sustainability

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Hope Punk 2022

Written By: - Date published: 12:35 pm, January 1st, 2022 - 11 comments

Here’s a kind of map to a future where things work out.

Revisiting Riverton: the Longwood Loop food resiliency project

Written By: - Date published: 6:15 am, December 22nd, 2021 - 22 comments

Key here is the resilience politics of greenies, DIYers and anarchists, where we just don’t wait for the government to act, we get on with and build the new ways ourselves.

Goodbye, Auckland

Written By: - Date published: 9:23 am, December 14th, 2021 - 21 comments

For the hundreds of thousands of Aucklanders who have decided to holiday at a town near you, just be careful: they may never leave.

None of this is remotely sustainable

Written By: - Date published: 12:31 pm, November 3rd, 2021 - 43 comments

The story of New Zealand’s most polluted lake is the same story running through all of New Zealand society. We treat nature as an after thought that we can fix when things go wrong, even when we can’t. What if we told a different story?

Alt COP26: “Get in line or get out of the way”

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, November 2nd, 2021 - 30 comments

Climate solutions are coming from Indigenous peoples and other system thinkers who are deeply connected with nature, not the neoliberal diehards who treat nature as a grab bag of resources to be manipulated.

Ways out of the climate catastrophe

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, August 10th, 2021 - 130 comments

As the IPCC drops its grim, damning report on humans and climate change, and as we are surrounded by social and mainstream media narratives of disaster, we desperately need cogent and hopeful visions of where we can go next, and stories of futures where things work out.

Climate transition transport and the rural road tumbleweeds

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, June 16th, 2021 - 69 comments

Beyond the cycle/car wars.

Riverton rocks: support the pilot for social and economic rejuvenation and resilience in rural NZ

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, May 31st, 2021 - 12 comments

The South Coast Environment Centre is creating a local food network that connects growers and customers directly, creates food resiliency, and keeps money in the local economy. Today is the last day of their Pledgeme, and they need a bit more support to push them over the top.

Cycling Politics Is Damn Serious Business

Written By: - Date published: 7:12 am, May 26th, 2021 - 73 comments

Don’t knock local politics until you’ve had to stand up and defend a cycleway in public.

What local food can look like (and why)

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, May 21st, 2021 - 10 comments

The South Coast Environment Centre is creating a local food network that connects growers and customers directly, creates food resiliency, and keeps money in the local economy. This is an exemplar of climate, economic and community sustainability.

Regenerative agriculture and climate solutions

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, May 6th, 2021 - 94 comments

Research is now showing the advantages of regenerative agriculture. Are we wise enough to make best use of them?

Sustainability and learning from forest gardening

Written By: - Date published: 6:15 am, April 11th, 2021 - 30 comments

The Guytons’ 25 year old food forest in Riverton is a showcase of sustainability practice and knowledge.

Will Technology Solve Climate Change?

Written By: - Date published: 6:01 am, February 14th, 2021 - 87 comments

What if we actually planned to reduce energy usage significantly while revamping the economy to promote happiness and well-being? Then it would be far easier to replace our remaining energy usage with renewable sources. – Richard Heinberg

Escape Velocity

Written By: - Date published: 9:11 am, February 7th, 2021 - 93 comments

In this series so far I’ve examined three of the four terms in the Kaya Identity, population, economic intensity, and energy intensity. It can be conclusively shown that none of these factors can be reduced sufficiently to reduce CO2 emissions to zero – or even close enough to be useful. Let’s return to each one […]

The Malthusian Spectre

Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, December 20th, 2020 - 46 comments

Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive […]

What could possibly go right?

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, December 6th, 2020 - 34 comments

Bridging the gap between the people who are involved in proactive, regenerative responses to the climate, ecological and social crises, and those who don’t know this is happening, feel overwhelmed, and don’t know what to do.

Being real about the climate emergency

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, December 4th, 2020 - 118 comments

Green tech, negative emissions and carbon capture and storage won’t save us, but we have other options.

Powerdown part two

Written By: - Date published: 8:50 am, November 16th, 2020 - 90 comments

Christchurch transition engineer Susan Krumdieck lays out the realities of the various crises we are facing, and why green tech won’t save us. What can we do instead?

Labour’s new Oceans Ministry

Written By: - Date published: 8:19 am, November 3rd, 2020 - 23 comments

Jacinda Ardern’s decision to rename the Fisheries Ministery to “Oceans and Fisheries” and install David Parker instead of Stuart Nash shows a welcome desire to protect this most precious of resources.

No Right Turn: The transport policy we need

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, September 30th, 2020 - 40 comments

All of these policies will get fossil cars off the roads, reducing emissions. 

The Greens on urban farming

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, September 24th, 2020 - 25 comments

This is exactly the kind of approach the Green Party would like to encourage – it’s strategic, it’s intergenerational and it recognises the interconnectedness of our people, the environment and local communities.

What is this regenerative agriculture thing anyway?

Written By: - Date published: 11:42 am, September 13th, 2020 - 32 comments

Given the state of New Zealand land and water, changing how we do farming should be a strong political topic for the left this year. The Greens and Greenpeace are campaigning for a shift to regenerative agriculture, so it’s timely to look at what that is.

Will our cities revive?

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, September 5th, 2020 - 43 comments

Our cities are the nation’s lungs; they recycle and accelerate external goods and transform them internally into faster circulation. Auckland and Christchurch have had tens of billions invested in them over successive local and central governments, but has this improved our strength or wealth as a country at all?

Covid recovery and bouncing forward

Written By: - Date published: 6:05 am, August 10th, 2020 - 21 comments

Central to the Transition movement from the outset has been the idea of resilience. Usually framed as the ability to ‘bounce back’, it is seen in the Transition movement as being better imagined as the capacity to ‘bounce forward’, i.e. to use it as the opportunity to move forward to something better. How then to ‘bounce forward’ from COVID-19 in such a way that we also move to a way of doing things consistent with the scale of the climate crisis?

We don’t have time for this shit

Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, June 24th, 2020 - 52 comments

the government can’t agree is a euphemism for NZ First blocking climate action.

How to kill the car

Written By: - Date published: 7:17 am, April 29th, 2020 - 45 comments

What would you do so that instead of wandering endlessly through tilt-slab monstrosities soaked in 80s music and fluorescent lighting, surrounded by oppressed minimum-wage slaves who hate being there and you hating being there worried about your wheeled asset damaged in their carpark instead you get freedom?

Tourism is the elephant in the living room

Written By: - Date published: 7:10 am, April 9th, 2020 - 148 comments

Rather than saving an industry that has multiple sustainability and resiliency failures, how about we regenerate local economies and set them to serve our communities?

RIP Jeanette Fitzsimons

Written By: - Date published: 10:04 am, March 6th, 2020 - 33 comments

Former Greens co leader Jeanette Fitzsimons has died.

Sustainable NZ not so sustainable after all

Written By: - Date published: 2:42 pm, February 21st, 2020 - 23 comments

It appears that National’s dream of an alternative Green party that would drive the real Green Party below the threshold is in tatters with news that Sustainable NZ is on the skids.

The Government’s $12 billion infrastructure package

Written By: - Date published: 11:33 am, January 29th, 2020 - 96 comments

The details of the Government’s $12 billion infrastructure announcement have been released. 

Sustainable Party launches

Written By: - Date published: 8:01 am, November 11th, 2019 - 99 comments

The Sustainable Party, National’s sock puppet party designed to weaken the Greens has launched. And its policies for some strange reason have not put climate change front and centre.

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