queen Elizabeth II as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1978. Although he traveled extensively around the world, St. Barb Baker's home base was at Mount Cook Station from 1959 until shortly before his death in June 1982 at the age of 92. I met him on several occasions at Baha'i summer schools in Helensville and for the last time at Wellington Public Library, not long before he passed away. The long, important and interesting life of St. Barb Baker really deserves a whole program, but in the interim, let's listen to a short report on his life prepared by the Baha'i World News Service. People sometimes ask me, if you had to start your life all over again, what would you do? I think the answer is the same, exactly the same. I would start as a child in my father's nurseries, helping him to raise tens of thousands of forest trees. And today, there's even a greater need in the world. It's a question of planting trees for survival. St. Barb, who lived from 1889 to 1982, initiated many practices that have become common and widespread today. It is estimated that as a result of his efforts, the organizations he founded and those he assisted, some 26 billion trees have been planted globally. He founded the first international non-governmental organization focused on the environment, today called the International Tree Foundation. He established the longest-running environmental journal. Generations of environmentalists have credited St. Barb as igniting their passion for their work. A reevaluation of this influential environmental pioneer is now underway, thanks to the work of the International Tree Foundation and the publication of a new biography. Paul Hanley, St. Barb's biographer, explains. His interest in conservation began right as a little boy. They had property, and they were very religious people. And his father was kind of a lay preacher and very involved in Christian revival, but also made money selling trees. So, just as a little boy, he talks about his first playthings were trees, and he'd sort of march about the seed beds and salute the trees like they were toy soldiers and so on. He was way ahead of his time because so many of the ideas we talk about today, such as sustainable development and agroforestry and agroecology and permaculture, organic farming, plus things like desert reclamation and fair trade and ecotourism. He was talking about all of those things in the 1920s. He was really far ahead of his time, and his whole kind of philosophy of the integration and unity of human society, of humanity, but also of the natural world, were fairly radical concepts of the time. In many ways, the things that he wrote, he seemed to have a remarkable prescience about what was going to happen if we deforested too much of the planet. We are hearing now from Andy Egan, Chief Executive of the non-profit International Tree Foundation, formerly called Men of the Trees, an organization St. Barb founded in 1924. He seemed to have a kind of innate understanding of the issues that we're now facing in terms of climate change and the effect on the atmosphere if you lost so much tree cover globally, even before the sciences actually proved the dangers of deforestation. He seemed to have a kind of innate understanding of that. Of the Earth's 30 billion acres, already 9 billion acres is desert. And if a man loses a third of his skin, he dies. Plastic surgeons say he's headed. And if a tree loses one third of its bark, it dies. And if the Earth loses one third of its green mantle of trees, it will die. The water table will sink beyond record. Life on this planet will become impossible. It's being skinned alive today at the speed of forest destruction. You know, he did face opposition. And when he was a conservator of forests in Kenya, people thought his ideas were crazy. Because it's basically what today we call social forestry. Work with local people, integrate the forestry practices into their cultural practices and so on. So he started this thing called the Dance of the Trees in 1922. So I said, what about a dance for the trees, for tree planting? And they said, well, that's God's business. Sha-re-o-mungu. But if you cut all the mother trees, you don't give mungu a chance. I've got an idea. We'll have a dance at my camp. And I'll offer a prize of a fat bullock for the best turned out warrior and a necklace of their favorite beads for the most beautiful damsel. They thought that was a swell idea. And three weeks later, 3,000 of these warriors turned up for the first dance of the trees. And it was at that dance that I called for volunteers, for men amongst them who had promised before the high guard to plant so many trees each year and take care of trees everywhere. He did really initiate the whole concept of social forestry and trying to encourage a movement of people that would plant and protect trees from the very beginnings in Kenya with the Dance of the Trees in July 1922. When the movement was founded as Watu-Wamiti, People of the Trees. So he very much helped to give birth to this idea that it wasn't just a professional thing about planting trees, that it was something that ordinary people and communities could and should be doing. And in a way, they're the best place to actually protect the forest. And as we know now, I think 80 percent of the world's forests are protected by indigenous communities. So their role should be very much sort of recognized and supported and celebrated. For our part, the whole principle of community-led forestry and agroforestry is central to everything that we do. So in the work that we support and the partners that we work with, we specifically choose to work with local community groups and organizations to help protect and plant trees in their immediate locality and community. Paul Hanley again. Men of the Trees was the first international non-governmental organization working the environment. And at one point, they said it had 5,000 members in 108 countries. So we're talking a long time ago. Even Jane Goodall, she said, really, Baker paved the way for people like her or people like Al Gore and David Suzuki, who are, in a sense, global environmentalists. She was kind of the first of that category of people. St. Barb grew up in a deeply religious family. He was open to a diverse range of spiritual teachings and, at a young age, had the view that humanity and nature were closely connected. Paul Hanley describes St. Barb's first encounter with a Baha'i, Claudia Coles. He'd given a talk on African religions, which was a positive view of those religions, and then she went up to him and said, you're a Baha'i. She said, you're a Baha'i. I said, what's a Baha'i? She said, you're just as interested in the other man's religion as your own. I said, that is so. Meet Mrs. Grant Duff. And I passed her on because I wanted to shake hands with the other people waiting to thank me. And she followed me up, lent me books, and I went back this time to Nigeria. He read those books and was inspired by them. The faith was, I think, his primary inspiration. He talks about his meeting with the Guardian as the most significant moment in his life. Then, in 1929, St. Barb was in the Holy Land to promote tree planting. He visited Haifa, where he first met Shoghi Effendi. He arrived at the House of Aadva Baha, and the Guardian came out and met him at his car and handed him an envelope, which was the first life membership of the Men of the Trees. So the Guardian was their first member, and then supported him throughout the rest of the Guardian's life. I found in his archives there are 31 letters from the Guardian to St. Barb Baker, and he really did help him in many ways. Today, the International Tree Foundation is in the midst of an ambitious plan. By 2024, the centenary of the organization's founding, it aims to plant 20 million trees in and around Kenya's highland forests. The Foundation also runs the annual Trees Journal. Nicola Lee Doyle, who today compiles the journal, explains. It started in 1936, and it's the longest-running environmental journal in the world. Originally, it was created because it seemed that St. Barb just got so many letters and invites and correspondence, and he was telling people constantly where he was going to be, what he was going to be talking about. So they needed a way to just give everybody the information, and then that's kind of where it started. But then it started having, like, a picture of a nice tree, and then nice little articles about the alphabet of trees. Aspen would be one of the first ones, but then he'd write a short poem about it, and he went right away through. St. Barb's influence lives on not only in the International Tree Foundation and the Trees Journal, but also in the countless people he has influenced. I found there were people who are fairly significant people in the conservation movement who were influenced by him. They really credited him as the person who kind of started them on their path. And then some of these people, like people like Tony Renato, who started Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration in Niger, where they've now restored 12 million acres of desert using these methods, says it directly links to his inspiration that he got from Richard St. Barb Baker. He was visiting a farm with his father, and there was a big pile of books in a shed, he noticed. And on top of the pile, there was a book by Richard St. Barb Baker, and it was called Sahara Challenge. And he picked up that book and read it and decided right away to become a forester and went on to become one of the most effective people in desert reclamation in the world. And another guy who's really quite interesting is Scott Poynton. And Scott started something called the Forest Trust, and their work is really trying to get, let's say, industries like the furniture industry to use sustainable forest products and going through the whole supply chain for many different industries now. This is a very significant movement in terms of protecting and making forests sustainable. And again, he said his inspiration was hearing an interview when he was a 15-year-old of St. Barb Baker's talking in Australia about trees. And again, he said, no, I'm going to become a forester, and he did. And this really had a significant impact. So there's quite a few people like that, and there's kind of this ripple effect from some of these small endeavors that St. Barb had to travel the world, give interviews, and really to enquant people with this whole perspective on trees. There's this fundamental idea that forests and people go together. That's Paul Aird, the International Tree Foundation's programs manager. Forests is not something, which it was in his time, it's worth thinking back to when he started in Kenya as a colonial forest officer that was by definition an authoritarian, top-down role where you enforced rules and kept people out of forests which belonged to governments. And he was extraordinary in that he broke through that and saw that fundamentally these forests belonged to the people of Kenya and that you needed to work with the people to conserve the forest. That is a very big message. That was a short report on the life of environmental activist, New Zealand resident, and Baha'i Richard St. Barb Baker, provided by the Baha'i World News Service. That's our special show for today. Our music came from Stefan Brown's delightful CD, The Angelic Way, and Michael Jackson's Earth Song from Rupert Parker's CD, Harp Beat. Thanks for listening. Different races you may be Like the waves upon the sea A living synchronicity Of unity and diversity Unity is human being Together we can all agree Just like one big family We can make it strong I looked at you, you looked at me Got this feeling that we'd agree Hey, there ain't no difference in humanity Just unity and diversity Unity is human being Together we can all agree Just like one big family We can make it strong Unity is you and me Together we can all agree Just like one big family We can make it strong We can make it strong We can make it strong We can make it strong We can make it strong

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