Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
Light the fuse: Not the great New Zealand novel prologue
Readers of its unedifying history will struggle to credit that the Climate Polycrisis took so long to be convincingly named. Successive cohorts of historians will struggle to explain this phenomenon, and labour to quantify quite how critical a lacuna it was in impeding anything…
Climate-powered atmospheric river alters algorithm
Mahurangi Regatta 2023, or rather its cancellation, has added an important loop to the loose algorithm that has been run 46 times since Mahurangi Action revived a regatta for which only scant clues remained as to how it was run. Initially, the sailing and shoreside events were…
Thinking outside the three-bedroom breeding box
Good for absolutely nothing, war is now preoccupying the every waking moment that should be fiercely focussed on the climate emergency. For those born into the post-war optimism of the United Nations, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sharply increased the struggle to…
Every action equal and apposite climate action
As a catchy climate-action-mobilisation call-to-arms, equal and apposite is a pun too far. An incisive shorthand phrase to convey the imperative that every action be a climate action is, nevertheless, in desperate need of coining. Glasgow’s overarching message…
Honest cop preferable to climate Pearl Harbor
Globally, writers are giving their best shot to the imperative of persuading the Glasgow conference parties that, this time, they must mobilise meaningful climate action. One such writer, the Guardian ’s re-wilding guru, George Monbiot, in his masterly eve-of-cop 26 article…
Te Muri access dictated drop-in location
Was it not for John Darrach’s 1880s activism, Saturday’s coffee-and-croissants drop-in day, in Mahurangi West’s former school, would have been held in Sullivans Bay. John Darrach was so exercised about the danger to the 23 Māori and 14 Pākehā children living at school-less…
Mahurangi West land restoration planting Sunday 11 July
Officially, the West is East, but in practice it is neither, nor is it in the Mahurangi hydrological catchment, it being in that of Te Muri. First planting day under the Mahurangi Land Restoration label appears to be an echo of the first under the $3 million Mahurangi Action…
Imperative for private-vehicle-free Te Muri future
Not everyone supports the proposed Te Muri crossing. Nor does everyone who supports the proposed Te Muri crossing, support every aspect of it. For example, many Mahurangi West people would have preferred that development of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail began…
Wicked climate action starts with Wenderholm Regional Park
Wenderholm is a wicked place to tackle the wicked problem of anthropogenic global warming. Wickedly symbolic, to begin with. Wenderholm was the first of Auckland’s wonderful 41 000-hectare network of now 28 regional parks. Throughout their otherwise…
covid-19 didn’t mobilise but climate must
Fifty-one weeks ago, the Mahurangi Magazine warned: “The eventual toll of this pandemic could be in the order of 3 million deaths.” At the time, the reported global toll had only just exceeded 100 thousand, but the calculation wasn’t complex. Subtract the population…
Donald’s depraved indifference indiminishable at 100 000/day
Ahead of itself, but by less than two months, the Mahurangi Magazine, 5 July, predicted: The depraved indifference of Donald Trump means that, come 5 September when New Zealanders begin flocking to the polls for 13 days of early voting, it will be against a backdrop...
Act now and Aotearoa could own Democracy Day 2021
With Donald Trump’s best prospects now being immediate resignation and prompt a Mike Pence pardon, the United States’ flawed democracy might now survive long enough to face redemption. Shy seven weeks, it is 20 years from the United States election that…
25% less democracy doesn’t equate to 25% less can-kicking
Blamed for everything from the lack of climate-action mobilisation to the lack of a capital gains tax, to the failure to raise the retirement age, the three-year parliamentary term—it is persistently opined—must go. Evidence for the efficacy of longer parliamentary terms….
$30 million Mahurangi action plan
$3 million over 5 years seemed, for a moment there in 2004, as though all the Mahurangi Harbour’s Christmases had come at once. Even in today’s money, $9.06 million is more than twice the 2004 amount, but nor, back then, does it mean that the Mahurangi’s sediment woes…
Depraved indifference to humanity and the home planet
Aotearoa has demonstrated that democracy can work. Globally, however, covid-19 demonstrates the deadly degree to which governmental and intergovernmental governance, democratic or otherwise, is grossly unfit-for-purpose. The world’s ascendant…