Christine Dann

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Climate for Change, July 20, 2020

Making up a new cosmology and a new biscuit recipe – at the same time At the beginning of her talk Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change Sherri Mitchell says that some years ago, at the request of…

July 21, 2020
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Climate for Change June 29

Effective and ineffective food politics in a time of climate change In their May 23 article Investing in a Good Food Future, Paula Daniels and Alexa Delwiche from the Urban Resilience Project provide an impressive record of local governments and…

June 29, 2020
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Climate for Change, June 22

Sheltering in place During the global Covid-19 crisis many states have been advising or requiring their citizens to ‘shelter in place’. This means – stay at home except when it is essential for you to leave it to get food…

June 23, 2020
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Pandemic Diary June 8-14

Fifty shades of poverty Food poverty has been a feature of New Zealand and other formerly egalitarian societies for thirty years now. Instead of being able to buy food where the non-poor buy it, and eat a varied and healthy…

June 15, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – June 1-7

The robot didn’t do it So a robot takes your job – as in “Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft’s MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told…

June 8, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – May 25-31

Saving seeds [25.5.20] When New Zealand went into Level 4 lockdown two months ago my usual seed supplier, Kings Seeds, reported a rush on its stock. Usually they turn around an order in a day, but they soon had a…

June 1, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – May 18-24

What price a reality cheque? [18.5.20] An email conversation started yesterday among members of the Christchurch branch of 350.org, and the XR group, about what could be done to make the climate crisis issue more politically and economically salient leading…

May 25, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – May 11-17

My industrial valley. [11.5.20] I was born in the Oil Age, and in the Oil Age I will die. I first remember walking up the valley where I now live when I was aged ten or eleven. That was in…

May 18, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 46 – May 10 – Real pandemic resilience.

Gaia’s Day. Real pandemic resilience. The pandemic is testing the resilience of hundreds of millions of people to a sudden shock which causes a major disruption to their accustomed way of life. To their income (if their job is threatened…

May 11, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 45 – May 9 – Liminal times.

Gaia’s Day. Liminal times. Anyone who has been alive in the past fifty years has been living in a liminal time. This time began in the 1970s when the first popular publications on the limits to the growth of global…

May 10, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 44 – May 8 – Knowing Gaia at home.

Gaia’s Day. Knowing Gaia at home. Stay at home, get to know the birds. New Zealanders who took the stay-at-home message seriously (most of us) have also been taking advantage of the opportunity it provides for seeing who else lives…

May 9, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 43 – May 7 – The breathing of life.

Gaia’s Day. The breathing of life. Plants wake up in the morning when the light returns and begin their daily task of growing by ‘breathing in’ carbon dioxide (CO2) and ‘breathing out’ oxygen (O). This process has been given the…

May 8, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 42 – May 6 – The revolution of everyday life.

Gaia’s Day. The revolution of everyday life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “Ceux qui parlent de révolution et de lutte de classes sans se référer explicitement à la vie quotidienne, sans comprendre ce qu’il y a…

May 7, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 41 – May 5 – Rain at last.

Gaia’s Day. Rain at last. Last night just over 20 ml of rain fell. It has been over two weeks since we had this much. Most of those days were warm and sunny, with temperatures in the 20s. It’s only…

May 6, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 40 – May 4 – 40 days and 40 nights

Gaia’s Day 40 days and 40 nights. In the wilderness of lockdown… Never in my whole life has so much of the human world been experiencing the same thing at the same time. And while the humans (mostly) stay safe…

May 5, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 39 – May 3 – Should Gaia listen to the ‘do-should-ers’?

Gaia’s Day Should Gaia listen to the ‘do-should-ers’? I don’t know about you, but I have always found people who tell me what I should be doing fairly annoying. I can listen to any amount of advice if it is…

May 4, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 38 – May 2 – Should you always do what you are told?

Gaia’s Day Should you always do what you are told? At the moment the differences in the world between states where citizens have confidence in the political leadership and how it is dealing with the current crisis, and those which…

May 3, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 37 – May 1 – May Day!

Gaia’s Day May Day! The three words ‘mayday, mayday, mayday’ have been used by ships and aircraft to signal an emergency situation for just on a century now. They were derived by an Englishman from the French ‘m’aider’ – help…

May 2, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 36 – April 30 – Just the right size

Gaia’s Day Just the right size. Small is Beautiful, a book by the English economist E.F.Schumacher, came out in 1973. It was extremely well-read at the time but alas, not as influential as it should have been. It gives plenty…

May 1, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 35 – April 29 – The trees of life

Gaia’s Day The trees of life. As some relief from following the pandemic – and also because it is an important book anyway – I am finally getting round to reading Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants (2015). It is…

April 30, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 34 – April 28 – Lessons from five crises.

Gaia’s Day Lessons from five crises. It has been my fate to live through two major disruptions to normal life locally in the past ten years. The first disruption was difficult to predict with any accuracy (to the decade) and…

April 29, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 33 – April 27 – More denialist quackery

Gaia’s Day More denialist quackery. In Down to Earth (2018) Bruno Latour distinguishes between two ways of doing science and thinking about science – nature-as-universe and nature-as-process. The former he calls the ‘view from Sirius’ . Everything on Earth is…

April 28, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 32 – April 26 – The Quack-in-Chief

Gaia’s Day The Quack-in-Chief. One of the unintended but equally pernicious results of having a president who is a climate change denier (which is just as the globalist elites who support him intended) is that you can’t stop him denying…

April 27, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 31 – April 25 – Droughts don’t stop for pandemics

Gaia’s Day Droughts don’t stop for pandemics. Another fine day in Paradise – and that’s a problem for living things. Our first biological need is air to breathe; our second is water to keep our cells moist and functional. When…

April 26, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 30 – April 24 – High secret fliers – do they belong anywhere?

Gaia’s Day. High secret fliers – do they belong anywhere? On Day 6 of the lockdown, under the heading Gaia scoffs at the bunker people I wrote, only semi-ironically, “who knows what private foreign jet(s) may yet be taxiing to…

April 25, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 29 – April 23 – How smart are the (global) growth promoters?

Gaia’s Day. How smart are the (global) growth promoters? The ideology and practice of globalisation, as developed and promoted by transnational corporations and epitomised by the formation in 1995 of the world’s largest international economic organisation (the World Trade Organisation,…

April 24, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 28 – April 22 – A pandemic of food despair

Gaia’s Day A pandemic of food despair. Today I couldn’t finish reading the article Coronavirus pandemic ‘will cause famine of biblical proportions’ because it made me too sad. If there is anything sadder than not being able to provide food…

April 23, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 27 – April 21 – The beauty of Gaia on Te Pataka o Rakaihautu

Gaia’s Day The beauty of Gaia on Te Pataka o Rakaihautu. The photo-sizing function on my website was restored today, so in honour of the occasion (and because I am too busy doing other things to write anything meaningful) I…

April 22, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 26 – April 20 – The strength of elders

Gaia’s Day The strength of elders – and the old ways. It is usual to talk about the wisdom of elders, which implies that minds improve as bodies start to fail. Unfortunately, we know that this is not necessarily true…

April 21, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 25 – April 19 – Earthquakes don’t stop for pandemics

Gaia’s Day Earthquakes don’t stop for pandemics. There was a small but shallow earthquake (M 3.4, depth 4 km) in the Port Hills at 3:19 pm on April 18. Martin experienced it as the sash windows in the room he…

April 20, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 24 – April 18 – Sensible prepping for a good life

Gaia’s Day Sensible prepping for a good life. Out in media land there seems to be a lot of discussion on whether ‘the preppers’ were (or are) right. Geographer Dudley Garrett was interviewed by RNZ on being ‘Inside the world…

April 19, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 23 – April 17 – Would somebody please DO something about the water

Gaia’s Day Would somebody please DO something about the water. Another day, another report on the worse and worsening state of New Zealand’s freshwater. Also lots of reporting on and analysis of the report, such as Polluted, drained, and drying…

April 18, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 22 – April 16 – Gaia takes a breather during the pandemic

Gaia’s Day Gaia takes a breather during the pandemic. So does every city dweller with a respiratory disease, and everyone else in town who prefers clean air to badly polluted air. I think we can safely say that this is…

April 17, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 21 – April 15 – How do we know what’s going on?

Gaia’s Day. How do we know what’s going on? Before I fell asleep last night I thought about all the thousands of scientists, all around the world, who are working on some aspect of the new coronavirus. In the past…

April 16, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 20 – April 14 – Gaia is as sacred as you are – within limits

Gaia’s Day Gaia is as sacred as you are – within limits. Although the name Gaia comes from an ancient Greek earth goddess, its contemporary usage is as a metaphor for the integrated and complementary physical, chemical and biological functions…

April 15, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 19 – April 13 – Gaia does not think globally

Gaia’s Day Gaia does not think globally. Nor should Americans. While Gaia is a metaphor for planet Earth and everything on it, and all its processes whether physical, chemical or biological, this does not mean that Gaia is ‘global’. This…

April 14, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 18 – April 12 – Gaia’s garden gets a break

Gaia’s Day Gaia’s garden gets a break. The unprecedented cessation of human economic and social activities which has been caused by the pandemic is turning out to be great for plants and the creatures who live on and from them.…

April 13, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 17 – April 11 – Gaia’s music

Gaia’s Day Gaia’s music. From around the locked-down world comes the sound of birds singing in the cities – and being heard. The black-backed gulls which frequent Auckland’s CBD don’t need to yell any more over the noise of traffic.…

April 12, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 16 – April 10 – Gaia’s liturgy

Gaia’s Day Gaia’s liturgy. Gaia accommodates all religions and none, but ever since I read Juliet Batten’s Celebrating the Southern Seasons (still in print a quarter of a century later) and learned how the Maori, Celtic and Christian traditions move…

April 12, 2020
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Pandemic Diary – Day 15 – April 9 – Rich clusters of viral infection

Gaia’s Day Rich clusters of viral infection. Viruses adore clusters of whatever it is they infect. With a tightly-packed group it is much easier to find new hosts and keep going. This is why most of the novel viruses which…

April 12, 2020
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    Recent Posts

    • Climate for Change, July 20, 2020 July 21, 2020
    • Climate for Change June 29 June 29, 2020
    • Climate for Change, June 22 June 23, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary June 8-14 June 15, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – June 1-7 June 8, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – May 25-31 June 1, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – May 18-24 May 25, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – May 11-17 May 18, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – Day 46 – May 10 – Real pandemic resilience. May 11, 2020
    • Pandemic Diary – Day 45 – May 9 – Liminal times. May 10, 2020

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