Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

In asking himself the question, “what do I and a bumblebee have in common?” Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, hit upon a new way of looking at man’s relationship with nature that could not only revolutionise the way modern food production is handled, but also vastly improve soil quality and the general sustainability of many farms.

Filmed at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design - an annual meeting of thinkers and innovators from around the globe) in 2007, and made available for free online this year, Pollan urges a re-think of our relationship with nature, arguing that Darwin’s evolutionary ideas need to be taken to heart if we are to increase production in any sustainable fashion. Read more »

Written&directed by Johannes Kuemmel
Produced by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
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Lord of the Fruit Flies

History shows that human society can change if some moral force (civil rights, women’s rights) challenges convention. However, before we can be optimistic about solving the environmental crisis, we must be realistic. Otherwise, our confidence is delusional.

Human analysts struggle to assess our predicament because we live inside the experiment we are attempting to understand. We are the fastest changing variable in the experiment. Sixty-thousand years represents only a blink in the story of life on earth (one-thousandth of one percent), yet those millennia comprise the entire history of humanity from a million wide-eyed hunter-gatherers to six-billion humans clinging to a shrinking resource pool. From inside this surging human wave, particularly from one single lifetime, it is difficult to witness the forces that erode civilization. We must take a step back. Read more »

Greening the Titanic

Elle magazine announces that eco-friendly fashions are hip and features Stella McCartney vegan, silk dress sandals at $495, which would work well on a date in the $100,000 Tesla electric sports car. “In this epoch of global warming,” declares Green Guide online fashion consultant Anne Wallace, “fall fashion rules are undergoing climate change: it’s OK to wear knee-high faux fur boots with a light cotton skirt and wool sweater.” Vogue magazine advises, “prepare for erratic weather by putting warmer wraps over something skimpy.” Like your awareness of the issues?
consumer trolley.

To be fair, for decades, those in the environmental movement have wanted ecology to become popular, so we can hardly complain that it is. Consumer choices impact the environment, and we might rejoice that the shopping public is aware of this. Nevertheless, since consumption itself remains a root cause of our ecological crisis, we must ask: “Who is really gaining ground and who is blowing promotional smoke?” Read more »

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Ecology? Look it up! Your involved.

- Rex Weyler

Deep Green is a new monthly column by Greenpeace’s unofficial historian, Rex Weyler.

Rex was a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, the editor of the organisation’s first newsletter, and a cofounder of Greenpeace International in 1979. He was a photographer and reporter on the early Greenpeace whale and seal campaigns, and has written one of the best and most comprehensive histories of the organisation, Greenpeace (Raincoast, 2004). His book, Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Read more »

Welcome to the shiny and new Greenpeace NZ weblog!

We’ve talked about this for far too long now so without further ado here it is!

A forum in which Greenpeace staff can speak their minds, issue challenges, offer insights and go off on wildly unrelated tangents. And a place where you dear reader can also offer your thoughts on such matters. Most pages will sport a comment form near the bottom of the page for you to do so and we’d love to hear from you!

So with all that in mind, the following disclaimer applies…

Let it be known that the opinions expressed on this website (weblog / blog) are the entirely personal opinions of various members of Greenpeace who should probably be busy working on some highly important and time consuming project but instead choose to make their opinions known to the rest of the world in the naïve belief anybody else wants to know, and those from outside Greenpeace foolhardy enough to venture into the debate. The opinions have nothing at all, absolutely, whatsoever, for all time and in any way, shape or form at all, anything to do with Greenpeace, probably never will do, definitely never ought to, and should not be construed to be so. In fact, we wash our hands of it all, completely.