About me

Tramping (hiking) is my greatest passion. I tend to pick a high spot with a tarn, and stay there as long as I can before the weather packs in. I've grown to love New Zealand's native flora and fauna. I've studied and worked in conservation, but mostly I've been a writer. Before that I programmed a lot of Flash websites (remember those?). Filmmaking is new to me. I like it a lot.

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
—Gus Speth, prolific environmental lawyer and advocate

Gus sums up my general frustrations and hopes perfectly. This environmental mess we're in can't be cleaned up unless we change the way we look at things, the way we value them and each other. The way I see it, questions regarding emotion, perspective and experience are key to finding a sustainable future — one that's worth living, anyway.

I don't think this film will save the world. It's simply another voice in the crowd. It's my voice. If it inspires a few people to spend more time just 'being' in nature, that's neat.

Before I embarked on my studies, I had various unformed thoughts about human-nature relationships, and their influence on environmental crises. I had snippets of knowledge, but I had no idea how much academic research had already been done. Discovering that work was like the dream where you find a secret room in your house. So many journal articles, books and entire disciplines I hadn't known existed had been sitting there all along. It's fascinating and encouraging. It would help if they were all open access, but that's a gripe for another time.

I thank Gianna Savoie, my supervisor, for giving me the room and encouragement to go down the rabbit hole of human-nature connection research and for her invaluable support as I made the film.

Lauren Schaer