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- I’ve been on for sometime about New Zealand, as any long term reader of this Blog knows.   Indeed, my wife and I have secured resident visas for NZ as a sort of insurance policy.  

- This means that we now have the permanent right to live there, if we want to for the rest of our lives.  And, we may well do so when we’re ready to retire. 

- If the world begins to crumble as a result of the numerous threats that I an others have detailed, then moving there will certainly look like a good move.

- We’re not the only folks to think so.   I came across a reference to the article, below, on a friend’s Blog and I found it interesting reading, indeed.

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Is the end really, finally nigh? And if it is, what are you going to do about it? John McCrone meets some South Islanders who are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

The ‘twin tsunamis’ of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it - and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades.

Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat.

Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up  to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.

The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley’s winding dirt-track road.

The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.

Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry.  here is the library of yellowing books from colonial times, telling how to make your own soap, spin candlewicks, care for clydesdale horses.

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- research thanks to Brian C.

My wife’s in New Zealand and so I’ve been running the business here alone. And business has been slow for us like it’s been for most everyone. So, I’ve cut our workers back to 32 hours a week and I’ve been using our part-time sales staff less and less. The idea, of course, is to cut our outgoing money flow until it roughly matches our incoming. Assuming I can hit the balance, we can tread water indefinitely until things sort themselves out.

Yesterday, I had a sales person in and we only did about $150 in sales for the day and the weather was beautiful. A Saturday, 73 degrees Fahrenheit, fluffy white clouds - in short, everything one could want. But, in spite of all of that, only a few folks came in all day.

Today, rain was forecast and I let our sales person go for the day (actually, I called last night and told them not to come in). And, indeed, after a somewhat gray morning, the skies opened up in the afternoon and rain arrived by the buckets.

And sales?

Five times what we sold yesterday.

Now, that’s still not a large amount of sales compared to what we normally do on weekend days in high season when the economy’s healthy. But, it was a lot better than yesterday. So, I was busy most of the day talking to folks and just dealing with it all. And then, as the skies opened and the rains came, they kept on coming in. And I was amazed - but willing to keep selling.

So, in the end, the last customer left just at closing time and I was happy though I was pretty throughly wet by then.

I went around and passed out paychecks, turned off the automatic irrigation systems and finally got in the house and out of my wet clothes.

This week’s total sales were better than they’ve been for several weeks and we may actually have hit balance this week between our burn rate and our sales income. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. It is the average of whether you are winning or losing over many weeks that matters. And we’re still waiting for that fortune cookie to be delivered.

One small consolation … I understand it is pouring in New Zealand too <smile>.

Later - this same day.

Another small but very significant (to us) bit of news.

After three years of effort, Sharon and I have secured permanent residency status in New Zealand. From now until the ends of our lives, we have the right to live and work in New Zealand, if we wish.

We want to retire there after we’ve sold the nursery business and now it is guaranteed that we can go when we are ready. What a beautiful thing this is to finally see manifested.

If you are going to have a drink tonight - raise one for us.

Cheers!

New Zealand has reported the fastest growth in sales of Fairtrade products in the world - a 45-fold increase in just four years.

Barry Coates, executive director Oxfam NZ, said there had been a huge increase in Fairtrade sales here, from $200,000 a year in 2004 to annual sales of about $9.13 million.

He said it was the fastest growth rate in the Fairtrade market of any country. That was partly explained by the mainstreaming of products such as coffee, tea and chocolate into supermarkets and cafes, as well as speciality stores. “They used to only be available in Trade Aid shops … now they are even served up in some government departments.”

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Kiribati’s President, Anote Tong, says his country may already be doomed by global warming - and he wants New Zealand and Australia to consider the issue of environmental refugees.

“We may already be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, so in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged,” Mr Tong said yesterday in Wellington.

Kiribati’s highest point of land is just 2m above sea level, and under “worst-case” scenarios it will be flooded by the Pacific this century and its 94,000 people will have to be re-settled in other countries.

Mr Tong, a graduate of the London School of Economics, said climate change “is not an issue of economic development, it’s an issue of human survival”.

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- Great piece by Long Ago and Not True Anyway, a New Zealand Blog.

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Development as Explained By 2 Cows in a Field

Development in General – “Three cows are better than two.”

Mainstream Development – “Feeding the cow grass and exposing it to fresh air is completely inefficient. We will loan you money so that you can house the cows in a battery farm and feed them upon sheep brains which you will import from Great Britain. You can pay off the loan by exporting factory effluent to Japan.”

The Debt Crisis – In the 1970’s Western Banks had more cows than they knew what to do with, so they loaned cows to all manner of Third World despots and dictators. These un-elected rulers then slaughtered the cows and sent the profits to Swiss Bank accounts. Twenty years later the people of third world countries are asked to forgo education and basic medical care to repay the loaned cows, despite the fact that they never saw them in the first place.

And for more of this sort of thing, click here:

- I’ve written a fair amount about New Zealand on this blog over the last few years. My wife and I intend to retire there, so I have a special interest in the place. Below is an article from the New Zealand Herald about why folks are drawn to New Zealand.

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Lifestyle biggest drawcard to NZ

New Zealand’s relaxed lifestyle is the leading reason people come here to live, according to new statistics.

Statistics New Zealand’s longitudinal immigration survey put lifestyle (44 per cent) at the top of the list of reasons people want to live here.

The climate or clean and green environment came in second at 40 per cent, with a desire to provide a better future for children following at 39 per cent.

The survey showed 93 per cent of permanent migrants indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with life in New Zealand, while almost the same amount said they planned to stay for three years or more.

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- Nice post today in a New Zealand Blog (Amerinz) written by an American immigrant to that country. He writes about corporate greed and how corporations are only beholding to their shareholders and how, as a business model, that isn’t necessarily the best thing for the people who have to share their societies with these ravenous and amoral entities.

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I’ve written about corporate greed many times. I’ve been critical about corporate ethics, and about the modern business paradigm in which nothing matters to corporations except maximising return to investors.

Today, there was an example of what I’ve been talking about.

New Zealand appliance manufacturer Fisher & Paykel has announced that it’s shutting factories in Dunedin in New Zealand, Brisbane in Australia and one in California, shifting the jobs to Asia. 1070 people will loose their jobs, 430 of them in New Zealand. Last year the company announced that it was eliminating even more jobs in Auckland, shipping them to Asia.

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I’m leaving New Zealand for the U.S. day after tomorrow on Tuesday. I’ve been here for three months now and it is time to return home to my other life.

I’m looking forward to seeing my wife very much. And our friends and our animals as well.

But, it’s hard to leave. I’ve made good friends here as well and I love living in this Kiwi culture.

I’ve grown discouraged with the U.S.’s corporate-driven culture the ascendancy of its religious right. And I daily grow more worried about the long term stability of our global civilization. I want to live in a simpler time and place in the remaining years that have been given me. And I think New Zealand is the place.

I will resume Blogging in a few days from the Seattle area. Until then, cheers, my friends.

For a thousand years before people settled in
New Zealand, a small alien predator may have been
undermining the islands’ seabird populations.

By Laura Sessions

Our yellow Zodiac bobbed across the choppy sea and made its way slowly through the clouds of seabirds that wheeled and soared around us. Albatross, cape pigeons, diving petrels, mollymawks, mottled petrels, and sooty shearwaters all took their turns skimming our bow wave for fish. In the distance my boat mates and I could see the final stop on our sub-Antarctic tour: the Snares Islands, about 130 miles south of New Zealand’s South Island. The chorus of screeching birds drowned out our rumbling boat motor, and even from several miles away we could smell the acrid white guano that coats much of the Snares’s rocky coasts. During the summer breeding season the Snares, whose entire area totals not much more than one and a quarter square miles, are home to more than 6 million seabirds—as many as nest along the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland combined.

Today in the New Zealand archipelago, such dense seabird colonies persist only on small offshore islands, but at one time much of the coastline of the North and South Islands (by far New Zealand’s two largest islands, commonly called the mainland) would have been equally pungent and raucous. New Zealand once supported one of the most diverse seabird faunas in the world; the country was particularly rich in species of petrels. Nowadays those populations have crashed, and many species have been extirpated on the mainland. One can only imagine what it must have been like for ancient Polynesian seafarers reaching the shores of uninhabited New Zealand. The archipelago, no doubt a welcome sight after months of arduous ocean sailing in a double-hulled canoe, would also have presented a far different scene from that of most of New Zealand today.

But did these colonizers encounter a truly pristine environment? It would be easy to “round up the usual suspects” and blame the loss of so many species from the mainland on the encroachments of civilization. But in reality, the early Polynesian settlers were not responsible for the destruction of many of the seabird populations. Even before people settled this southern land, other visitors may have already irrevocably altered the New Zealand environment.

Those earlier arrivals on the New Zealand mainland were Pacific rats (Rattus exulans), or kiore, as they are called in the Maori language. It has been known for almost a decade that these small stowaways helped drive some of the native bird species from the mainland, or, in some cases, to outright extinction. According to the standard account of the invasion, the rats arrived in New Zealand between 800 and 1,000 years ago, in the canoes of the first Polynesian settlers. But in 1996, Richard Holdaway, an independent extinction biologist, presented evidence that the rodents first made landfall perhaps a thousand years earlier. That date has called into question the entire sequence of prehistoric events that shaped New Zealand—and, not surprisingly, has fueled much debate in New Zealand about the strength and validity of Holdaway’s evidence.

But even more, Holdaway has hypothesized that a rat-generated crash in island bird populations could have led to “a cascade of damage” and even to a change in the nearshore oceanic food web: seabird colonies generate a prodigious quantity of guano, which can form a kind of organic bridge between sea and shore, enriching soil and promoting plant growth. If the seabird populations crashed, Holdaway argues, so did this bridge. The islands would have lost a major source of nutrients. If Holdaway is right, the rats had accidentally landed on a choke point of the ecosystem, causing a ripple effect that went far beyond the destruction of seabirds.

Thanks to their remoteness—New Zealand lies 1,200 miles east of its nearest neighbor, Australia—the North and South Islands faced the onslaught of invaders considerably later than did many other islands around the globe. But just as they have on Hawaii and Guam, alien species that were suddenly introduced onto the islands have had devastating effects. New Zealand birds were particularly at risk, because they had evolved for millennia in the absence of mammalian predators (indeed, the only land mammals of prehistoric New Zealand were three species of ground-feeding bats). Many of the native birds were flightless and seminocturnal, making them easy prey for the rats and the eleven other introduced species of predatory mammals that eventually prospered in the archipelago. Even seabirds were vulnerable; though they can spend months of each year at sea, many of them nest in ground burrows and are helpless against terrestrial threats.

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Natural History, May, 2001 by Laura Sessions

Sugar was a shared resource in a forest community until a greedy newcomer moved in.

Biologist E. O. Wilson has called invertebrates “little things that run the world,” because of their numbers, variety, and influence on larger organisms and even entire ecosystems. New Zealand is home to “little things” that, while each only a few millimeters long, have benignly modified about 250 million acres of the country’s beech forests. Known as sooty beech scale insects, these agents turn the resources of the beech trees into a substance crucial to their own survival and to that of other forest dwellers, from fungi to birds. The association of the insects and the trees is an ancient one, and the expansive food web in which they are actors was, until recently, intact.

Sooty beech scale insects (Ultracoelostoma assimile and U. brittini) are sap suckers, or homopterans, that grow in the furrowed bark off our species of southern beech trees (Nothofagus) in New Zealand. During its complex life cycle, the beech scale insect goes through several developmental stages called instars. The females pass through four stages, the males five. Second- and third-instar females insert their long mouthparts into the cells of a beech’s phloem–the tissues that carry nutrients through the tree–and suck up sugars. After satisfying their appetites, they excrete the excess sap and wastes through a waxy anal tube. A sweet liquid, called honeydew, accumulates one drop at a time at the tip of this tube, which looks like a thin white thread.

Homopterans are common and widespread. Most of the world’s 33,000 species produce honeydew, but few can match the beech scale’s enormous and constant output of the substance. In the Northern Hemisphere, honeydew producers such as aphids are active only seasonally, but beech scale insects draw off and convert energy from beech trees year-round, and they do so copiously during the austral summer. From January to April, the tree trunks in a southern beech forest often shimmer with a thick coat of honeydew, and the droplets’ heady, sweet smell fills the air.

In some forests, ten and a half square feet of tree trunk (think of the top of an average card table) may support as many as 2,000 scale insects. More than 40 percent of the food the trees have produced through photosynthesis may be lost to sooty beech scale insects. These beeches do not appear to be harmed, although for most plants, losses of much less than 40 percent of their energy reserves would be insupportable. Currently, scientists can only guess how the trees are able to withstand such a drain, but various theories are being explored. Possibly only the more vigorous and faster-growing beech trees are tapped by beech scale insects. Fallen drops may recycle sugars to the soil and thence to trees, or the insects may promote extra photosynthesis in host trees.

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