A vast expanse of the Southern Ocean vital for the future of the world’s penguins has become one of the largest marine protected areas on Earth, after years of close cooperation between the South African government and WWF. Continue reading →
30
Mar 10
Fighting the flames
WWF has stepped in to battle annual fires in central Kalimantan, Borneo, which threaten the survival of an estimated 8,000 endangered wild orang-utans.
Every dry season more forest and peatland in the region is cut and burned to make way for plantations, destroying the forests and some of its wildlife, fuelling climate change, and sparking uncontrolled fires.
Beginning in July 2009, the last dry season was marked by a prolonged drought. This triggered wildfires that threatened to spread into vital orang-utan habitat in the Sebangau National Park area, where they could have easily killed the great apes or left them homeless. The park’s 568,700 hectares are made up of peatland, which burns easily when it dries out.
To help tackle any future fires, WWF has been working with local authorities to train and equip a community fire service called RPK. This has already proved successful. In August a joint team from WWF and the Park Office was on a routine fire patrol when locals alerted them to a fire burning above and below ground in a nearby peat area.
A spokesman for the local RPK said they are much better prepared to tackle fires since they have established proper forest fire-fighting techniques. “When the fire started, we extinguished it using techniques that we learned during training sessions conducted by WWF just before the dry season ,” he added.
WWF has also established and fully equipped a forest fire-fighting station in north Ulu Segama – a critical orang-utan habitat in the Heart of Borneo. And we are working with local people to strategically block local canals: this keeps water in the peat bog areas to reduce the risk of fire and allow plants to re-grow. In west Kalimantan, WWF has established two pilot projects in villages pioneering the use of improved farming techniques that do not require burning.
We hope to expand these projects. We are also calling for the government to support us with tougher law enforcement against those found guilty of setting fires as well as action to prevent further incidents.
30
Mar 10
Cracking South East Asia’s Ivory trade
Undercover investigations by TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network of WWF and the IUCN – has put the spotlight on the scandalous ivory trade in Thailand and Burma.
In Thailand, a survey of Bangkok and Chiang Mai throughout 2008 revealed 50 more shops offering ivory items than in the previous year. In total 23,000 ivory products such as knife handles, belt buckles, jewellery and statues were found openly for sale. And staff at many of the stores had little hesitation in telling the undercover buyers about smuggling techniques and other illegal activities.
A separate operation involved staff from TRAFFIC posing as potential buyers in areas of Burma bordering Thailand and China. They found 9,000 pieces of ivory and 16 whole tusks for sale. Shockingly, they also uncovered evidence that about 250 live Asian elephants have been smuggled into Thailand from Burma over the last decade. Once there they are used for tourist trekking or street begging.
Taken together, the findings suggest poor policing and a blatant disregard for international conventions and national laws. Neither Burma nor Thailand has reported cross-border trade in live elephants to CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), and Thailand has reported only two ivory seizures (totalling 1.2 tonnes of raw ivory) since 2004.
The discoveries also raise concerns that the legal trade in domesticated elephants is providing cover for illegal trade in wild, highly-endangered Asian elephants.
Tom Milliken , of TRAFFIC, says: “Thailand has consistently been identified as one of the world’s top five countries most heavily implicated in the illicit ivory trade, but shows little sign of addressing the problem. The government needs to reassess its policy for controlling its local ivory markets .”
The reports’ findings are being used to put pressure on authorities in both countries to work together to tackle the problem, and to warn tourists about the issues involved and products to avoid. This work forms a key part of our efforts to reduce illegal trade in major markets for elephant products and help governments enforce restrictions on the trade.
07
Jan 10
Time for Transition
February, 2008
Since I learned about Transition Towns, I stopped waiting for my jet-pack to be delivered.
When I was a snotty-nosed 10-year-old in the mid-1980s, my school teacher gave out a booklet. It described how by the year 2000 we would commute by jet-pack from the roofs of our air conditioned living pods over green fields to gleaming cities of sky-scraping steel and glass.
There we would do a squeaky-clean 20 hour week, while the machines and robots did most of the work. Leisure would be the largest industry; our biggest problem would be working out what to do with all the spare money and free time.
Of course, it didn’t mention that this kind of future would only ever be available for a tiny minority of super rich people at the expense of everybody else. It left out the limits of global resource use, Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Fast forward to now. Surprise. It turns out Star Trek was a science fiction show after all. The jet packs ain’t comin’.
How each of us copes with this reality, how we re-imagine and re-engineer our future with this knowledge and build new dreams, is the greatest and most exciting challenge humanity currently faces.
Transition Towns is one way in which people are coming together to do this. It accepts that the future is going to be one in which we consume dramatically less energy than currently. Most communities, towns and regions, not to mention individuals like me, are terribly ill-prepared for this.
But if we prepare in enough time and engage with enough creativity, we can create a better, more vibrant future than the life we are currently living.
When I cycle up to meet James Samuel, New Zealand’s volunteer national co-ordinator for Transition Towns, he is smiling from his sun bleached shed-come-office perched over Waiheke’s idyllic Oneroa Bay. He’s wearing beach shorts, an open shirt and large greenstone disc dangling from his neck. With his athletic build, twinkling eyes and deeply relaxed composure, he doesn’t seem like a 50-year-old who has been on a computer all night.
“I took a Skype call at about 2am about sales on our latest book,” he explains. “Then at 3am I got involved in a web training seminar with the UK, then another call came in at 5.30am with the feedback from another workshop being held over there. It was great.”
Okay, Transition Towns isn’t some Doomsday Luddite anti-technology cult. I may not get my jet-pack, but I won’t get in trouble for bringing my laptop. We go for a swim in the ocean beneath James’ home. With a holistic work schedule like James’ you take your breaks whenever you feel it’s appropriate.
Nobody can question his commitment. He has now spent most of his savings while working 50 wildly irregular hours a week on this for the past five months, for which he has managed to get $3,500 in funds. He says this doesn’t worry him.
“I will never be homeless on this island, and never without food,” he says simply. “I don’t own my own home, but I have a lot of social capital built up here.”
The concept of Transition Towns began life just about when I was due to start gliding off my garage, by another seaside, in Kinsale, Ireland. It grew – you might say organically – from its originator Rob Hopkins’ study and practice of permaculture, which he had at that time been pursuing for more than a decade.
Permaculture – coming from ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’ – is a design approach which aims to integrate and harmonise humanity with nature to provide for all our needs in a sustainable way. In permaculture gardens, lakes, ponds, rivers, fields, forests and buildings are designed or reshaped with the intention of being as diverse, stable and resilient as nature itself.
Applying these principles to Kinsale, Rob began to develop ways in which the community could prepare for the approaching realities of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The result was the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, which was adopted by the local town council.
The plan was essentially aimed at creating a vision of what a happy, healthy, thriving post-Peak Oil and Climate Change savvy Kinsale might look like, and then charting out the steps aimed at getting there.
Or, as Rob describes it: “It was the first, as far as we know, attempt at designing a timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels.”
Importantly, the plan was informed by community discussions and input from a wide range of local people. Transition Towns is not about politicians or ‘experts’ telling people what they should do. It’s an open invitation for everyone to play a part in creating a really tight-knit, focused, inspired community, which can share the upcoming challenges and successes equally.
It does this by helping a community to identify what they need to become stronger and more resilient to the changes ahead. It could be anything from intensive permaculture design courses and setting up alternative currencies to coffee mornings and yoga classes. Anything that binds the community together is thrown into the mix. The Transition Town group’s job is to just to keep stirring.
After his success in Kinsale, Rob moved on to Devon and began work on a plan for Totnes, where a calendar of Transition events and a number of working groups have sprouted. Word spread. What became the Transition Network forged links with similar worldwide movements. Today there are 35 full scale Transition projects in the UK, one in Australia, and two in New Zealand.
Which is where James came in, in about the middle of 2007, with his eclectic background as farmer, woodworker, traveller, paragliding instructor, religious community member and facilitator. When he first heard of Transition Towns, he had already been working hard on bringing his own community together.
He had been manager of the local cinema, ensuring that films covering Peak Oil and Climate Change were screened. He also helped to establish community gardens, the local farmer’s market and even a new primary school.
“I called the first Transition meeting, inviting 20 people, and 24 came, which was encouraging,” he said. “I soon realised that people already knew about Peak Oil and Climate Change, they wanted to talk about the process, about what to do.”
Currently the Transition Towns concept includes guidance on 12 steps – like Alcoholics Anonymous except it deals with our community’s addiction to oil. Rob admits they are not so much designed to take you from A-Z as from A-C, since this is as far as people have got up until now.
The steps are not prescriptive, they can be followed in any order, left out, or new ones added as the group sees fit.
- Setting up a steering group designed only to continue as long as a few of the steps have been taken. This avoids burn out or stifling of ideas by strong personalities and bureaucracy;
- Raising awareness about the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change with films, talks and other events. These should all be designed to be positive and constructive;
- Connecting with people and groups that are already acting on these issues;
- Organising a launch event which celebrates the community’s resources and willingness to act;
- Forming groups to work on areas like energy use, transport, food etc;
- Using Open Space, a collaboratively organised conference where participants all get a chance to lead discussions and choose the topics;
- To avoid becoming just a talking shop, developing physical practical manifestations of the project like tree planting, solar panels, or alternative local currencies, and getting publicity for them;
- Helping people train in basic self sufficiency skills and problem solving in a relaxed, social atmosphere of fun;
- Connecting the project to your local authority;
10. Learning from those who remember the transition into cheap oil between 1930 and 1960;
11. Letting it go where it wants to go. The Transition group is there to act as a catalyst for the community and to facilitate them asking the right questions, rather than to come up with answers;
- Finally, creating an Energy Descent Action Plan.
What it doesn’t involve is getting funding, fighting the law, stepping on the toes of other green groups, waiting for someone else to do something, berating people or obtaining qualifications.
“The idea is to keep the energy going,” says James. “Find great people, and make them as effective as possible, so that everyone can focus on what they have a passion for.”
As an island beside an island nation, with a warm climate and abundant water supplies, Waiheke is fertile ground to test the Transition Town idea. And because New Zealand does not produce large amounts of oil and is a long way from the key oil producing parts of the world, it is likely that energy decent here will be quite sudden.
Current priorities for Transition Waiheke include looking at ways to reduce food imports to the island, working with Meridian power to reduce power consumption on the island, and encouraging house builders to use local materials.
The group is also planning a new sustainable public transport system, sharing sustainable skills like woodworking and blacksmithing and drawing together a full inventory of current community projects.
The Transition Towns push also manifests itself on the island in neat little ideas, like the veggie swap stall on the local market, where instead of money, people’s surplus fruit and vegetables from their gardens changes hands. Or the ‘fabulous fruit tree’ project, which aims to plant 20,000 fruit trees in public spaces on the island by 2014.
These are what James refers to as ‘baby steps’, which get people used to the idea of gathering and sharing natural resources. They also provide fresh opportunities for people to get to know and like each other.
“People want to feel that it is doable, that we can start now,” he explains.
In New Zealand all Transition Towns activities are undertaken by volunteers, and only three people formally work in the UK home of Transition Towns. The number of people involved ebbs and flows depending on their passions and availability, and the events taking place at the time. Despite, or perhaps because of it, the momentum is growing.
“Things are moving at a phenomenal pace,” says James. “The last film showing we had was on a really sunny Saturday afternoon on which there was a load of other stuff happening on the island. We still filled the auditorium and had people sitting in the aisles!”
As well as Waiheke, Orewa has begun the formal transition process, and a number of meetings have been held. The business of raising awareness is also underway there. This recently included a talk from Cuban biologist Roberto Perez, who provided an example of how his country survived and thrived while oil was scarce because of the US blockade.
More than 30 other areas in New Zealand have expressed an interest in this approach, and are using some of the Transition Towns techniques to bring people together. The chances are there is one near you. If not, James suggests you get in touch, so you can start something yourself.
“It is an amazing, exciting, encouraging, growing thing and I don’t see that stopping,” he says. “We have got to keep learning from each other. When people come up with something really creative everyone can benefit from it, and that is exciting.
“When a community comes together as a Transition Town they are saying ‘we have started’ which means they have already succeeded, not in some future moment. It is a movement and evolution which begins now.”
07
Jan 10
A green glossary
February, 2009
Alternative energy
Power generation without fossil fuels. Typically wind, wave, solar and geothermal. Plants, algae, human sewage and cow poo are being tested. But it’s not like we’re desperate or anything.
Biodynamic agriculture
Emphasises compost and lunar planting calendars, instead of chemical sprays and fertilisers. Practitioners stuff a cow horn full of cow poo and bury it to create super-powered fertiliser, honestly.
Bioaccumulation
Toxic substances which build up in plants, animals and us. The odd bit of pesticide may not harm you directly, but eventually Kiwi blokes may develop man-boobs and a fondness for Abba records.
Carbon footprint
The total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organisation, event or product, roughly equivalent to how guilty you are supposed to feel about it.
Carbon Offsets
A credit bought to negate part of a carbon footprint. Should cover the cost of additional measures to reduce worldwide carbon emissions, which come into effect as soon as possible. Described by author George Monbiot as akin to medieval religious ‘indulgences’ payments to atone for sins the sinner has no intention of giving up.
Carcinogen
Any cancer producing substance. So many are discovered each week it is increasingly likely that life gives you cancer the same way rain and time give rust to a bicycle.
Climate change
Long-term significant changes in expected patterns of average weather on Earth. Sometimes called global warming, although some places could get colder. Increasingly termed ‘Global Weirding’ as no one has much of a clue what’s happening.
Eco-tourism
A hotel with recycling bins. Rapidly becoming extinction tourism, as we race round the globe taking photos of things our children will never see because of all the pollution caused by international travel.
Eco-worrier
What we become when it takes 15 minutes for us to analyse the global ecological and humanitarian impact of buying a tin of spaghetti.
Emissions trading
Buying and selling the supposedly limited rights to emit greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. The modern, adult version of shuffling Brussel’s sprouts around your plate, or giving them to your little brother because you can’t face eating them yourself.
Extinction
Dead as a dodo. If the animal is cuddly or cute enough, humans will leave just enough of whatever it is for David Attenborough to whisper at. If it’s an insect – no chance.
Freecycle
Online jumble sale at www.freecycle.org, without the sale. Give away stuff you don’t need; claim free stuff you may or may not, on reflection, discover you need. If you are lucky, this may indeed include a free bicycle.
Fossil fuels
The P-pipe of the industrialised world. Coal, oil and gas, formed from the fossilised remains of plants and animals over hundreds of millions of years. Burning them has made life so easy we struggle to leave them alone, even though they keep us divorced from reality and wreck our health and relationships. (see greenhouse gases and climate change).
Greenhouse gases
Gases which trap the heat in the Earth’s atmosphere like a fart under a duvet. Human activities are releasing more into the atmosphere than ever before – and our duvet is getting very stinky indeed. (see climate change)
Recycle (incorporating downcycle)
The separation and collection of materials for processing, remanufacturing and use as new products. What normally happens is ‘downcycling’, where the resulting product is less valuable than the one you started with. Upcycling, on the other hand, is about making more valuable products from less valuable pre-used materials.
Self-sufficiency
The ability to provide all of your needs yourself, without the help of others. Unlikely in a civilisation breakdown scenario: you have potatoes, your neighbours don’t have potatoes, they steal your potatoes when you’re not looking.
Sustainable
An activity which can be continued indefinitely at its current rate and scale. These days this is taken to mean without irreparable environmental harm or compromising opportunities for future generations. You can have your cake and eat it, provided you are growing all the ingredients to make another cake without polluting the garden.
Toxin
A poisonous substance produced by living cells or organisms capable of causing disease. Some commentators on Radio Live qualify. (see also Bioaccumulation)
07
Jan 10
Good food from the supermarket, without going off your trolley
If you want good food from the supermarket without agonizing over it or spending a fortune, ignore the mind control and keep it seasonal and simple.
June, 2009
For me, being an ethical food shopper can tricky. Is it Fair Trade? Organic? Rainforest Alliance? Does it come from a country with a dubious human rights record? Has it been the subject of a recent health scare? Does it contain palm oil not sourced from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil? How many food miles does it have? Does it contain potentially harmful additives and colourings? Is it tested on animals? Is the company owned by a global conglomerate with any subsidiaries which block cheap drugs to poor countries/push inappropriate baby milk powders to people without clean water to mix them with/ invest in arms/smash unions? And on and on and on.
Then I have to try to give this bewildering number of parameters some kind of relative value.What’s better: organic beans fair traded from the indigenous people of wherever, or the ‘conventional’ ones from just round the corner? This creates such a quantum level of complexity I’m lucky if I make it to the check-out before inflation pushes my purchases out of my price range.
I’m vegetarian, which tips the ecological balance sheet slightly in my favour and reduces my confusion by cutting down on the options. Sadly, it sometimes cuts the options down to the extent that there aren’t any, and a smug glow in the belly is not very filling at supper time. I have a vegetable patch. It currently contains three gigantic silverbeet, three spring onions, some lettuce and a rose bush, which is not really enough to live on.
I buy as much stuff under the Fair Trade and various organic banners as I can, and it’s great to see that more and more of them are hitting the shelves. But since I am not an investment banker, the prime minister, or both, there’s a limit to that as well.
So, given that people like you and me still have to use supermarkets, how do we ensure we shop effectively without being a complete sell out?
Firstly, let’s arm ourselves with a little knowledge on how supermarkets work. From the moment we walk through the door, we are entering a carefully controlled environment designed exclusively to do two things – fill up our trollies and empty our bank accounts. Supermarket do this by spending truck loads of cash working out how people move through their shops, how they buy and when they buy.
It’s called Neuromarketing. The gorgeous aroma wafting from the bakery is not just a by product of bread making. It’s also there to make you hungry, so you will buy more food. The mellow in-store muzak is there to slow you down, so you will spend longer browsing the shelves. And the shelves are not stocked for your convenience, they are stocked to maximise income.
For example, the first thing you always come to in the supermarket is the fresh fruit and vegetables, which makes very little sense for shoppers. They can be easily damaged, so you spend the whole time digging them out from under your tins and bottles. But research suggests the experience of selecting good wholesome fresh food at the outset of a shopping spree makes people feel less guilty about stocking up on rubbish later on.
More expensive items, or items the store particularly wants to sell, will tend to be to the right at eye level or just above it, because this is where most people look first. Sumptuously branded product lines from the best known producers will hog the carefully designed, expensive and power-hungry limelight, while cheaper home brands will be languishing somewhere near your ankles.
This is partly because many producers actually pay for prime positioning. For the same reasons products intended for children will sport the colours of a nuclear explosion and just happen to be within reach of your offspring, or at their eye level.
Some items, even whole sections, are moved from one position to another in the store so that you keep moving, collecting other items as you search for what you originally wanted. Some Pak’n'Save stores even have a zig-zag course through the grocery section as the only method of entry, just in case you want some courgettes on your way to pick up a six pack.
Brightly coloured tags on the shelves might point you in the direction of a sale item, or they may just say something meaningless like ‘Everyday low price!’ to draw your attention to the items the store wants to shift. At the checkout queue either you or your children may be feeling tired and peckish, which is why there are shelves full of chocolate there.
None of this is to say that supermarket owners are especially evil or manipulative – they just have a lot of money invested and to invest and are good at their jobs. The good news is that knowledge is power, and you can fight back.
Firstly, stay out of the supermarket as much as possible. If you can do all your shopping in one go it’s easier to stick to a budget and avoid impulse buys. A great way to do this is to shop online. This bypasses the in-store neuromarketing, reduces the time and stress of shopping, and removes the need to drive to the store in the first place.
You can easily check what’s left over at your house, and if you have the time, you can Google the eco/ethical credentials of potential purchases before selecting them. And because the system adds up your bill as you go, you can stick to your budget without having to abandon things at the checkout. Once you have cracked the supermarket’s website you are more likely to discover other more ethical online choices. If you get hungry while online shopping, you make yourself a much cheaper snack than you would probably buy in the store.
If you have to go in, you could take own mp3 player to keep you going while you read all the labels, but you should definitely take a detailed budgeted list of what you want and ignore aisles you don’t need to go down.
Aim low, but keep in mind that even actual sale items are infinitely more expensive than not buying them if you don’t need them in the first place. Some of the ‘own brand’ products, as well as being relatively cheap, can be quite healthy, with less salt and sugar than goes into some of the more well known tastes. Look at the unit price, not the overall price. Buying in bulk can save you money, save on packaging and save the number of car rides to the store. But you obviously need to ensure that the product won’t spoil before it’s used in your home.
What do the experts recommend? Laura Faire recently worked with Kathryn Hawkins on the book Shop Local, Eat Well – Cooking with Seasonal Produce in New Zealand. She says the key is to shop for simple unprocessed ingrediants which are local and in season.
“The best way to shop ethically is to buy New Zealand grown,” she says. “If you can buy in season it is cheaper too, and if you think about it supermarkets have an incentive to source locally. It’s all about shelf life. They offer the options, it’s up to consumers to buy them. The more local produce we buy the more they will put on the shelves.”
Seasonality can vary from region to region and store to store, so you may need to search online for a local guide, or ask a friendly gardener. Things can get tough to find around spring time, when everything is growing but nothing is ready.
Green Party MP Sue Kedgeley has a similar approach. She has been campaiging on food issues for more than a decade, and runs her own ‘Shop with Sue’ sessions to help guide people around their local supermarket.
She says, “Currently I don’t think it is getting easier in most places to shop healthy and even ethically.”
She reckons it’s not fair that if we want to know what’s in things, we have to rely on a ‘nutrition panel’ which often requires a magnifying glass to read and a chemistry degree to understand.
“Things have got better with eggs, at least you can check whether they are caged hens, barn hens or free range. That is some progress,” she says.
In the absence of the mandatory and legally binding country of origin standards she is pushing for, the supermarkets have started their own voluntary system for fruit and veg.
But a key point for Sue is your choice of which supermarket you go into in the first place. She recommends New World, Pak ‘n’Save and Four Sqaure, as they are all owned by Foodstuffs – a 100% New Zealand operation owned by a co-operative of the shop owners themselves.
Finally she asks: “If you have 50c for food and it’s a choice between a single vegetable and a packet of Maggi instant noodles, what’s it going to be?”
Erm…I’ll get back to you.
07
Jan 10
Finn friends
July, 2009
In 2001, Neil Finn brought together some of the world’s top musicians to play some of their favourite songs in aid of Medicin Sans Frontiers, and created the 7 World’s Collide shows and album. Last Christmas, for the project’s second outing – The Sun Came Out - Johnny Marr, KT Tunstall, Radiohead’s Ed O’brien and Phil Selway, along with American alternative outfit Wilco met up with local heroes Bic Runga and Don McGlashan. They played at Neil’s Roundhead Studios in Auckland and to sell out crowds at the nearby Powerstation venue, ably hosted, supported and collaborated with by most of the Finn family. The results are now in your local record store.
[When Good interviewed Liam for Issue 3, he mentioned Neil was the one telling them all to turn off lights they weren’t using them.] My Dad was a real stickler for that, and I am no where near as good at it as he is. But he grew up in the generation during the depression and there was a sort of environmentalism born of being thrifty in those days. You don’t waste power because it costs money and you don’t waste food because it’s precious. And that sort of got passed on, but to be honest not as relentlessly.
This studio generates shit loads of power. I’ve investigated already two or three different solar systems which might end up on the roof but up to this point I can’t honestly say that I have found one which is going to make a significant difference. The technology isn’t quite yet good enough to really put much into the grid. We can do the hot water here which we will do, and that’s the bare minimum, but to run the whole studio, from what we have been told for that incredible investment, we haven’t quite solved that. We are looking at that and we will get there. We’ve got a good west-facing roof so, at some point, we’ll be solared up.
But I don’t think I have every written a song or approached a piece of music with a thought of some kind of political, social, or environmental cause in my mind, I don’t think that is my kind of song, I don’t think I feel comfortable in that area. I write interpersonal songs about states of mind, and places. I try to describe places and times and the way people think. Similarly with this record, the main purpose of it was to make a great record. To get a true collaboration going and make a soulful, entertaining record, and I think we did that. I think the complete picture is built by it ultimately going to do some good, I hope, if it sells a few copies and some people benefit from it, and maybe there’s some good karma in it as well!
There’s a lot of different ways of people interacting with issues and causes out there. I’m a little but wary of celebrity driven campaigns where people’s voices carry more weight simply because of their celebrity status. I just think most of the people on the project were of a like mind you know, we just love music and we love creating something which makes people feel good. I think in that state, when people are feeling something, then they are more receptive to good ideas, so I believe that is something of a positive upshot. When you have been inspired by a concert, when you leave it you feel like reaching out in your own life to various people and it puts you in a positive frame of mind, so maybe you will make some positive contribution.
07
Jan 10
Bringin’ in the rain…
August, 2009
Freshwater is one of the world’s most precious resources. So it’s handy that so much of it falls out of the sky in New Zealand. All we need to do is collect it.
The benefits
Collecting and using rainwater is one of the easiest ways to add a touch of eco-friendly self-reliance to your home and help preserve our environment. And if you are on a metered supply, it will save you money too.
Most areas of New Zealand have a pretty good supply of fresh water, but it’s not always in the right place at the right time. Like the components of any complex long distance supply system, mains water storage dams, pipes, and treatment facilities are costly and come with inherent environmental impacts, including the potential to damage the health of our river ecosystems through excessive extraction and pollution.
The mains system is also susceptible to occasional failures which leave you, or at least your precious vegetable patch, high and dry. This is particularly true in hydro-power areas like Auckland, where in dry periods water and energy authorities have to strike a delicate balance between supplying fresh water and power.
Even small roof water systems can take a huge load off of the mains supply and inspire you to be much more conscious of the water you do use, and how you use it. And they help slow the flow of water in our urban areas, improving storm water management and reducing the risk of flooding
The paperwork
You may need a minor plumbing consent from your council, or a building consent, especially if you are planning anything larger than 25,000 litres. You will also need to fit a backflow prevention device if your tank is being topped up from the mains supply, to keep the two types of water separate.
If you plan to drink roofwater, some councils require you to treat it. Others require an annual inspection of your system. On the plus side, some local authorities offer cash rebates to encourage rainwater use.
Watch out for…
Cleanliness: keep the roof and guttering clear of overhanging branches and regularly inspect and clean them. Consider fitting one of the many guttering filters on the market. The ministry of health recommends disinfecting roof water with small amounts of chlorine, but for those of us who dislike that ‘fresh from the swimming pool’ an ultraviolet light filter system costs about $1,500, plus installment.
Contaminants on the roof: You will need to unplug the system from your roof and find an alternative for a while if you use chemical paints or moss killers up there. Don’t collect from a roof which has lead, chromium or cadmium materials or is unpainted metal. Any paint used should be labelled ‘suitable for potable water supply’.
Your intake: Rainwater is naturally ’soft’ water, meaning it does not contain the dissolved minerals, like chalk, lime, calcium and magnesium mains water in some areas picks up as it percolates through the ground and into our waterways. Getting the right amounts of these minerals is important to our health, so its worth cross-referencing the decision to switch to rainwater with our dietary considerations. This is especially important if we choose a vegetarian or vegan diet, where obtaining the right mineral levels can be more challenging.
Small people: For the same reason, as well as the risk of possible contamination, some doctors advise that even filtered rainwater may not be ideal for pregnancy or for bottle fed babies.
The sums
You only need about five litres of drinking-quality water for each person a day, for cooking, drinking and food preparation. The rest – about 160 litres per person in an average household per day – is used for toilets, showering, washing, the garden, and other uses.
There are many variables, but as a very rough guide each metre of roof space you get hooked up to your system provides around one litre of water in an average year. Even in relatively dry areas, an average home with 120-150m2 provides the potential for at least 100,000 litres of free water each year. A smaller household should get by on a 25,000 litre (5,500 gallon) tank. A larger household may need two.
Metered mains supply of water costs about $1.50 per 1,000 litres, plus a couple of hundred dollars a year for water testing and meter reading. If you are in an area which is not normally metered, you may have to pay $500-$1,000 or more to get one installed. This, plus the cost of your system, suggests a payback time of somewhere around 10 years.
Unless you have a lot of roof, a lot of rain and a plenty of tank space, or you are very frugal with water use, you will probably want to keep a mains back up, to avoid costly water truck deliveries through dry spells.
07
Jan 10
You are my sunshine
September, 2009
Aliens are probably laughing their tentacles off at our approach to energy generation. We spend our days fighting wars over a dwindling supply of black sludge, beneath our very own giant free fusion reactor.
Many homes in New Zealand have 20 – 30 times more solar energy hammering down on them each year than the owners use in electricity or gas. We have, at least, got as far as developing photovoltaic cells to convert this energy into electricity. But with the average Kiwi household using about 8 kWh of electricity per person per day, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority calculates that to supply all the needs of an average family of four would require a system costing between $60,000 and $170,000.
So reducing power use remains the first priority if you want to save money and protect the environment. But the tantalising prospect is that if every New Zealand home had a 3kW photovoltaic solar panel array, they would generate enough power to satisfy more than a quarter of New Zealand’s residential electricity needs.
That would mean we could shut down the Huntly coal fired power station, assuming we didn’t need it to back up our renewable sources on those still winter evenings…
The dark side of the sun?
There’s no such thing as free electricity, either economically or environmentally.
The glass, plastic and metal fittings in PV systems take energy, water and a wide range of chemicals to make. Some of these are toxic or hazardous. PV modules also use palladium silver, nickel, nickel chromium or tin for metallic contacts and usually a tin/lead solder for electrical connections. Not to mention small amounts of cadmium, which is toxic and has a tendency to accumulate in the food chain.
The resulting cells are generally only good for about 20 years. And although the cells are more or less benign in use, disposal of dead cells is also problematic. Recycling programmes are being developed, and some manufacturers will take back old panels to recover the more valuable materials.
There are some other, unavoidable, limitations. Because PV cells only produce power during the day, and relatively little when it is cloudy, even the most super frugal electricity user will need some sort of backup if they don’t want to be left powerless from time to time.
Other renewable generation options like wind can help to iron out the peaks and troughs if you have the right conditions, but for most people off the grid, lead acid batteries containing sulphuric acid are the most useful option. Nickel-cadmium batteries are less common and much more expensive, but last longer. Depending on the system and how it is maintained, the batteries you use will last somewhere between 3-15 years.
As PV technology advances the costs are falling and the efficiency of the panels is increasing, making it a more viable option. However, as things stand, when you take into account the costs of installation and maintenance, and even once you have negotiated with your local energy company to sell power back to the grid, you will almost certainly be paying more for each watt of electricity than if you plugged into the mains. And whether your system adds its full value to the cost of your house depends on the temperament of the potential buyer.
While there are 100% renewable energy providers like Trustpower and Meridian around, even the overall environmental benefits of having your own PV system are difficult to quantify. But wind farms are a blot on the landscape, and there are benefits from reducing our hydropower use to reduce the pressure on our water systems. There’s no doubting the added self sufficiency and resilience provided by your own personal power generation. And if you can’t get on the grid, or don’t want to, PV is less polluting than gas.
The paperwork
Building or resource consents may be required for photovoltaic systems that penetrate the roof or are considered by neighbours to affect their property. Any grid-connected photovoltaic systems need to be agreed to by both the lines company (for the connection) and the electricity retailer (for pricing arrangements). And you need to get an installer who knows what they are doing as the system must meet the AS/NZS 3000:2007 electrical installations wiring rules.
07
Jan 10
Pitch with no buts
November, 2008
First printed in Idealog magazine
http://idealog.co.nz/magazine/november-december-2008/
How to jump start creativity wearing coloured hats and comedy spectacles.
Picture the scene. A high ranking BBC executive has just been given one minute to pitch an idea to a group of her colleagues, many junior than her. She chooses a project which is already happening, she is responsible for, and on which the company has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars (£100,000).
At the end of her time she has to stand there, without saying a word, while the group responds to what she has said. Some of them are wearing coloured hats, others have large comedy spectacles on. Twenty minutes later the project is dead. It will be scrapped and started from scratch.
The story is true, and for Bill Wilmot, who led the session, it’s an illustration of the power of a simple innovation process, and the potential costs of not bothering to go through it.
Bill works for SRI International, is an emeritus professor at the University of Montana, and is director of the Collaboration Institute, which specialises in workplace communication and collaboration. He is also the author of Innovation – Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want.
He has played a part in nurturing innovations like the computer mouse and high definition television, and has helped nudged the BBC from its collision cause with the government axe man.
On his way he has probably arranged the deaths of thousands of dumb ideas which could have cost his clients millions in money, time and reputation. At the heart of the process is a simple mnemonic: NABC. This means:
- identify the marketplace Need for your product or service;
- define the ‘golden nugget’ or the unique advantage of your Approach;
- outline the Benefits to the customer, your partners in the market ecosystem;
- pinpoint the Competition and systematically compare your approach to competitive products or services.
Do not go glossing over this list. Look at it again and think about it. When was the last time you systematically went through all of them thoroughly?
Considering its simplicity, Bill finds it startling how haphazardly this process is done in most firms, if it is done at all. The resulting confusion is readily exposed in the one minute pitch exercise he uses at the outset of his sessions.
“They know this stuff, but it’s about getting them to do it rather than talk about it,” he said. “What’s fascinating for me is that businesses world wide use these terms but they can’t define them. It is un-fucking-believable how bad it is the first time. I walk up to employees and say ‘what’s the value you bring to this company’, they say ‘Erm…I’m a vice president.’”
The average pitch, he says, is mostly Approach – how we’ve come up with this new way of making X, with a distinct lack of knowledge on whether anybody wants X, what X will do to enhance people’s lives and whether or not X’s role is already being fulfilled by a similar product or collection of products.
“The typical thing is to say ‘well it’s better than the competition’, but that doesn’t really cover it,” said Bill.
When he told me this, it reminded me of a piece of marketing analysis I did for some friends working on an internet start up in the UK. They had spent three years working with investment cash from friends and family developing a new online tool.
We got together and they told me about their Approach, what the thing was called and why, how it worked etc. They also told me that whenever they explained it to anybody the response they invariably got was ‘that sounds like Facebook or MySpace.’
I checked out their website and asked them a few questions. They couldn’t tell me exactly who their tool was for or what made it unique, and I couldn’t really get to grips with how it worked. We parted company. They have tried it as a website for individuals. They have tried aiming it at business. Last time I checked it was sort of aimed at both.
This was three years work, remember. Bill tries to get this all sorted out in an hour or so. After participants do their initial pitch the person gets 20 minutes of feedback in which they are not allowed to speak. Bill calls this the Watering Hole. This is also where a little light role playing comes in.
“The Brits were so critical at the BBC we gave them these green hats and said those wearing them could only say something positive,” said Bill. “In Asia, people sometimes have more difficulty being critical, so we gave them red hats and said they could only say things which were negative.
“Then we give some of the group these giant spectacles, which we call the Eyes of the Customer, and tell them to feedback from that point of view, you know ‘I don’t care about the technical stuff, just tell me what I want to hear.
“People don’t tend to want to open their idea up like that, but it is often the person who comes in from the outside that says ‘Erm, I just don’t get it’ that is important. They learn more in those 20 minutes than they have learned in the last year.”
After their initial Watering Hole, the participants are given more time to come up with a more detailed proposition which takes the form of a four minute pitch. According to Bill, the key is to do this multiple times.
Many people are incredibly uncomfortable doing this the first time, especially with an idea that may be close to their heart. But with the right coaching and preparation, most become more comfortable.
Then they are able to drop their defensiveness and learn from the intense feedback they are given. This makes them part of the innovation process. They themselves come up with the changes which can turn a good idea into a great one, or a bad idea into a forgotten one, fast.
Bill said: “The customer and competition parts are the hardest. Most people do not do a good job of identifying customer needs. They tend to just ask customers what they want, but customers cannot always tell them. They think they do a focus group and that answers the question. You can’t really see what people need unless you shadow them and follow them.
“Go into an airport and you will see people sitting on the floor propped up against the wall. Why? They are plugging in their laptops and phones. What are airport designers thinking? You can’t really tell what people need until you watch them start to clog up the spaces. It is not a one time thing, it’s an ongoing process.”
At SRI International people pitch ideas to each other as they pass in the corridor. The company is currently helping to develop the next generation of intelligent internet browsers and ‘packet hop’ technology which would enable mobile phones to work at short range without the use of a tower. It is also working with Worcestor Polytechnic to build innovation into the curriculum, and in Singapore they are working on making innovation a part of children’s school work.
The aim is to engender an entire culture of innovation. Bill sees potential for that here in New Zealand too.
“You guys are talented, and well educated,” he said. “The thing that is missing is realising how competitive the world is. The exchange rate falls and you won’t be selling lamb to France. I would suggest more flexibility.
“I do see it as a strength that there are a lot of small companies here. That is where innovation happens. What isn’t happening is talking to each other. But you must have a clear process for innovation, a common language you can use to make it happen.”