Severine | Point Chevalier, Auckland 

“I feel brave to always pick up the rubbish in Pasadena Intermediate or around my neighbourhood, so they don’t go into the stream. It’s tiring. Nobody really encourages you to do it, but I can see the long-term.

It’s necessary to do that, and I feel quite brave to not abandon it, and constantly do it. I cannot not do it. I see it, I pick it up. I hope to inspire my children to be brave in that kind of bravery. I know that we over-consume plastic, and there is quite a bit of wind in New Zealand and a lot of coast, and everything ends up in the sea. I’m concerned, because that’s the lungs of the earth, so first you need air, after a minute you die, maybe after you need water. We talk about the shortage of water. We rarely talk about air, but the air is purified because of the plankton in the sea, and so we need to look after our ocean. That’s what triggers me, I’m quite aware, but a lot of people follow people like Greta Thunberg who made me much more aware of it. It’s not going better. It’s just going worse, and we don’t talk about it in New Zealand. We’re very happy. We’re in a little bubble of happiness, but we are interdependent. What’s happening on the other side of the world in Chernobyl or in Fukushima happens here. It just takes a bit longer. We all have to do something, and more, actually. So, that will be the real bravery, because being brave and saving your kid who doesn’t know how to swim, everybody does it. You plunge. You take the child. You’re a hero, but the real bravery, it’s the endurance of changing things. That’s how I see things.

So I’m, as you can maybe hear, I’m French, and spent 30 years happily in Europe and then I wanted to travel a bit further, and I came away. So, I had friends in Noumea. I went to Australia. I went to New Zealand, fell in love with the country first, and then fell in love with a Kiwi guy. I’m still with the Kiwi guy, and in love. I became a teacher, but I would really like to teach ecology. I’m just a home-maker. I’m a real woman in the sense that I do a lot of things that I don’t earn money for, but I quite like taking care of children. So that’s what I like to do, taking care of children, taking care of nature, taking care of older people. The people who need me the most, and I love the beginning and the end of life, because it’s not more intense, but more precious. 

I’ve got two girls, and they’re now 15 and 13, and I take them to pick up rubbish with me and they are very happy to tell me, oh Mum I cleaned up this or that. And, it’s always something I will value. I would love one to be working for Sea Shepherd for example, and I would love the other one to be also an activist. That would be the career I will value the most. The rest doesn’t seem so necessary. I don’t know what they will do, but I will certainly push it if I can.”