– The New Zealand Listener Magazine has an editorial in their September 22-28, 2012 edition entitled:
GLOBAL WARMING – Record droughts, hottest US summer ever & Arctic sea ice vanishing – What does it mean for New Zealand?
– It makes a lot of good points and I recomend reading it if you are a New Zealander.
– It repeats a point that I’ve made on this Blog for a long time. And that is that sooner or later, the same factors that brought me, and numerous other new immigrants to NZ, are going to become apparent to greater and greater numbers of folks and the rush to immigrate to NZ is going to be on.
– There will be, in the not too distant future, a lot of reasons to run away from other locations out in the world. Rising sea levels, water shortages, food shortages, extreme weather and widening social chaos will be among those factors. We’ve had economic and human rights refugees in the past. These will increase in the future and to their numbers will be added environmental refugees.
– Right now, NZ is not in bad shape.
Our beautiful refuge
– We generate the majority of our energy needs from benign sources such as hydroelectric and geothermal.
– We also generate two or more times the food that we consume which is why we can do a handsome amount of agricultural exporting.
– We are also protected from the worst of the weather changes because our climate is strongly buffered by the fact that we are an island nation in the midst of a huge surrounding ocean.
– We also have a fairly homogeneous culture which is good. It means that we, as a people, have fairly uniform ideas about how things should work.
– And, finally, we are protected from unwanted and forced immigration by that same ocean that surrounds us. Australia is the closest and they are 1000 miles away and most of the increasingly desperate world lies beyond them on the far side.
– But we will not remain in good shape if we don’t, as a nation, look out for ourselves.
– Should we let foreigners buy farmland here?
– The authors of the article think not and I agree with them. If push comes to shove in a nastier future and we need the food that grows here to survive, we will not be happy if a significant portion of it belongs to folks from overseas and they want to ship it home to their own people.
– Should we let offshore folks own significant portions of our industries and our means of production? I think not. If the world gets tough, they won’t be asking ‘how can they help us with those things’. They will be asking how those things can be used to help them.
– Should we let large numbers of folks immigrate into NZ from cultures significantly different from ours? Currently, we are not split, say, over common law verses Sharia Law or whether women should be first class citizens here or not. Or whether or not everyone should be able to practice their own religion so long as they leave other folks alone. But, if we don’t watch our immigration rates and types, this situation could get away from us. For a more detailed discussion of these ideas see here: ➡
– It is indeed sad that we might need to start thinking this way. Is seems so isolationist and selfish and New Zealand has always been a compassionate and generous nation.
– But, tough times are coming. The question is not ‘if‘ but simply ‘when‘. And the question is not, ‘is it going to be bad?‘. The fact is that it is going to be bad and the estimates of how bad it is going to be are only getting worse as we, as a world, keep continuing along without reacting to the dangers ahead.
– Please read the article.
– We in NZ are probably going to be some of the very luckiest people on the planet when the wheels come off because of our physical isolation, our low population, our excess food production capability and our well organized society. But those factors are not going to be enough to save us if we don’t look out for ourselves.
– The Arabs have an expression that comes to mind here: “Trust in God, but tether your camel.“
– dennis
– Late breaking: Chinese want to buy into Fonterra. See ➡
