Slowing the Sun | Essays

Hope is a shovel and will give you blisters.

Overwhelmed and often unmoved by the scientific and political jargon of
climate change, Nadine Hura sets out to find a language to connect more
deeply to the environmental crisis. But what begins as a journalistic quest
takes an abrupt and introspective turn following the death of her brother.

In the midst of grief, Hura works through science, purakau, poetry and back
again. Seeking to understand climate change in relation to whenua and
people, she asks: how should we respond to what has been lost? Her manysided
essays explore environmental degradation, social disconnection and
Indigenous reclamation, insisting that any meaningful response must be
grounded in Te Tiriti and anti-colonialism.

Slowing the Sun is a karanga to those who have passed on, as well as to the
living, to hold on to ancestral knowledge for future generations.