What Do We Already Have That We Haven't Counted?

A story about community, imagination, and the quiet abundance hiding in plain sight

The most radical thing I've discovered running resilience workshops across Waikato isn't how unprepared people are. It's how much they already have and how completely we've been taught not to see it.

While we fixate upon headlines about petrol prices, food prices and energy bills, people are dying as global powers fight to protect the flow of wealth from oil. A product and non-renewable resource that Big Oil companies need us to believe in as an ingredient essential to every element of our lives. A core component of a global economy that has never given us food, shelter, clean air, clean water, healthcare or the tools of liberation.

Our discomfort is real. Our fear of not having enough is real, and if we’re honest with ourselves both monotonously predictable and unimaginative at the same time. The crisis that is being shouted at us from the news, the one that is telling us that our systems are strained and demand is growing and food prices will continue to rise, is relaying the messages of a campaign laid out years ago by the think tanks that need us to ignore climate change, capitalism and colonialism.

What We’ve Been Living With

Back in 2021 and 2022, I delivered a couple of scenario workshops, we were working on a pilot program to build climate resilience in Community organisations and local enterprises. The opening scenario was simple and deliberate: a lone tanker from Singapore carries Aotearoa’s fuel supply. It doesn’t arrive. From midnight tonight, fuel is rationed to prioritise ambulances, fire engines, police, public transport only. Your organisation has none.

People exhaled slowly when I read it aloud. Some laughed nervously. A few said, we have been here before, it’s lockdown again.

What struck me then was that the scenario wasn’t really about fuel. It was a door into a much larger conversation about dependency and how we’ve outsourced our food systems, our health infrastructure, our sense of what’s possible without a car, and, yes, even now, we’re outsourcing our own imagination to AI assistants that exist with every app we favour. It showed us that we’ve stopped noticing what we already have.

Naomi Klein wrote it plainly and confirmed what we already knew. We’ve known it for decades, and we kept going because the alternative felt too large and too hard to break down into SMART goals and tasks.

The Foretold Future

I wrote a scenario that has become the news, and yes, it’s a wry feeling.

The fuel wars were foretold in books, in films, in the grim logic of extractive capitalism stretched past its own limits. Mad Max wasn’t a fantasy. It was a direction of travel. Elysium wasn’t science fiction. It was class analysis in a spacesuit, the wealthy literally lifting off from a planet they had bled, while everyone else made do on the carcass.

Kim Stanley Robinson spent years mapping this in The Ministry for the Future, a novel that imagines the decades ahead with brutal clarity. He wrote:

And also, with a precision that feels like a gift:

Enough as a human right, enough is a feast. It is a reframe of what abundance actually means in our day to day.

The Campaign to Make Sure We Couldn’t Imagine It

I have recently re-read This Changes Everything (Klein), and again it is a reminder that the narrative environment we find ourselves in is intentional, carefully shaped for the interests of Fossil Fuel Industries and the supply chains now beholden to them. It really changes how you read the last thirty years.

Naomi Klein walked into the Heartland Institute’s annual climate denial conference and asked its head, Joseph Bast, a simple question: how did he get interested in climate change? He told her plainly. They had realised, he said, that if the science was true, it would give governments justification for almost any regulation they wanted. So they took another look at the science.

This was not confusion. This was not a genuine scientific dispute. This was a deliberate, decades-long, well-funded campaign and as Klein concluded:

The privatisation, austerity, deregulation and extraction. The entire edifice of an economic order is built on the premise that individuals consume, markets provide, and governments both get out of the way and provide band aids for the damage. All of this is because if climate change were real, then a collective response would be necessary, and a collective response is the one thing that the privatisation model cannot survive.

So they spent fifty years making sure we couldn’t imagine it by funding think tanks that ran the conferences where, as Klein witnessed, the deniers literally laughed at the prospect of extinction. They shaped the media cycle, narrowed the Overton window, and ensured that any politician who suggested we might need to fundamentally reorganise how we live could be dismissed as a socialist, a dreamer, an enemy of freedom.

The petrol price headline is the latest chapter of that story. Keep people focused on the cost at the pump. Keep the conversation personal, economic, individual and fear-based. Keep them scrolling. Keep them angry at the price, not at the system that made the price inevitable.

Because the moment people stop scrolling and start talking to each other across fences and between organisations and in community halls with a whiteboard the narrative breaks. Community cohesion is not just a nice outcome of resilience work. It is, structurally, a form of resistance to the story that was built to keep us apart.

What Cannot Be Changed From Here

I think we need to be honest about what we cannot do.

We cannot immediately stop the wars being fought over fossil fuel routes. We cannot redirect the logic of global capitalism from our kitchen tables. We cannot compel policymakers who have consistently chosen short-term economic comfort over long-term ecological sanity to suddenly find courage.

Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) has named this clearly, writing that

The petrol price is one of those fires. Real enough. Worth attending to. And also a distraction from the arsonist.

The arsonist is an economic system that treats the atmosphere as a free waste dump, that extracts from communities until they break, that has built a globalised supply chain so fragile that a single tanker rerouted by geopolitics can tip a nation into crisis.

Dr Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa), one of Aotearoa’s sharpest voices on climate justice and tika transition, has argued consistently that climate change cannot be separated from questions of sovereignty, Te Tiriti, and who holds authority to make decisions about land and resources. A just response to climate change asks who gets to design the future, and whose knowledge counts.

You cannot talk about climate change without talking about land. You cannot talk about land without talking about who it was taken from, and how.

What Has Already Changed

I have watched what happens in rooms full of community workers, iwi representatives, educators, health workers, and neighbourhood organisers across the Waikato.

When you remove the question “what should the government do?” and replace it with “what do you already have?” our conversation shifts.

A retired nurse who knows about food as medicine. A kuia whose knowledge of rongoā has never formally been asked for. A block of ten neighbouring businesses that have never once spoken to each other about their shared interests. A community garden that’s been quietly running for eleven years and has never been mapped as infrastructure. A cargo bike in someone’s garage. A WhatsApp group that becomes, within seventy-two hours of a crisis, the most functional supply chain in a two-kilometre radius.

We have always been living with more than we thought, are more capable than we believe and less alone than the isolation of modern consumer life has made us feel.

Covid showed us this. Climate events confirmed it. And now, as the fuel wars arrive, we are being invited again to reconnect, test our neighbourhood relationships, look for opportunities to connect, walk down the street and greet people as we pass by. The simplest and most direct route to community cohesion.

From Sufficiency to Abundance

Most resilience frameworks stop at sufficiency by asking, “Do we have enough to get through?”

I think the more interesting question is: “what becomes possible here that wasn’t possible before?”

That’s the shift from sufficiency to abundance in the human sense that is connection, reciprocity, knowledge flowing between people who had no reason to talk before the crisis made them neighbours and peers in a local community.

It is not so much to ask and offer in community it is, quietly and subversively, everything.

We are already living with the unknown. We are already talking amongst ourselves, making amendments, adjusting how we grow food and get around and look after each other ahead of, and often despite, our policymakers.

The lessons of Covid. The lessons of climate. The lessons now arriving from the fracturing of the global economic order that books and films warned us about are all pointing us in the same direction - toward each other.

Resources:

https://tinangata.com/author/tinangata/

https://www.metuauru.co.nz/

https://matikemai.maori.nz/

https://www.goeco.org.nz/climate-resilience