A social conscience

CLAIRE ALLISON

Steve Earnshaw is talking the talk and walking the walk as the spokesman for Transition Timaru. Feature writer Claire Allison met the environmentally aware orthopaedic surgeon.

Although Steve Earnshaw is on call, it's not his hospital pager that interrupts our interview.

It's his home phone. Someone's tracked him down to have a chat about his latest letter to the paper.

He is talking the talk as the increasingly high profile spokesman and driving force behind grassroots environmental movement Transition Timaru.

But Earnshaw is also walking the walk – driving a hybrid car, making his home energy efficient, growing vegetables.

Then there's his day job as one of four orthopaedic surgeons at Timaru Hospital, and one of those involved in introducing new, complex methods of hip and knee replacements to New Zealand.

Earnshaw says he likes a challenge.

That has seen him give up a high-flying career in England to settle with his family in provincial New Zealand, throw himself wholeheartedly into extreme sports events like the Coast to Coast, and find himself at the forefront of the Transition movement.

It wasn't the plan. Yorkshire-born, Earnshaw studied medicine in Sheffield, but took a year out to travel the world as a professional rock climber. He returned to complete his studies, and his working career took him to North Wales and Liverpool and then to Nottingham for 12 years, where he completed his orthopaedic training and carried out two years of medical research.

In simple terms, he has a research doctorate as well as a doctor doctorate.

With his orthopaedic training completed, Earnshaw was set to take up an academic job. But chance intervened. Fellow orthopaedic surgeon Dave Templeton had worked with Earnshaw in Nottingham. After a trip to Timaru for his sister's wedding, Templeton was sold on the New Zealand lifestyle.

"So I was talking to Dave and his wife, and that put us on to the idea. We decided we'd stay for a year and see how it went. And that was six and a bit years ago. We love it here, and we've got no plans to go back."

The Earnshaws' twins, now 7, were just a year old when the family packed up and moved to a place they believed would be better to bring up their children, with a lower crime rate, fewer people and ample opportunity for the couple who share an enthusiasm for outdoor sports.

Conveniently, the interest is shared by the orthopaedic team – the four surgeons have competed together in various races.

"We're all slightly mad."

Mad maybe, but the addition of South Africans Templeton and Mark Cvitanich and Englishman Earnshaw has given the orthopaedic department a nationwide reputation.

Complex surgeries and particularly difficult trauma cases are Earnshaw's specialty, and he brought those skills to Timaru, making the hospital the New Zealand leader for a hip resurfacing operation that English surgeons had been carrying out since the early 1990s.

"It had been going for quite a while, and Dave and I had done a lot of them in England, so we were quite surprised that no-one in New Zealand was doing that operation. And there are a lot of young patients.

"So we did the first hip resurfacings in New Zealand at the end of 2004, and have continued to do quite a lot of them. We get them sent from elsewhere.

"Timaru was the first, and is still one of the major (New Zealand) centres for that kind of surgery."

It's an operation more suitable for younger people. Conventional hip replacements that will last 20 years on an older person might last just five for someone under 65.

Earnshaw and Templeton will often operate together on complex cases. They have also introduced a new form of knee replacement to New Zealand, and have moved to get the unit working more as a team, rather than individual surgeons.

"So yes, we've overhauled a lot of the way orthopaedics were done in Timaru. We've changed procedures, clinics, changed things around quite a bit. We were probably a little bit unpopular for a while."

Their expertise means junior doctors are now specifically asking to come to Timaru because they've heard about the work that's being done.

As well as bringing his orthopaedic skills, Earnshaw has also brought the beliefs and drive needed to help get the Transition Town concept off the ground.

He's always been involved with environmental issues through his participation in outdoor sports and his scientific background, so he was aware of the issues faced – climate change, communities becoming more isolated, resources being depleted.

"I've always been a bit like this. You don't become a doctor if you don't have at least a little bit of a social conscience. If I was in it for the money, I would have become an accountant or a lawyer.

"And I am pretty motivated by wanting my children to have at least as good a place to live as we have got – if not better. The risk is, if we don't do something, that's probably not going to be the case."

Earnshaw read about the Transition Town movement, which started in Britain after the family left, and liked the concept, the way it promoted dealing with the problems in a positive way.

"If we start rebuilding local community, economy, get to know your neighbours, buy more goods locally, we'd definitely reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and become less dependent on foreign oil. It would bring the community together and make our focus better places to live.

"I was really captivated by the idea. It seemed to make sense."

A group of people in Timaru were already interested in doing something. Earnshaw offered to give a talk about Transition Towns, and he's since been actively involved in driving the concept forward.

"I think that it has got a huge potential to improve Timaru."

Transition Timaru was launched nine months ago. It now has 500 people on its mailing list, and has begun a weekly farmers market at Caroline Bay. Many more initiatives are planned, and the response has been encouraging.

"I think it's an idea that the time is probably right for. We've been pushing on open doors."

And he sees Timaru as an ideal size for the Transition Town concept to work.

"It's a small enough community that people do see themselves as a community. In very big places, it's going to be definitely much harder for this type of idea to work."

Plans for the coming year include investigating local energy schemes and promoting energy efficiency, harvesting neglected fruit trees to provide fruit for community groups and foodbanks, and a garden share project.

"That increases the number of people gardening and starts to build connections in the community between older and younger people."

Those links are evident at the farmers market – a social event where people meet the food growers, have a chat, listen to music.

Earnshaw is practising what he preaches. The family home has been insulated, triple glazed and had solar water heating installed. Eighteen solar panels are due to arrive within the next month.

"We will produce about two-thirds of our electricity from the solar panels, and in summer, we should be exporting some of our electricity to the grid."

He acknowledges those changes don't come cheap, but says there are a lot of simple things that people can do – many at no cost – to use less energy at home and in their vehicles.

His hybrid car has a computerised bar graph that provides constant feedback on fuel consumption. In six months he improved his fuel economy by a third, just by changing his driving style.

Buying local food is an area full of facts.

"Sixty per cent of the carbon footprint of food is transporting it – not growing it or eating it, just transporting it. Fish is caught off the coast of Timaru, and then it goes to China to be processed before it comes back here for us to eat.

"There are so many examples of that. But if you buy local, it's better quality, it's fresher and you're supporting local growers. If you spend money on local produce, 80 per cent of it stays in the local economy. If it's a chain store, less than 12 per cent of your money stays in the local economy."

There are those, however, who don't believe they can do anything about the issues.

"A lot of people feel disempowered, they feel it's too big a problem, and there's nothing they can do about it.

"I think that's the important thing we're getting across to people. It's not someone else's problem. If we all start doing these things, we can start changing things ourselves. We don't need the government to do it for us. The only way we can change things is from the grass roots. Politicians tend to be reactionary. They're unlikely to make decisions about mid-term-to-distant future unless there's a grass-roots push for them to do that."

Earnshaw says significant societal changes are driven from the grass-roots level: the abolition of slavery, the industrial revolution, the suffrage movement.

"Every so often there are big tipping points in society where things change driven by grass-roots movements, not by changes from government level. I think we are close to that tipping point. I think a lot of people are starting to question how we are doing things."

Earnshaw says even those who aren't convinced about climate change or peak oil problems can believe in supporting their local community.

"All these things that we can do, they're great things – whether or not it's for climate change."

- © Fairfax NZ News