The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir
The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir by Mike Joy. Bridget Williams Books (2024). RRP: $39.99. PB, 218pp. ISBN: 9781991033840. Reviewed by Tim Jones.
I’ve met Mike Joy, and I’ve heard him speak. He’s a knowledgeable, passionate, and an effective critic of the disastrous effect agribusiness in Aotearoa has had, and continues to have, on that most fundamental of the world’s treasures and our needs: water. I came with some expectation that this book would be well researched, which it is. However I also expected a (rightfully) angry polemic on the fight for freshwater—perhaps, if I’m honest, for it to be a rant. Yet there’s no ranting to be found in this lively page-turner.
The most significant words in the title are ‘A Memoir.’ Joy’s leadership on water quality is given due prominence in the second half of the book, but this is the story of a life. Michael Kevin Joy, born in Nelson in 1959, son of Trev, a policeman, and Bev, who had a ‘full-time job, which was us,’ is a restless and active child who becomes a teenage petrolhead fascinated with guns. No gilded ticket to the heights of academia for young Mike: he leaves school after passing University Entrance and works hard as a forklift driver, storeman, foreman, and farm hand. It’s the latter role where he first encounters the dairy industry. At some point he transfers his mechanical passions from cars to yachts. Taxi driver, antinuclear protestor, Security Intelligence Service (SIS) agent: in my head, these things don’t go together, but in Joy’s life one folds into another. As he says early in the book:
‘During the time living in Palmerston North, I changed from the boy racer with a Ford Zephyr to more of a hippy … I had begun to think more about living sustainably. We often talked of buying some land up the nearby Pohangina Valley and developing a self-sufficient lifestyle.’
We’re almost eighty pages in before Joy decides to go to Massey University, and begins the journey that will transform him into Mike Joy the public figure, scourge of prime ministers and the agribusiness complex that squats across New Zealand politics like a particularly large and ugly toad.
Good stories abound in The Fight for Freshwater. The endless tedium and brief excitements of life in the SIS during the agency’s Penthouse-and-a-pie era are a fascinating read. There’s a stint on Campbell Island, and a grim encounter with animal cruelty in Australia.
As Joy settles into his long-term relationship with Ally, his growing focus on ecology comes to dominate the story. The step into academia isn’t a natural one for this young working-class man, with its stately dance of academic politics, its windy circumlocutions and pointed barbs. He is curious, inventive, hardworking and determined, qualities that bring him to a key role in developing innovative techniques to measure freshwater quality and study the effects of pollutant discharges on freshwater fish. When it becomes clear that agricultural discharges are threatening stream ecology and human health, Joy doesn’t seek to prettify the picture: he publishes his work, he communicates his methods, and he speaks out.
Joy’s bluntness, his career-threatening propensity to say that true things are true and false things are false, is what makes and breaks his academic career. Innovation is all very well, free thinking in the privacy of one’s own mind is to be encouraged—but in an agribusiness university like Massey, you’re supposed to go along to get along, and Joy does not play that game.
He discusses many of his academic colleagues, such as lecturer Dr Russell Death, with respect and gratitude. Steve Maharey, former Vice-Chancellor of Massey University, emerges as a significant figure in these pages, shielding Joy and his work from some of the pressure coming from on high. And Joy’s beef is not with individual farmers.
But the overall trend is clear. Joy’s research makes it overwhelmingly obvious that industrial agriculture is causing fish species to die and water quality to be severely degraded. The big Fs of industrial agriculture—Fonterra, Federated Farmers and the fertiliser companies—gang up against proposals to improve water quality in the Manawatū River. Joy vividly describes the way in which the big players and their hired suits mobilise to bully the ordinary people, NGOs and researchers standing up to protect the water on which life depends:
‘At the One Plan hearings, the agricultural industry groups appeared with well-paid, impressive teams of consultant experts and lawyers. This felt like the usual ugly power imbalance, with me and a few supporters along with NGOs doing their best to represent a very large number of current and future users of the environment, up against a team of extremely well-resourced lawyers and consultants representing a small number of people with a considerable financial stake in the outcome.’
It’s an example of the system working in ways that are all too familiar. In corporate offices, the spin doctors, merchants of denial, delay and deflection, spring to life, manufacturing dissent. Academic managers, given the hard word by their corporate funders, obey their masters’ voice and call the rogue researcher in for meetings. They have concerns, serious concerns. Funding is threatened—and then, when the threats don’t work, funding is withdrawn.
This memoir full of energy and enthusiasm, that bops along with the energy of a thriller, is also the story of a darkening vision. Raised to hold the police in high regard, Joy becomes disillusioned through personal experience—and the pattern later repeats as he comes into close contact with the brutal power politics that lie beneath the thin veneer of academic and media independence. As Joy’s advocacy, clearly and closely based on the scientific methods and findings he has done so much to develop, comes up against the institutional power of agribusiness and the institutional cowardice of an increasingly managerial university system (some shining exceptions noted) he becomes increasingly exasperated and disillusioned at the dismaying regularity with which money trumps facts.
Concurrently, Joy becomes increasingly aware of the ruinous effect the ideology of relentless growth—implicit in the exploitative colonialist project—is having on the water, the land, the air and the web of life which surrounds and sustains us: an understanding catalysed and deepened by his growing association with Parihaka, and his work gathering evidence for iwi and the New Zealand Māori Council Te Kaunihera Māori o Aotearoa. He has most recently turned his attention to supporting the movement for degrowth in Aotearoa.
Joy is a few months younger than me. Growing up in the 1960s, and developing an interest in politics and the environment in the early 1970s, I remember the sense of national pride in the idea that Jack was as good as his master, that whereas your fate in other countries was determined by accident of birth—by your parents’ social class and income—here in God’s Own Country you could make something of yourself, become someone, no matter how humble your beginnings.
That sentiment wasn’t true then—especially not for Māori, not for women—however, Joy’s life shows that journey in action.
Mike Joy is a heroic figure, even if he wouldn’t be comfortable with that description. But he’s also a person, who tells the story of his first 64 years in a tightly-written 200 pages. The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir is a good read whether or not you care about the destruction of Aotearoa’s waterways and ecosystems, the trampling of Te Taiao.
If you do care about those things, it’s an even better read.
Tim Jones lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He was awarded the NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship in 2022. His recent books include poetry collection New Sea Land (Mākaro Press, 2016) and climate fiction novella Where We Land (The Cuba Press, 2019). His climate fiction novel Emergency Weather was published by The Cuba Press in 2023.