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By avoiding planes for a year, I found that I had cut my carbon dioxide emissions from travel to just over 1 tonne. This was a reduction of 95 per cent from my 2017 carbon footprint from travel. It felt good. What happens when a leading New Zealand scientist (and frequent traveller) rules out flying for a year? From overnight buses to epic train journeys, Shaun Hendy’s experiences speak to our desire to do something – anything – in the face of growing climate anxiety. #NoFly confronts the hard questions of one person’s attempt ‘to adapt’. Was this initiative merely symbolic? Did it compromise his work, his life? And has it left him feeling more optimistic that we can, indeed, reach a low-emissions future?
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‘It is there, in the background. Always. Increasingly urgent. Its ominous hum is the soundtrack to every other story we tell.’ The devastating summer of Australian bushfires underlined a terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic lurch away from business as usual. Some observers are worried that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a ‘green Covid-19 recovery’: a cleaner, fairer and safer world. This BWB Text brings together mātauranga Māori and Pasifika perspectives, voices from academia, activism, journalism and economics to bear witness to these troubled times.
While we New Zealanders live off the cow's back, our long-term economic prognosis looks grim. Our economic growth lags behind Australia and other countries in the OECD. Our universities fall each year in international rankings. We export 24 per cent of our university graduates. The country's lack-lustre economic performance following the free-market reforms of the 1980s is often cast as a paradox: why haven't sound economic policies led to growth? In this book two of New Zealand's leading thinkers tell us to 'get off the grass!' - and explain how we might do so. Shuan Hendy and Paul Callaghan argue that the New Zealand 'paradox' can be explained by our struggle to innovate. On a per-capita b...
CONTENTS Introduction 1 Hey Look! A Flying Pig!............................................................1 Are Very Often Not Symptoms Of The Disease At All, But Of Something Quite Different..............................................................2 The Consensus Farce..................................................................4 Consensus Is Invoked Only In Situations Where The Science Is Not Solid Enough............................................................................4 2 February 2020..........................................................................7 Tyranny in the Name of Science.................................................7 Lying in the Name of Science.....
For novelist Stephanie Johnson, her relationship with Australia and Australians has been an ambivalent one. She has lived there for periods in her life, and her first book, a collection of short stories, was actually published in Australia. She was described then as a young Australian writer, something she says she agreed to ‘for reasons that are complex and some of them hardly honourable’. For Johnson the longing to return has waxed and waned. ‘Why don’t I live there?’ she often asks herself. Yet she is a sixth-generation New Zealander. In this BWB Text Johnson explores her elusive and ambivalent feelings about the sunburnt country – which includes a musician’s road trip there with her singer-songwriter son Skyscraper Stan – and in so doing casts fascinating light on some of the formative influences that have shaped the work of this award-winning New Zealand writer.
‘I began to pull the threads of my experience back together. Instead of divergent stories about public failure, private torment, and postnatal distress, I started telling myself a united story: the truth, or as close as I could get to it.’ A Rhodes scholar and former Green MP, Holly Walker tells the story of how she became one of New Zealand’s youngest parliamentarians, how motherhood intervened, and how she found solace and solidarity in the writings of women. This short book makes a passionate case for the role of literature in political change and personal resilience, and for the importance of women’s voices in the public sphere.
There is a deep dysfunction in the way we talk about oil and mining. Battles over oil and mining developments in New Zealand are fierce and polarised. Often presented as a simple trade-off between conservation or quick profit, the debate leaves little space for discussion across ideological divides. The Ground Between provides a rare account from someone who has worked within this contested arena. Drawing on his experience with local and international mining companies, governments and NGOs, Sefton Darby reflects frankly on the state of resource extraction in New Zealand. Seeking to reset the debate within a global context, this book is ultimately about how we – as a country – make decisions around contentious issues.
New Zealanders are too complacent about the continuing erosion of their right to know what government is doing on their behalf. Political risk has become a primary consideration in whether official information requests will be met, and successive governments have allowed free speech rights to be overridden. Drawing on decades of experience as a journalist and editor, Gavin Ellis chronicles the patterns of erosion and calls for entrenchment of the Bill of Rights Act. As supreme law, it would set a high bar that politicians must hurdle before freedom of expression could be curtailed.
"Today it seems that conspiracy and rumour spread faster than ever and are increasingly hard to debunk. How do we convincingly explain the difference between good information and misinformation? A matter of fact explores the science of communicating and presents innovative ways to talk effectively (and empathetically) about contentious information"--Publisher information.