Carbon in the time of Covid

This actually has nothing to do with Covid-19 or Cholera, which the title is very loosely taken from.  If you cast your mind back a few months, the world was fixated on carbon-sequestration.  It seemed like every few weeks another tree planting programme was...

Henry’s answer to a complex problem

Henry Louis Mencken is famous for many things including saying; “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry was an American satirist and cultural critic who died 1950’s – by all accounts he was free with his opinion and took...

Zen and the culture of pruning

The Skype meeting was tedious and I found myself checking FaceBook. Checking FaceBook out of the corner of my eye; one can never look away from the camera during an online meeting. A discrete click, a sly scroll and ‘Pruning is cultural not scientific’, that’s worth a...

Facilitation in a time of change

– the control of exotic vegetation on Auckland’s volcanic cones The volcanic cones of Auckland were taken from the Māori about 150 years ago; the cones were and are considered ancestral mountains, they are Tūpuna Maunga. During those 150 years, Māori had...

New kinds of Snake Oil

Snake Oil is an old-school term for a cure-all potion, that in reality does nothing. If you are lucky the potion won’t make things worse but the chances of it making things better are slim – ‘that which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’, or in the case of Snake...