Fertile land is priceless
As Labour moves to protect prime food growing land around our cities, we should be having a wider discussion about food security in New Zealand.
Environment
food
Is there a middle ground on climate change
It has been reported that US Presidential hopeful Joe Biden is hoping to craft a middle ground position between the extraordinarily strong scientific consensus suggesting we have a climate crisis and the industry supported anti scientific knee jerk opposition to doing anything.
It’s the end of the world as we know it *
* and I don’t feel fine.
The Meathead tax
National’s claim that the Government wants to impose a meat tax suffers from the reality that the Government has done no such thing and the proposal comes from an International collective of academics.
How To Get There 6/1/19
Welcome to TS’s Sunday think piece. It’s a blank sheet, a tabula rasa, waiting for your thoughts on the future and How To Get There.
No sense, nonsense and a dearth of common sense.
We wouldn’t tie a rope to a heavy load and then push on the rope with the expectation of achieving anything, right? So why is the Guardian’s Environment Editor entreating that we do just that? Is he merely stupid? Or is there something more cynical at play?
The zero carbon bill
The Ministry for the Environment has released a discussion paper on a Zero Carbon Bill. But one proposal is to exempt methane which would mean that effectively half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gasses would not be subject to limitation.
Killing Them Softly With…
In New Zealand there is sufficient evidence to show that poor peoples’ lives are cut short because of poverty related poor nutrition. While food banks are alleviating the worst impacts of hunger, their kindness may well be contributing to the problem. Food poverty is a systemic issue and requires a systemic response, a response that successive governments are able to avoid while charities continue to provide a buffer for the system.
It’s Time for a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Dairy Farming
Not just, ‘we’ve got to make the good outweigh the bad’. I mean: why should dairy farming exist here?
Deep Trawling.
Is NZ’s fishing industry just a domestic version of the tobacco companies? And how much would that really matter?
Food security in New Zealand
The Standard regular commenter Macro takes a look at the state of food security in NZ
Local Bodies: Climate Change Just Got Personal
“At 46 degrees latitude south, New Zealand’s southern most city has regularly been experiencing similar temperatures to cities near the equator. When we were sizzling at 32 degrees, we equaled Cairns, were 2 degrees warmer than Jakarta and Suva and 6 above Nairobi. These cities are used to such temperatures and their ecosystems have adapted to it, it has been a severe shock to ours.”
Guest Post: Monbiot, Attenborough and Soper on environmental collapse
Guest post by Ed about the intellectual rigour of George Monbiot and David Attenborough and the rater strange response of Barry Soper.
A Sugar Coated World
Yum! That would make for generations of ecstatic kids, no?
The Future of Food
A short film about a Wairarapa organic farm using Community Supported Agriculture to bypass agribusiness control of the market and sell direct to customers.
Rain doesn’t cause most floods, humans do
What to do with all the water falling from the sky? Some choices are smarter than others.
Regenerative agriculture
Regenerative farmers in NZ are already leading the way on land and water restoration, and how to grow food in a changing climate.
Waimea a good dam?
The proposed Waimea Dam in Nelson is attracting opposition from the Green Party but support from the Labour Party. Is there such a thing as a good dam project?
The Essential Forest-Gardener – in the end…
Robert Guyton concludes his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – reproducing the forest
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – the humus factor
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential-Forest Gardener – native or exotic
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest, this week looking at usefulness of natives and exotics in a forest garden.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – the trees and the heritage
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – “don’t destroy life”
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest, exploring diversity, stability and the concept of Complexity Gardening.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – what grows in the forest?
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – tools of the trade
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest, this week looking at untooling and letting nature do the work.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – where to start
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – chapter 3
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener – chapter 2
Robert Guyton continues his series on life in a Riverton Food Forest.
The Essential Forest-Gardener
Robert Guyton begins a weekly series on life in a Riverton food forest.
Grow the Commons
Robert Guyton on reclaiming the Commons one plant at at time.
Wasted food and carbon footprint
The Italian intiaitive encouraging supermarkets to give unsold food to those in need is a great move. Helps the poor, reduces waste, win win. But it’s just a start. We need to massively change attitudes and behaviour to reduce food waste.
Climate change pedal to the metal
Avoiding 2 deg C warming is a ship that’s sailed. Global warming is now happening at about 4.3x the previous long-run rate. And it might go up to 18x the previous rate over the next few years. That’s what the pundits call “abrupt climate change.”
1/3 of Nobel Laureates say Greenpeace is “anti-science”, must now embrace GMOs
Unless you are scaremongering and “anti-science” you should embrace GMO foods. Say 107 Nobel Laureates.
This is what sustainable fishing looks like
“It turns out there will be no jobs on a dead planet.”
While New Zealand is struggling to maintain integrity around fishing and resource management, an ocean farmer in the US is leading the way in economic and ecologic sustainability. This is how we can do things differently.
Global elite plan their escape from “pleb masses”
So, Key has now come out and revealed to us how afraid the global oligarch class (and their well paid professional enablers) are. They appear to have no plans to reverse their activites to make things better for us.