Manu Caddie

For Manu Caddie, sustainability is not neat, polished, or comfortable. If anything, it’s disruptive. When asked to imagine sustainability as a flower, Manu reaches instead for a weed — something persistent, inconvenient, and impossible to ignore. As he puts it, sustainability is “like a weed… growing up inside and around the shell of Capitalism, where it doesn’t belong and eventually it will smother the unsustainable structures and reclaim the place for Nature.”

That framing captures much of Manu’s life’s work. Across Māori-led ventures such as Hikurangi Bioactives and Rua Bioscience, Manu has focused on moving Indigenous communities up the value chain — from raw material extraction to IP ownership — while embedding kaitiakitanga and benefit-sharing with Nature into commercial models. His work sits deliberately at the intersection of biodiscovery, regenerative land use, and ethical enterprise.

A defining moment came in the mid-1990s, when Manu read a paper quantifying the lifetime environmental impact of a single person born in the United States. Seeing the cumulative effects of waste, energy use, ecosystem alteration, and species loss laid out numerically reshaped how he viewed humanity’s relationship with the planet. He describes it as profoundly changing how he thought about humans and other species, and reinforcing just how extractive — and often abusive — that relationship has become.

Today, Manu’s work acknowledges this tension rather than trying to erase it. Developing clinically proven therapeutic products from taonga species still relies on extraction, manufacturing, and emissions. For Manu, the challenge is designing systems that are as circular, respectful, and dignified as possible — recognising that perfection is not currently achievable, but better systems are.

Underlying this work is a worldview that sees Nature not as a backdrop, but as an active participant. Manu often returns to a quote by Wendell Berry: “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” He believes Aotearoa is uniquely placed to act on this idea, particularly through legal innovations that recognise rivers, mountains, and forests as entities with mana — and potentially, as shareholders and directors within our economic systems.

When asked what seed of change he would plant for the future, Manu responds with characteristic sharpness and humour: “Develop a gene therapy to treat self-centredness.” It’s a line that lands lightly, but carries weight — pointing to the deeper behavioural and cultural shifts required if sustainability is to be more than a technical fix.

Read Manu’s Blooming Sustainability to explore what it really means to treat Nature as a stakeholder in business and innovation.

BLOOMING  Sustainability Questionnaire

Name: Manu Caddie

Company & Title:

• Managing Director, Hikurangi Bioactives Limited Partnership - hikurangibioactives.co.nz

• Director, Matawai Bio Ltd

• Director, IO Ltd

• Trustee, Kānuka Charitable Trust – hakanuka.nz

• R&D Director, Wairuakohu Charitable Trust – wairuakohu.org

Website & LinkedIn Profile: manu.org.nz | linkedin.com/in/manucaddie | substack.com/@manucaddie540258

* Guiding Values | Kaupapa

If sustainability were a flower blooming in your life, what would it look like? What nurtures it?

It’s probably a completely inappropriate metaphor, but I’d like to think sustainability in my life is like a weed (just a plant in the wrong place), growing up inside and around the shell of Capitalism, where it doesn’t belong and eventually it will smother the unsustainable structures and reclaim the place for Nature.

A quote, personal motto or whakataukī that reflects your vision:

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. – Wendell Berry

If you could mentor a rising change-maker in Aotearoa, what advice would you share?

Find a cause and dedicate your life to it – find ways to support yourself on the journey and hopefully you will find or build a community that can support you in that calling.

* Leading Change | Arataki

A key moment in your journey that shaped your path:

In the mid-1990s I read a paper entitled: “The environmental consequences of having a baby in the United States” (Hall, C. et al., 1994). It calculated the magnitude of a hundred environmental impacts that one American born then will cause over the average person’s lifetime. The impacts are grouped under five headings: waste generation, mineral consumption, energy consumption, ecosystem alteration, and food consumption, it also looks at the impacts of one person’s life in the US on extinctions of species and indigenous cultures. Those calculations laid out in bare, dispassionate numbers of the impact per person on Nature profoundly changed the way I thought about humans and our relationship with other species and the planet. It put be right off having children - though later I got married to Tarsh and we reached a compromise to have one child (we adopted another and I deeply love both of them!), but it also just put things into perspective for me. Understanding the impact (positive and negative) of each life elevated in my mind and priorities the more-than-human creatures we share the planet with and caused me to continually reflect over the last 30 years on what an extractive and essentially abusive relationship humans have with the planet. From that perspective I don’t really believe humans can have a truly sustainable existence, at least until we’re back in some post-agricultural age as hunters and gatherers.

What’s the main challenge you face in driving sustainability within your sector?

Most of my work is focused on developing clinically-proven therapeutic products from biological organisms (taonga) to help create value for Indigenous communities and indigenous ecosystems. While there are real issues around sustainable sourcing of raw materials – at the end of the day, even if we’re just creating Intellectual Property, the idea is that some useful product is created to help lots of people – those supply chains inevitably rely on the extraction of natural resources and emissions of greenhouse gases to support the manufacturing, packaging, transporting, marketing, etc. It’s been fascinating to work through some of those issues and exciting to design systems designed to be circular and treat everyone in the value chain with respect and dignity, and that feels like the best we can do at present.

An area you need more support with:

Establishing our own trusted channels to markets feels like an important development – it was really hard to find licensees willing and able to run with our clinically proven kānuka oil based eczema product, so we hope that goes well and they can take other products too, but having more options would be great. Connected to that are the regulatory issues as new products and ingredients derived from taonga species – I’m hoping Aotearoa will develop a robust pipeline of expertise that makes it easy to access new markets with ingredients the world hasn’t had access to before.

An Indigenous perspective you admire and want people to be mindful of:

As you might have guessed, I’m not a huge fan of “He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.” I do like 'Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tāngata'; 'When the land is well, we are well' – and just the Māori/Indigenous worldview – that recognises geographical features (mountains, rivers, etc) as well as creatures of the ngahere and moana, as tupuna – is the original Rights of Nature kaupapa. Some people take real issue with that conceptualisation of the natural world, but hopefully it becomes more accepted as I think it provides a very different relationship with Nature and the more-than-human world.

Your best approach for engaging stakeholders in meaningful dialogue about ESG:

I have a background in monitoring and evaluation, so I’m a fan of certification systems. I know they can be gamed and used for greenwashing and maintaining poor practice, but I like the idea that transparency and accountability is possible in commercial contexts.

What do you think is Aotearoa’s superpower in creating a sustainable future?

Given the legislative innovations created through a number of Treaty settlements that recognise the mana and legal personhood of mountains, rivers and ngahere. With our long history and strong influence of Te Ao Māori over all aspects of like in Aotearoa, I think we can work out how to build Te Taiao into legal and commercial arrangements that give it mana as a shareholder and director in every company.

* Surfing the Green Wave | Kakariki

Books, podcasts, courses or other resources that profoundly shaped your approach to sustainability:

Not sure about ‘profoundly shaping’ my approach, but I listen to Planet Critical in short-bursts, and appreciate Vincent’s The Climate Business for a local take on interesting domestic business and sustainability issues. Others in my library include:

• The Abundant Edge (Regenerative Skills)

• Plants of the Gods

• On the Rights of Nature

• Mongabay Newscast

• Challenging Economic Assumptions

• Accidental Gods

In my early 20s I read a lot of the 19th and 20thCentury anarchists – Tolstoy, Bakunin, Goldman, Day, Ellul – the helped shape my view of politics, democracy and the way we organise ourselves as humans – and more recently people like Wendell Berry, David Boyd, Andreas Malm and Mihnea Tanasescu have helped influence the way I think about Nature, legal systems and societal change.

Events in Aotearoa or globally that you think are must-attend:

I’m not a huge fan of conferences and I’d say stay away from anything called a summit unless it’s actually on a mountain top and you have to hike to get there. Instead I’d encourage us all to attend and/or organise Matariki events in our communities and homes. It’s awesome that is a public holiday day and not only is it a special way to remember those who have passed in the last 12 months and set intentions for the next year, but it helps us decolonise our calendars and reorientate society to the seasons in these precious islands.

A sustainable initiative or project in Aotearoa that deserves more attention:

www.tairawhitingutukaka.nz – a kaitiaki-led, community-based initiative to save an endangered species.

If your work could plant one seed of change for the future, what would it be?

Develop a gene therapy to treat self-centredness.

The leader(s) you endorse for a future edition of Blooming Sustainability:

Tāme Malcolm

* One actionable takeaway for our readers to make a change today for a brighter tomorrow:

Don’t vote National, ACT or NZ First and convince your friends and family to do the same.

More Blooming Sustainability