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Episode:
35
Miriama Kamo: The Journey and Joy of Zero Waste, Sustainability, and Te Ao Māori
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This week, we are joined by someone truly multi-talented. Miriama Kamois an award-winning broadcaster, TV presenter, face of Sunday, author,and a hardcore environmentalist.
I was a little intimidated havinganother legitimate, professional journalist on the show, but Miriama is just soincredibly kind, warm, and generous. I think you’ll be fascinated by how herupbringing has shaped her environmental mindset and just how committed she isto sustainability.
In this episode, she shares:
Key Quotes:
“Just make whatever differenceyou can, every single little thing does matter.”
“Everything I’ve done in my sustainability journey has given me pleasure or even great joy.”
More about Miriama
Her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miriamakamo/
You can get involved with the podcast online
Find our full podcast via the website here: https://www.nowthatswhaticall.com/green
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowthatswhaticallgreen/
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For our latest big project, find out more about Incrediballs here: https://incrediballs.com/
Brianne
0:00:00
Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host,Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excitedabout our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to makingthe world a better place, without the judgment and making it fun. And ofcourse, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we shareour
Brianne
0:00:24
planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or notso green, you have come to the right place. Today I'm very excited to bring onMiriama Kamo, who of course you will know as the award-winning broadcaster, TVpresenter, she's the face of Sunday, but she's also an author and a prettyhardcore environmentalist. Today we're going to talk about the impact of herupbringing on her zero-waste life philosophy and how she handles that in quitea high-profile life
Brianne
0:00:55
Welcome, Miriama. Thank you so much for joining me. It is a little bitstressful having an actual proper journalist on the call, I'll be honest. Butthank you for joining me anyway. So everybody knows who you are, obviously, butcontext is good. I know you grew up in Ōtutahi Christchurch and then you movedpretty quickly into journalism.
Brianne
0:01:15
What was your career trajectory like? Did you always want to be a journalist?
Miriama
0:01:17
So I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to do all sorts of things when I wasgrowing up. I wanted to be an artist and a teacher. Fashion designer wasanother one. But all the way through, the sort of abiding passion was readingand writing.
Miriama
0:01:32
And so I thought that I would become a writer of books and plays and movies andthings like that. And it wasn't until I was in university and trying to thinkabout the next step. My sister was already at broadcasting school. She didradio. And she said, you know, if you want to do writing, you might enjoy doingjournalism. So why don't you come here and do the journalism course?
Miriama
0:01:54
And I was like, oh, okay, so I did that. And did a year of it. And then a fewof us got a job straight out of school at the end of that year on a new kid'sshow which was called Get Real.
Brianne
0:02:05
The science one?
Miriama
0:02:06
Yeah, Science and Discovery. Yeah, yeah. There used to be a show called Beyond2000 and people of my age, you don't know it, do you?
Brianne
0:02:14
I loved Beyond 2000. I don't think anything has come true. I remember sitting,my dad and I would sit every, I don't know what morning it appeared or where oranything. I just remember how awesome it was. So was it like that?
Miriama
0:02:23
Yeah, yeah. It was meant to be a bit like a New Zealand version of Beyond 2000.So discovery and entertainment, but education and lots of strands, like theplanet strand. There was the exciting sort of going out and doing fun stufflike getting on a four-wheel bike and that kind of thing. So there were allsorts of strands in this thing.
Miriama
0:02:45
There were about seven of them, I think. And it was awesome. It was such agreat baptism into TV.
Brianne
0:02:50
Yeah, yeah, I bet it was. It would be such a cool thing to bring science andsort of that experience to younger audience. I'm a little bit scared of kids. Idon't have any of my own. But so my contribution to every child I know
Brianne
0:03:04
gets science-related presents every month or so. So I'm quietly manipulatingthem into being scientists of some description.
Miriama
0:03:11
Well, we need that, that's good.
Brianne
0:03:12
We do, we do, we do. Now, we have talked a little bit, because you and I havemet a few times before, and we've talked a little bit about your journey intote reo and your immersion learning, education. I thought before we kicked off alittle bit into some of the other stuff, it'd be interesting to understand someof that and how you've been finding it.
Miriama
0:03:28
Sure. So, I'm a full-time student at the moment of Te Reo Māori, so, immersionsetting at Te Wānanga o Takiura in Auckland, and that's every day, Monday toFriday, 9am to 3pm, just like a regular school kid. Yep, I go to school andit's just fantastic.
Miriama
0:03:51
But I grew up in Te Ao Māori, so I grew up in the Māori world in Christchurch,and everything about me, everything about my whānau was Māori. That was ourcomplete and utter worldview, everything was Māori in my world. And so I grewup very comfortable in my identity. The only thing that was painful for me wasthat I couldn't kōrero Māori, and I didn't really feel the pain of thatprobably until I left high school because I was pretty much
Miriama
0:04:17
in a bubble the whole time. I was with people who had about the same facilitiesI did in the reo, some better, some worse, and we all just sort of grew updoing our best, but we're all very much immersed in kapahaka and going to ourmarae and that kind of thing. So it didn't feel like a big gap until I leftthat nest, until I left that safe place and went to university.
Miriama
0:04:42
Suddenly I was like, oh gosh, I really would love to learn the reo. So, for myentire life it seems, I've been a student of the reo and never quite nailed it.A lot of that comes down to, we recognise now, language trauma. When you have asense of expectation, a sense of burden that you should succeed, that youshould have this thing that you don't have, it can really block you. Yeah, sowhen you have language trauma, it can really block your progress.
Miriama
0:05:10
I really realised what that meant when I went to Germany about 15 years ago forthe first time. And within the first week, I had a few hundred words and Icould have quite basic conversations with people. And I thought, why is this soeasy? I now have in one week, not much less than I have in total in te reoMāori. And so, yeah, doing more investigation, interrogation of that,discovered, okay, well, this is what this is about. This is language trauma.I'm not getting it because there's too much loaded on it.
Miriama
0:05:38
So yeah, it's been a real journey, but doing it this year as in an immersionsetting has been awesome, revolutionary.
Brianne
0:05:46
Yeah, I've been trying to learn and I know more than I will ever say becauseI'm terrified of saying it. I'm terrified of I don't know what. I'm obviouslynot saying it is remotely equitable at all, but language is so much morecomplicated than just learning how to speak a language.
Brianne
0:06:06
There's so much more to it. Which does bring me to the bigger piece I wanted totalk about, which is te ā Māori.
Brianne
0:06:14
So it's the way of looking at the world. It's the Māori world view that youtalked about before. You grew up in it. Now I've read a few books about it.What is it to you?
Miriama
0:06:24
It's such a good question. I mean, it's my complete identity. Although I have aPākehā mum, and I'm very proud to be Pākehā, she raised her five children tohave this Māori worldview. For her, Māoridom was very important. Hermother-in-law, my nana, my dad's mum, was extremely important to my mother andshe
Miriama
0:06:43
helped shape and my mother says even save her. They had a kind of inversion ofthe stereotype where my Māori whānau was very tight and secure and my motherdidn't enjoy quite the same security as my father had in his Māori whānau.She's got a beautiful family too, but it just wasn't as functional as the Māoriwhānau. And so for her, Te Ao Māori was a lifesaver. And so she also justnaturally had a Te Tiriti worldview.
Miriama
0:07:12
And so for her, it was very natural to bring her children up in te ao Māori. Sowhat does it mean to me growing up? I don't know if I would have been able toexplain it because it just is who I am and what we did. We went to the marae,we had hāngi, we went to tangi, we went to hui, we naturally understood what apartnership should be. We could recognise racism because it happened to us alot. We were taught to fight and advocate for things Māori, for inequity of anysort, actually. My parents were very big social justice warriors.
Miriama
0:07:44
And te ao Māori, you know, it's a really interesting question to ask becauseactually within it, I like to say we are a people, but we're not the sameperson. So within te ao Māori, there is as much a diversity of views as thereis in any other culture. And so the expression of your Māoritanga, yourMāoriness, is different for every single person. But there's some lovely commonvalues that we tend to share,
Miriama
0:08:11
things like having a collective view instead of an individual one, theimportance of reanga, of whakapapa, of nurturing generations, of having thatforward view, you know, we're building for the future, not for ourselves, oflooking back to our tupuna, of caring about what the stories are that unite us,of observing tikanga and kawa, however, respecting at the same time that theyare different for every iwi, hapu and whānau.
Miriama
0:08:37
The other thing that might help explain a little bit how te ao Māori works isthat Māori is just a word that just means normal or natural, and we use it inthat context too, he wai Māori, you know, water, it's just normal water. Sothis became a word that was used to express we are the indigenous people, weare quite normal and natural people, and these people who have come into thecountry, they're different to us, so they're not Māori. But what was reallyimportant about the
Miriama
0:09:04
structure in Māoridom was hapū, really, and that's in the Treaty as well, itrefers to hapū rather than iwi. So hapū and whānau are really, reallyimportant. And the way that we express our view of Māori is different acrossall of those hapū and all of those whānau. And iwi are a really powerfulexpression of those hapū coming together to work together on a common cause.
Brianne
0:09:27
It's a hard thing to sort of explain, but it's just nice, right? It's the waywe should be about so many things. A lot of us have such individualistic waysof looking at things, and yet so many cultures around the world do not. It'sjust nice. It is. It's just really a trite thing to say to try and encapsulatethat.
Miriama
0:09:45
No, I get what you mean. It sounds healthy and it sounds normal and natural andMāori, you know, but a lot of non-Māori organisations, for example, work inthat way. I grew up in a Christian family movement, and it was called CFM,Christian Family Movement, families were encouraged to join in their faith andsupport each other, work together. So, for example, in our movement of CFM,there were four families. We were the only Māori whānau.
Miriama
0:10:13
Oh, no, there's a little bit of Māori in another one, but primarily Pākehā. Andwe operated very much with a collective worldview, which could easily be seenas a Māori worldview, but wasn't. And that was that we built each other'shouses, we looked after each other's kids. Those families, their kids are likemy cousins. There's lots of expressions of collectivism that we see inMāoridom, but there's lots of expressions
Miriama
0:10:38
of that outside of te ao Māori as well. And they are, they're lovely. When theyare healthy and they're working well, they can be very life-giving.
Brianne
0:10:49
A word I use a lot on this pod is kaitiaki, right? Which I would be correct insaying guardian.
Miriama
0:10:55
Yeah.
Brianne
0:10:55
In a multitude of different... I use it in the way we, in my opinion, we arehere to be guardians of the world and everybody and everything that lives onit, which we are doing a truly appalling job of by and large. Although I liketo think we are moving in the right direction.
Miriama
0:11:10
I think we have to believe that. We have to hope, you know, otherwise there'sno hope. We have to have hope.
Brianne
0:11:16
Yeah, and you only need to look at, you know, the things that are moving in theright direction to have a little bit of that hope, right? And that's what I'mgoing with. Yeah, that's how I sort of try and approach things. Is thisworldview, do you think this has helped your, shaped your opinion onsustainability? Because you go a lot broader than a lot of other people in yourposition, that’s why I wanted
Brianne
0:11:35
to talk to you, and you try and infiltrate it throughout your entire life.
Miriama
0:11:39
I haven't thought about it being broader. In what sense?
Brianne
0:11:42
A lot of people who talk about sustainability will concentrate on one facet andI appreciate why and it's not to knock that at all because it's very difficultto do, but you try and talk about it across all facets. You talk aboutsustainable fashion, you talk about the zero waste things you use in your homeand I know that you, I've stalked to you obviously before this interview andsome of your interviews, you've talked about how you sort of try and apply theidea of having less impact holistically throughout your life.
Brianne
0:12:05
And I just wonder where that comes from. People ask me all the time why I'm anenvironmentalist and I don't know how to answer that question. I just am. Is itthe same for you? You just are?
Miriama
0:12:15
It's taken me a while to accept the term environmentalist for myself because Ithink, you know, we always think we're not doing enough. Do I deserve thattitle? I don't know.
Brianne
0:12:24
Oh my God, everyone does the same thing.
Brianne
0:12:25
And then I put it in my LinkedIn title and I was like, oh my God, everyone'sgoing to laugh at me.
Brianne
0:12:30
And then no one said anything.
Miriama
0:12:31
Whereas actually, it fits you perfectly. I just think one of the things that'sbeen really important in my sustainability journey is recognising joy withinthat journey. And it wasn't something that I expected when I first mindfullystarted on. I mean, we grew up in a very sustainable, sort of sustainablyminded fashion. My mother was, I like to say she was zero waste, OG, you know,without realising
Miriama
0:12:53
that she was operating in that way. And she really was. Like when I look back,I'm like, Jesus, she was amazing. And I didn't really think that when I startedon this journey that it was something I was doing for joy. It actually waspreceded by about two or three years of extreme anxiety.
Miriama
0:13:10
And you know, we're going the wrong way, everything's going to come to an end,my children are going to die, I'll never have grandchildren, if they come it's going to be a miserable world for them and what if I have to watch the crumbling of the – it was really, really quite extreme anxiety. Then just sort of randomly decided and I don't think I thought of it as any kind of cure at all, I didn't connect the two things but I just decided one New Year's Eve,here's a cool resolution, something called zero waste, I don't know what that is, I'll give it a go for a month because I always try to do
Miriama
0:13:38
something each new year just because it's fun to do it. It was really hard to begin with, but what I found was it kept connecting me to all these avenues of joy that I just really had not thought about before. The anxiety is no longer there. I'm still deeply concerned, but it doesn't keep me awake at night. Infact, I go to sleep very easily and I sleep well.
Miriama
0:14:00
I don't have the crippling anxiety and I am able to put things in their place now and accept that there are things that I can't control. What I can control is what I do. So I like to share the stories of the things that I have enjoyed doing on this journey. I don't leave anything out that isn't joyful because there isn't anything. Everything that I've done in the sustainability journey has given me pleasure or even great
Miriama
0:14:22
joy and simple things like, oh gosh, look at that beautiful sunset, you know?Or the biggest surprise to me was I stopped being frightened of spiders and creepy crawlies because I was like, oh, they're just part of the planet. Oh. Okay,cool.
Miriama
0:14:38
So it's amazing once you start suddenly, you know, like, oh, I'm baking things.Oh, look at how well this has turned out. Right now, like what I'd like to say is that I seem to have done the whole thing in chapters and as I've gone along, I've kept the last chapter but added another one.
Miriama
0:14:52
So it's things like, you know, the second hand clothes or the second hand furniture and then making rules around that. Okay, I'm only ever going to buy second hand and then because I don't want to leave out local artisans, if it's new, it has to be local. I get tested on that quite a lot and I have passed the test, I'd like to say. But yeah, it is quite testing because you see amazing things that you'd love to have but you're like,
Miriama
0:15:14
okay, but no, I can't. I've made this call that I'm for the planet and for my grandchildren, I am not going to do anything but buy second hand or local. Right now, my obsession is amazingly to me is gardening. Like I just think about all the time and I have never loved gardening. So, you know, I started this journey in 2018, so it took me this long to get to gardening. I'm obsessed.
Miriama
0:15:38
I love it.
Brianne
0:15:39
Yeah, you do become all about it, don't you? It's weird. I bought a pretty neglected lifestyle block a couple of years ago and it was just an estate and for two years I was gardening personality. That was all I was thinking about, how many holes I had to dig that weekend, whether the calluses on my hands would have firmed up yet, and what I needed to plant and I just
Brianne
0:15:57
became this person who's obsessed with it. And you're right. You do go, I've never been too bad with general insects, but spiders have always terrified the day lights out of me. And now I can entertain, I can be in a room with one. I'll move it outside.
Miriama
0:16:08
Yeah, I don't need to smash it or get someone to kill it.
Brianne
0:16:12
No, and I'm trying to get that across to other people is how important they are. And I love that approach of joy. That's very much, again, what Ethically Kate does actually, that there is this prevailing opinion that sustainability is giving stuff up.
Brianne
0:16:23
And look, let's be frank about it. We can't continue to live the way so many of us do, so there is an element of change, but it doesn't have to be bad.
Miriama
0:16:31
Yeah, I like that you said that, change, not sacrifice. Yes, and I think that's important, a really important reframe of things. Yeah, because I've been saying, you sacrifice some things, but you gain so much more, but actually I think change is when you change things and you get much more. Yeah, it's actually quite satisfying. You're not giving anything away because it returns twofold, tenfold to you.
Miriama
0:16:55
A hundred percent. Decency, goodness and fun, all of that.
Brianne
0:16:58
Yeah. There is nothing better than standing outside in my growing food forest now. It's so much cooler than a new pair of shoes. We all know that happiness doesn't come from things we buy. We fall in the trap every now and then. No one's perfect, but it is so much nicer.
Brianne
0:17:13
So what is zero waste? For those, I've never talked about it on here, so what is zero waste to you? Because it has different meanings to different people.
Miriama
0:17:20
I mean, basically, it's in the name. You want to create and generate zero waste. In Te Reo Māori, it's parakore, and there's the parakore movement, which is amazing. And those who practice parakore, you know, they're educators, they go around marae helping set up food waste systems, that kind of thing, their mahi is incredible. In English it's the same, of course, zero waste, the samesort of mahi. For me, though, it's really important that I don't paint myselfas any kind of, you know,
Miriama
0:17:50
I'm not perfect at this, I'm not a saint of zero waste. For me, it's an aspirational goal. I think when I think I'm not doing enough, what I try to remember to do is look back at myself pre-2018 and then I realise, oh yeah,actually I've come a long way and I don't recognise how far I've come because I've normalised all those things in my life.
Miriama
0:18:08
However, there's still a lot of work to do. And yeah, so what it is for me isan aspiration. Create as little waste as you possibly can. Things like making sure that you, you know, Ethique for example, buy beauty bars, buy things that leave no further product or residue
Miriama
0:18:25
or mark on the planet. Use it all up. So all of my makeup, for example, comes in glass jars and my skincare comes in glass. Now glass has its own problems to deal with afterwards as well, but it's not harmful in the way that plastic is.So, switch things out, change things around, minimise, deny yourself things that you kind of want but don't need. Deny, that's probably the wrong word. ButI actually get some pleasure out of denying myself sometimes.
Miriama
0:18:55
Like, yeah, but you don't need that. Oh, yeah, I don't. Oh, that just would have been another thing for me.
Brianne
0:19:00
Yeah, my base humor and instincts.
Miriama
0:19:03
But it's just kind of as much as you can simplify things.
Brianne
0:19:08
I like that, simplifying. So you're not necessarily going without, you're not sacrificing, you're simplifying. Yeah. And that's much nicer. Yeah. Because one of my questions is going to be if you don't mind talking about what you don't
Brianne
0:19:19
do or haven't been able to do yet because you do here in this zero waste world,you get a lot of, I don't know, I think of a nicer way to say cattiness and there is a lot of judgment and environmentalism in general, right? Yeah. So the key is there is no such thing as a perfect environmentalist, there's no such thing as a perfect person or a perfect zero waster.
Brianne
0:19:37
What have you found hard? Is there something that you haven't been able to...
Miriama
0:19:38
Well, quite a few things. Like, for example, I was talking to a friend recently who said, so your undies, they're secondhand, are they? And I was like, oh…
Miriama
0:19:53
And so there's things that I'm not going to change, you know. So actually,Ethically Kate put this really brilliant post up recently saying thank you so much to all the people who leave the bike at home but drive their electric car somewhere. You know, like...
Brianne
0:20:07
Yes, the vegans who fly every week. Yeah.
Miriama
0:20:10
Yes, it was a great... Basically just saying thank you to all those who do things imperfectly because we really need everybody trying and sure, doing things imperfectly. And now I saw this other great post that was like, what difference can I make? I'm just one person. Oh, yeah, well, what if 8 billion people all did? You know, things, tried a little,
Miriama
0:20:29
you'd make such a huge change. So the things I don't do, I mean, it's things like undies, sheets, I try to only buy linen, natural fibers, they have to belocal, not bought in plastic, you know, now a lot of sheets come in fabric bags, which is great. I mean, there'll be tons of things that I'm not doing well, but I can't think off the top of my head. But as we go along, I'll share more examples.
Brianne
0:20:56
But it is very refreshing to say or to hear, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that, I'm not gonna buy secondhand underwear, ew. I do recommend Nisa if you're looking for, do you know who Nisa are?
Miriama
0:21:06
No.
Brianne
0:21:07
They're an amazing organisation in Wellington. They work with refugee women.Yeah. So a lot of their seamstresses are refugee women. They just did a crowdfunding round to keep the business, I guess, afloat for lack of a better term.
Brianne
0:21:20
But everything is fair trade sourced, fairly made, ethically made, and it's just beautiful clothing. So a really lovely story.
Miriama
0:21:26
Brilliant. Thank you so much for telling me that. That's really great.
Brianne
0:21:29
N-I-S-A.
Miriama
0:21:30
N-I-S-A.
Brianne
0:21:31
Excellent. So let's talk about sustainable fashion because this is another thing. And this, for me, is the most impressive angle, I think, for you,because you are the MC at every event I ever go to, I swear to God, which is awesome, because you always make it, and I'm not blowing smoke, but you always make it a really warm, kind feeling, particularly like the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards. I don't like black-tie awards, I always feel awkward and uncomfortable,
Brianne
0:21:55
and you and the way you just open it, and it's just nice, you have a warm feeling. But you do have to wear black-tie dresses, right? You do have to have a certain level of look going on. How do you make that more sustainable?
Miriama
0:22:12
Well, Kiri Nathan is one of my best friends. I go to her for nearly everything.In fact, I think there's two people I go for. Kiri Nathan, the other one is Tarek Knuefermann from TK Store, and I get really any black-tie cocktail dress-ups from them. All right. Yeah. That's easy.
Miriama
0:22:32
Yeah. It is really easy. And then in terms of, I go to them too for day clothes. Shjark is amazing. They're just up the corner from my house actually.Shjark.
Miriama
0:22:42
Shark, yes, S-H-J-A-R-K, yep, with a J in it, Shark with a J in it. Oh gosh,now I'm probably going to forget people if I start reeling.
Brianne
0:22:51
I know. I don't want people to feel left out. I was going to actually ask you your favorite brands.
Miriama
0:22:56
Yeah, yeah. And these three, I just absolutely love what they do. I love the way they think about their craft, their art, and about the world.
Brianne
0:23:05
Kiri Nathan’s stuff is beautiful.
Miriama
0:23:07
So beautiful, yeah. In fact, everything I wear for New Zealand of the Year is Kiri’s.
Brianne
0:23:11
Oh, right. That's cool. And she was honoured this year, wasn't it? Was it this year?
Miriama
0:23:15
It was earlier this year. Yeah, she was in the top three, yep. She was, yeah.
Brianne
0:23:20
That was very cool.
Miriama
0:23:21
Nothing to do with me, she was voted on.
Brianne
0:23:24
Oh, I hope no one would ever suggest - no, no.
Miriama
No, she’s absolutely just, amazing.
Brianne
What other tips do you have for people who want to build a sustainable wardrobe? Is this like the capsule wardrobe thing that you do?
Miriama
Well, I don't do capsule. No, in fact, arguably, I have way too many clothes. I buy secondhand mostly, and I don't really like going shopping. That's not actually a planetary thing. That's just my preference. I don't really like to go shopping.
Miriama
0:23:50
My poor daughter, she loves it, and her mother doesn't. You know, if I am going to buy something, it's either because I happen to be in the place or I'm walking past it. But if I do want to get something and I don't go to one of my three favourite designers, my first port of call really is going to secondhand boutiques and places like that. And I'm quite good, I think, at just going in and spending no more than half an hour if I decide there are things I want to try out. Usually, I'll know within five minutes
Miriama
0:24:20
whether I'm going to try anything on. If I'm not going to, then I head straight back out again. But yeah, usually, I'll stay in a place that I like for half an hour and I'm quite good at picking fabrics, not needing to pull the thing out to see whether or not it's something I'll want to try on. So I'll go along theracks. If some sort of fabric leaps out at me, then I might pull it out to have a look. But I'm not the sort of person that goes to the rack and looks at everything. I can't be bothered.
Brianne
0:24:46
No, no. I was a big fan of it as a teenager. I hate it now.
Miriama
0:24:51
I hate it. Yeah. And I think once you really get that sustainable focus, it was just there's no appeal in it anymore, is there? Like I can't bear, I've become quite snobby about boutiques that aren't local and aren't secondhand.
Miriama
0:25:04
I just think, oh, if there's more than five versions of that top, no, I'm not interested. It's probably fast fashion and quite possibly made in unfortunate circumstances.
Brianne
0:25:15
Yeah.
Brianne
0:25:16
Of course, Shien and Temu thankfully don't have stores, but I'm sure it's coming.
Miriama
0:25:19
Yeah.
Brianne
0:25:20
Yes. Do you know, they now, there is so much freight going from those two companies alone that they are something like one in every four airliners offreight is almost entirely composed
Brianne
0:25:31
of their stuff.
Brianne
0:25:32
How terrifying is that? They are breaking the international freight system.
Miriama
0:25:35
That's terrible. That's just awful.
Brianne
0:25:37
Yeah. I do understand it's a complicated conversation around fast fashion.
Brianne
0:25:42
I appreciate that.
Brianne
0:25:43
But if you can in any way, please, please avoid it. It's horrendous.
Miriama
0:25:47
Yeah, yeah. And I know what you mean too. You know, for some people, it's the only way they're going to get new clothes.
Brianne
They're not the people we're talking to, though, right?
Miriama
0:25:57
Yeah, it is complicated.
But it's also not necessary. I mean, as I said, my mother bought all of her kids' clothes at the Methodist Mission in Christchurch actually and she'd just bring home a whole bag of clothes on approand we'd choose what we liked and she'd take the rest back and it was just a couple of dollars to clothe her kids.
Brianne
0:26:12
Yeah, I don't know if those, I assume those sorts of things are around and hopefully they are
Miriama
0:26:17
You can still find them. It is harder now that people have managed to monetise and commercialise secondhand. That's a real shame.
Brianne
0:26:25
Which is the downside of secondhand shopping, right?
Miriama
0:26:27
Yeah. And then on top of that, there's so much fast fashion that it's crappy stuff that people don't actually want to have once it's gone through the fashion cycle and it falls apart and then it just winds up in mountains of...
Brianne
0:26:37
Polyester.
Miriama
0:26:38
Yeah.
Brianne
0:26:39
Awfulness.
Brianne
0:26:40
Yeah. Yeah. Going back to your beauty routine, I know you share these and I know you've got some... Genuinely, I don't want you to mention Ethique because this is not an an Ethique endorsement request at all. I don't work there anymore.
Brianne
0:26:49
I have nothing to do with it. Who else, because I know you've recommended, I get asked this a lot, who else do you love and use from Kiwi brands?
Miriama
0:26:58
Okay, so Will&Abel for soaps and laundry liquid. We've got the cleaner, but we don't really use the cleaner, but mainly because we use just hot water and sometimes vinegar or baking soda, but mainly it's just hot water. But Will&Abel is fantastic. What else? In terms of skin care, there are so many amazing Kiwi artisans doing really beautiful stuff.
Miriama
0:27:21
It's really hard to narrow down to any one or two of them, but I'll give it ago. There's Corbin Rd, there's IAMMI, who else is there? Just going through my mind. Aleph is doing great skin care options. Beyond Soap is doing good stuff.And of course, I know you said that you don't necessarily need me to mention it, but Ethique.
Brianne
0:27:40
It's all right.
Miriama
0:27:42
Yeah, there's really great options out there now for people who want to have analternative. There's so many.
Brianne
0:27:50
Yeah, I know the feeling. And you don't want to leave anybody out, so you getslightly stressed when you're thinking about that. I know, it's a horriblequestion to ask, I'm sorry.
Miriama
0:27:56
No, no, all good.
Brianne
0:27:57
You talked about joy, and I really love that reframing of it, but it's probably quite difficult for people who don't see it the same way. So how do you stay motivated to carry on doing this when it is difficult, when you do want the thing in the fast fashion storefront that probably never happens? But when youdo want to do something that's at odds with your core values, how do you stay on track?
Brianne
0:28:23
Or do you let yourself go off track and then let yourself off the hook becausethat's also fine, right?
Miriama
0:28:27
Well, I can give you a good example. So if I see something, you know, like solast year I went to Germany and I saw this beautiful coat that I wanted to buyand I knew that I could buy it because it was a local designer. So I knew I wastechnically able to buy it but I didn't buy it there. And then I came home andI said, I wish I'd bought that coat. I so should have bought that coat.
Miriama
0:28:48
I wish I had it.
Miriama
0:28:49
I wish I had it.
Miriama
0:28:50
And then I looked online and then it was on sale. And I was like, oh, you just buy it, buy it, buy it. And then I was like, you shouldn't because you made this commitment that you wouldn't create unnecessary emissions and you'd buy local. You're not local anymore because you left. And so, what I did was I just let myself look at it for a few weeks and I'd get close to
Miriama
0:29:11
buying it and then I'd go, just hang on again. Let's just give it another breather. And in the end, I just realised I didn't need it. I just ran out ofpuff for it, you know? So I let myself be tempted over and over and over untilI was no longer tempted.
Brianne
0:29:26
Interesting.
Miriama
0:29:27
And it worked really well, yeah.
Brianne
0:29:28
It's like some kind of brain training.
Miriama
0:29:30
Yeah, exactly. Look at the coat, look at it, look at it, look at it. Now, don'tbuy it.
Brianne
0:29:37
So you don't want it anymore. I remember when I was going to school, I don't know, I would have been young, so 12 or 13, and one of my friends was caught with cigarettes and her parents let her smoke like four or five before she felt horrific. Yeah. And she never did again.
Brianne
0:29:50
It's kind of like that, sort of, not really.
Miriama
0:29:51
Yeah, I guess so, yeah, slightly more palatable, but yeah, but I have been tempted and there have been a couple of times where I've come really close to breaking my own rules, really close. And on those occasions, I have just let myself be tempted and just step back. Like, okay, let's take another couple of hours. Let's just see if the feeling is still there.
Miriama
0:30:15
Or let's just take a day or a couple of days. And usually, it all just goes away. You get distracted by something else. And then you realise, oh, yeah, I don't need that. I don't need that. I just don't need it.
Brianne
0:30:25
How many things have turned up in parcels for all of us and we've put it in the wardrobe and we're just so excited to put it in the wardrobe and worn it once. Actually, that happens a lot because the average piece of clothing is worn seven times. And whenever I say that, people are outraged. Just a reminder that your experience doesn't trump statistics.
Miriama
0:30:40
Yeah, that's right.
Brianne
0:30:42
Penultimate question. What would you say to someone who wanted to start on the Zero Waste journey?
Miriama
0:30:48
When I started, I just started and I failed immediately. Like, immediately, within the first hour, I failed. But I had made the call that I was going to do it for one month and I was like, so that's okay. Now you know you need to strategise. So my advice would be just make the decision and begin, you know, and it doesn't matter
Miriama
0:31:06
if you fail. Make a decision that you're going to do it for a week or six months or a year or whatever. Just come up with a timetable in your mind for whatever it is, it might not be zero waste, I'm going to do this planet-friendly thing and I'm going to put a time limit on that. And then after that, I'm going to do whatever the hell I want. And I think what you'll find is what I found, which was I got to the end of the month and
Miriama
0:31:24
I was like, this is so much fun. And why would I want to stop the fun when it'sdoing so much for me and also happens to be doing amazing things for the world?
Brianne
0:31:34
Yeah. When you feel smug, that is instant joy. Smug is a good feeling.
Miriama
0:31:38
There was a lot of being smug. Yeah.
Brianne
0:31:42
I like that.
Brianne
0:31:43
Okay, my final question is my favourite question and I ask everybody this and I won't give people a heads up about this question either because I want your first answer. If you were global supreme overlord and you had the power to do anything you wanted to, what would be the first thing you'd do to make the world a better place?
Miriama
0:31:57
Okay, so immediately what led to mine was compost. Okay. No thought went into that whatsoever. But the reason I think that that was my immediate thought was because so much, you know, half of what comes out of our houses is food waste.
Miriama
0:32:13
So what if we all had compost and we all decided we'd take responsibility for our own waste, what difference could that make?
Brianne
0:32:30
And Project Drawdown would agree with you because food waste is the single most important thing we could change as a household to lower our emissions. So that's a good one. I think you're the first person to say compost.
Miriama
0:32:34
Oh, good. Good. Yeah. I don't think that it would be a wildly popular thing toenforce for the entire world.
Brianne
0:32:39
No, no, it's not. It's not a common one. I'm waiting for someone to say I'd get rid of fossil fuels. Actually, no. No, somebody did. But there's been some interesting ones like ban raisins. That might have been mine.
Miriama
0:32:51
I find it's such a complex thing, isn't it, to, you know, so for example plastics, you know, that actually plastic is in a lot of ways life-saving and fantastic. And so, we don't want to demonise all of plastic, we just want to stop the proliferation of it and the misuse of it and the dumping of it. That's the thing. Same with fossil fuels, you know.
Miriama
0:33:10
So everything, we do things because they actually make sense. And then when they stop making sense, that's when we should stop doing it. So getting rid of all fossil fuels, I don't know if that's the right answer yet. We're not ready for that. We haven't created the systems to allow us to do that without everything cracking around us.
Brianne
0:33:27
Yeah, exactly. And you're right. I think the fastest way to solve the plastic problem would be to put the onus on the companies who produce it to have to dispose of it in a way that's not wasteful, because there'll be more recycling infrastructure very quickly, or they'd stop producing it.
Miriama
0:33:42
Oh boy, they would.
Brianne
0:33:43
Very irritating. Anyway, is there anything else you'd want to tell people about anything you like?
Miriama
0:33:48
Well, now that I'm on the compost vibe, if you can, compost. If you can't, find someone that you can take your compost to. We're actually in a lot of centres now, the councils will pick up food waste, which is really great, but composting at home is the best thing that you can do, you know, rather than even sending it off with your councils. If you can't create a shared space with your community where you can do composting together, and actually in Auckland at Kahumana Farm they
Miriama
0:34:16
had a thing called the Soil Factory and they would come and pick up for a fee your food scraps and then use them on their garden. So there's those sorts of things around the place too. But, yeah, in terms of a wider sort of message, I would just say if you're thinking about it, just do it. Just make what difference you can. Every single little thing does matter.
Miriama
0:34:38
And don't listen to people who say that individuals can't make a difference and actually it's only down to – yes, it's important, very important, that governments and organisations, multinationals, all those big, big levers, they're going to make the biggest difference. However, that doesn't let us off the hook. And every little bit of collective action and individual action makes a huge difference.
Brianne
0:35:00
So very true. And all of those little consumer level actions, if you like, they actually are what tell the government we want.
Miriama
0:35:07
That's it.
Brianne.
0:35:10
Exactly.
Brianne
0:35:11
Beautiful. Thank you so, so much. You have been a pleasure to chat to, as I expected.
Miriama
0:35:16
Thank you.
Brianne
0:35:16
And thank you again. We'll have you on in another six months to see what thenext journey has been.
Miriama
0:35:21
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if I've moved past the gardening.
Brianne
0:35:24
Yes. Or if you'll be even further down the track and be just mad gardener now. Yeah, could be.
Brianne
0:35:29
How cool was that?
Brianne
0:35:30
She is just one of the kindest, nicest people you will ever meet. Honestly, she has this sort of warm vibrancy about her. But what I really loved was two points. Was one, the idea that sustainability is not sacrifice, but joy. Ithink that's such a twist on the whole sacrifice,
Brianne
0:35:50
giving things up thing that dominate the narrative. I also love how honest she is about not being a perfect person. I say it all the time, it's about progress, not perfection. But still you have people in your comment section
Brianne
0:36:00
harassing you because you're not doing enough and you're not perfect. So I love that from her. Thank you again Miriama. Always wonderful to chat. Next week we will of course have another This or That where we will smash different sustainability myths against one another. Smash, quite violent really isn't it? But that's what I feel like it is when I write these scripts at times. See you next week. Till then, kia ora. And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with
Brianne
0:36:28
those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous,but sustainability at its part is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.
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