Long before the "Leaky Bucket" economy hit our shores in the North, the blueprint for extraction was drawn on a tiny island in the Atlantic called Madeira. In the 15th century, Portuguese settlers looked at a sub-tropical paradise and didn't see an ancestor; they saw a commodity. They named it "Madeira"—literally meaning "wood"—and then they proceeded to burn and fell every tree in sight to fuel the world’s first great sugar boom.

This was the birth of "Babylonian" capitalism. It wasn't just about trade; it was about the "boom-bust-quit" cycle. Using slave labour and "free" natural wealth, they achieved unimaginable productivity. But it was thermodynamically unsound. It took 60kg of wood to refine just 1kg of sugar. Within decades, the forests were gone, the soil was exhausted, and the "embodied energy" of the island had been exported to the banks of Europe. When the Mauri of the island was depleted, the capital simply "quit" and moved to Brazil and the Caribbean, leaving behind a high-entropy residue of social and ecological disorder.

The afternoon sun is baking the volcanic stones and warming the kiwifruit orchards here in Maungatapere. Looking out over the land, I’m reminded of what Reverend Māori Marsden called the "Woven Universe"—a reality where everything is a process of interconnected threads rather than a collection of separate things. If we are to transition Te Tai Tokerau from the extractive "Babylon" to the regenerative "Zion," we must understand how every person living here—tāngata whenua, tāngata Tiriti, and our new immigrant whānau—fits into that fabric.

For too long, the "Babylonian" operating system has relied on the "Newtonian Error". This is the bad explanation that views the universe as a clockwork mechanism made of separate, isolated parts. In our community, this manifests as the "Rational Individual," an atomised agent seeking to maximise their own utility at the expense of the collective Mauri. But modern physics and ancient Mātauranga agree: separation is an illusion.

In the Quantum Whakapapa Nexus, we recognise Whanaungatanga as literal Quantum Entanglement. When tāngata Tiriti or immigrants move to the North, they are not just "units of labour" or "consumers"; they become entangled with the life force of this whenua. Their skills, their capital, and their presence become part of the local energetic field.

We are currently drowning in data but starving for wisdom. If you walk into any boardroom in Whangarei or sit in a council meeting in Kaikohe, the air is thick with spreadsheets, GDP forecasts, and ROI percentages. We’ve become experts at measuring the "price" of everything while remaining completely blind to the "value" of anything.

The old Babylonian operating system has convinced us that if the line on the graph goes up, we are winning. But look out the window. If that profit comes at the cost of a silt-choked awa, if it’s built on the backs of whānau who can’t afford to live in the towns they were born in, then that "growth" is just a polite word for entropy. In the physics of the Woven Universe, we are exporting order and importing chaos. We are measuring the speed of the car while the engine is melting.

Growing up with a Pākehā mum who held onto a very specific, strongly colonised religious view, my scientific mind was always at war. I want to be clear—I love my mum deeply. She did the absolute best with what she’d been given, and she always did it with a pure heart. 

To me, spirituality looked like fairy tales—nice stories for Sunday mornings, but nothing that stood up to the rigour of 'real' data or the 'hard' world of business and physics. I experienced a strain of neoliberalism and imperial theology that had weaponised the spirit, turning it into a tool for control or relegating it to a building you visit once a week.