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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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.…
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…
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…
