Go home - it is a safe place - make it so

We need to rethink a few things. Climate change is reality and so is peak oil and the effects of both along with the degradation and pollution we have wrought on Papatūānuku. There is a time of change upon us - we created it and we will have to live with and through it. We will have to give up some things but we will also gain a lot and the things we give up are not valuable whereas what we will gain is invaluable. To paraphrase JMG - collapse now and avoid the rush - or maybe collapse now while you can. Collapse? WTF! Yep and what it means is moving to a simpler lifestyle a more direct lifestyle from what we do to what we get. A reduction of all of the intermediary steps/jobs/people between what we do and what we get. Eating food grown locally for instance, rather than exotic stuff flown in from godknowswhere so that we, in our extravagant western lifestyles, can eat it. We are all going to have to make changes and Māori as indigenous people of this land can lead and show others how to do it.

Many Māori are on the way and programs like Manawa Hou are also invaluable - they show how we used to live and that knowledge of the past is essential to build our futures. It would take some wrangling but this idea from Rankin would be a good start

An economic historian is calling for the benefit system to become more flexible to allow people to function within traditional subsistence economies.Keith Rankin from Unitec was responding to a challenge from Mana leader Hone Harawira that the Abbott Government’s removal of support from remote Australian Aboriginal communities was similar to Work and Income’s policy of not paying benefits to Maori who return to their home rural villages.
He told Radio Waatea’s Dale Husband that being able to turn to a subsistence lifestyle during downturns in the economic cycle was a normal part of capitalism.

Instead of calling people to the cities, help them move out to the rural areas and pay the to do it. This would rejuvenate those areas, release pressure from the cities infrastructure, help reinforce connections and communities, teach the basics like how to grow food, how to live in a community, how to live simpler lifestyles and so on and so on. Many Māori are connecting back to their ancestral marae. This connecting can be encouraged and facilitated by Government for all of the reasons above. To further encourage the move I'd pay superannuation earlier to Māori going home so that they could learn and teach and build the mana of their marae and themselves.

The destruction of our currently structured society is likely to be slow, with falls, then plateaus, with false hope, then dashed dreams - we will live it and we will need to adjust to it, physically and mentally. Go home - it is a safe place - make it so.

highly toxic waste oil spilled

What a disaster that this truck has crashed and spilled its 24,000 litres load of highly toxic waste oil into the Awakino River. 


Stuff


Waikato Regional Council spokesman David Stagg said

The oil would definitely have detrimental effects on the ecosystem of the popular whitebaiting river, he said. "Waste oil in the river will not be any good for it and will cause some degree of harm," he said. "Unfortunately in the gorge area, because of the swift nature of the river, there's no opportunity to contain it."

Mr Stagg didn't know what type of waste oil the truck had been carrying. "It may be from vehicles or it may include other materials and some of those things can be more toxic than the waste oil itself."

Who knows? Someone hopefully but the spill cannot be contained in the fast flowing river in the gorge - the highly toxic waste oil is in the system now and all we can do is mitigate the effects.  The more oil we bring up the more likely that accidents and disasters can occur. The more we stick our heads in the sand about oil and petrol and the whole industry the harder the shock will be when that lifestyle and world breaks down, as it has already begun to.

leave them be

I can fully understand why Wellington wants a new motorway as I lived there for many years. For me the building of motorways is really a last gasp of a oil addicted society and unfortunately when the oil runs out or becomes too scarce, well then we will have spent a lot of money for roads that not many can afford to use. So i'd look at alternatives to motorways which really means looking at alternatives to personal cars and that is a big one. cars have become more than vehicles, they reflect a lot of us, we feel safe within them, it is our space and it will take a lot of pain for people to give that up. The silly thing is that as there are positives to having your own car, there are also a lot of negatives and the same is true for shared transport, whether that be car-pooling buses or trains. It is pleasant to sit with the same people every day, to chat eventually to them, to smile and say hello. The fanatical attraction we have for our own personal transport seems to me to be a reaction to feeling disempowered within our society.


The motorway option chosen near Wellington goes through sacred Maori Land - an urupa. And tangata whenua are rightly disappointed that the route will disturb their land.

The Dominion Post

Takamore Trustees, which oversees the urupa, met agency representatives last month and refused to endorse new adjustments to the routes near the urupa.

Spokesman Ben Ngaia said yesterday that the trustees were waiting to see the detailed maps, but it was "an understatement" to say they were disappointed the western route seemed to have been chosen.

"Out of the two options, the one that we preferred was the eastern because of the level of impact it left on the waahi tapu."

Our sacred places are too important to develop them, we should respect them and when we do that we respect ourselves and our connection to this land.

cornfields vs oilfields - infographic

This infographic, sent in by a reader, is important because there is so much misinformation around alternative fuels. It is good to see a balanced approach which explains the positives and negatives.

With today's ever increasing gas prices, it's a wonder why we don't push harder for alternative sources of fuel. But at the same time, these alternative sources aren't as amazing as you would think. We've highlighted the pros and cons regarding corn ethanol, and presented information about just how effective an energy source it really is.

Via: Online Schools

There is no perfect pathway to the future and having information to determine the options is so important. Be informed. As oil runs out and our society is forced to change, we must consider the wider ramifications of our incessant consumerism and addiction to oil. We must reduce our demand.

i'm leery

I have been having a real think about this proposal for Ngai Tahu to get into dairying after reading this article in Te Karaka. I don't want to knock ideas but I am not sure about this  - maybe my concerns are illusory, I hope so. I know the arguments in favour of this idea of dairy farms and I agree with some of them but I am one of those who are very leery of this.

Mark Solomon

Ngai Tahu plans a dairy farm totalling nearly 1000 hectares in Canterbury in a bid to develop a "new model" of sustainable farming.

If the pilot is successful, the iwi could develop a dairy operation totalling 16,000ha in Canterbury.

Ngai Tahu chairman Mark Solomon said the three-year trial would be monitored to see whether a dairy farm could be developed that did not pollute water and land.

There are a number of people in Ngai Tahu who are very leery about dairy farming and have a negative view," he said.

Our property firm believes we can run sustainable dairying, so we will have a look and see how they do. If they can show to Ngai Tahu that it's sustainable, then we will do it.

Is it possible to develop a dairy farm that doesn't pollute water or land - surely pollution is inevitable - just the amount is variable. It is a pilot for sure, but I worry about the effects on the land and river. Runanga have been fighting for years to protect the mauri of the waterways and rivers from water use for dairying and pollution. I struggle to see how this proposal and these fights can be reconcilled but apparently they have been.

The sustainability targets are very important - what is success? This is obviously the nub of the 'sustainability' angle and is part of the measurement of the success of the pilot, so a fair bit of work must be going into this area already. The difficulty is words like sustainability which often means different things to different people. "No pollution" is pretty clear though.

If dairy farms are going ahead then surely organic farms, where best practices for the treatment of the cows, water and land are met, should be strongly considered and piloted. Sure organic farms are not perfect but in combination with a permacultural approach they can produce product of high quality that is needed and wanted. Why not create the model within this sector. And plant trees for the cows to shelter under.

Are we potentially putting at risk the land and the river and the downside of getting it wrong is great.

Cows deserve respect

We deserve respect

The future of our dairy farms - is this where our dairy farms are headed?

"It is a containment farm, meaning the herd of more than 4855 animals resides in the four massive cow barns on the 35-hectare property, or in the calf-rearing shed or heifer barn.


Three thousand pregnant Friesians were imported from New Zealand to start the herd, which has just begun its second calving season.


The efficient containment system succeeds where pasture feeding is not an option – as in much of China where the land is unavailable or the winters are too harsh.


Self-consciously high-tech, the farm relies heavily on computers to track each cow's life history, medical records and movements, to measure feed consumption and forecast calving schedules, and to plan the herd's diet.


The milking operation goes 18 hours a day, with each cow milked three times. Two 30-tonne tankers leave the farm each day trucking milk to a range of domestic producers."

Lucky cows. Three times a day is a lot. Is this really the way to go. They are already considering the concept here. And i am not saying there shouldn't be dairy farms but they should be where cows grow best. A barn is not that place.

I wish we were helping the people over there bring back their traditonal methods. Those methods worked, they spread the wealth and benefits across more people and communities, they were sustainable and conservationally orientated. The answer seems to be in working with nature not in opposition by trying to put things where they are not meant to be.

By working with nature we achieve so much more.