Kazel's blog

It inspiring to see how the efforts of a few people can lead to powerful changes.  I have always liked superheroes – those incredible caped crusaders with a mission to Save The World.  Of course, their superpowers make it easier, even if they have to fight super villains.

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With the rollercoaster ride of emotions that accompanied the elections in both the USA and NZ now over, it’s time to get back to day to day life and focus on the next big important event: Christmas.

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Clean rivers are essential for our local economy, for our health, for our kiwi way of life.  To be able to take the kids down to the river for a swim is a right we should protect, just like the taste of smoked eel or whitebait fritters.

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Remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper?  The ant worked hard all summer preparing and storing for the lean times ahead.  The grasshopper sang songs and relaxed in the summer grass.

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Keeping chickens is such a wonderful part of organic gardening and self-sufficiency.  With five laying hens and a couple of bantams we have eggs most of the year. 

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Floating in the Pacific Ocean is a massive floating island continent made entirely of plastic.  It’s in an area called the North Pacific Gyre and it is formed by a kind of whirl-pool effect.  It traps the floating plastic in the swirling underwater currents. » Read more

Sometimes it just gets worse.  Vast amounts of Arctic ice melt every summer and most of it refreezes every winter, but not all.  Monitoring since 1979 has shown that the Arctic has been losing summer ice at about 9% per decade.  This is actually much worse than scientists predicted when monitoring began, and is greater than even the worst-ca » Read more

I’ve presented my Peak Oil and climate change slideshow at few times now, at public meetings in Opotiki, at Rotorua’s Green Drinks, to teachers at the college and in the introduction to the Sustainable Living course.

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If I had to come up with the single greatest thing that we could do as a town to reduce our collective carbon footprint and create resilience to peak oil it would have to be growing more organic food locally. » Read more

‘Sustainability’ is a word that may have passed its use-by date.  When we try to find a definition of sustainability in the Sustainable Living course, a “low impact lifestyle that protects the natural environment forever with no waste” is a fair summary of our efforts.  » Read more