The following is my letter of complaint to Television New Zealand 1, who published the following report on the context of the Palestine/Israel situation on 16th October.(at 23 minutes into the news)
Your news reporter, Simon Mercer undertook what was supposedly intended as an historical outline of the issues for Israelis and Palestinians on TVNZ1 news last night in relation to the current hostilities in Palestine/Israel.
Simon talked about the lead up to 1948 when Israel militants took control of Palestine (the Nakba), but for some strange reason neglected to mention the 700,000 Palestinians who were forcibly removed from their homes in Palestine and moved at gunpoint to refugee camps by the Israelis and later the two prison camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Simon also failed to mention the thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in 1948 .
Simon also failed to mention the subsequent massacres of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps by Israelis and their enablers since 1948 and the fact that every day since then (for 75 years) Israelis have been murdering, torturing , imprisoning and dispossessing Palestinians of their homes.
Western governments, particularly the US and UK and their media, have played a key part in colluding with these Israeli war crimes so that their populations are largely unaware of these events, and clearly TVNZ as an ‘independent’ news media outlet, also considers it important to omit these facts as well.
By doing so, TVNZ is colluding in the immensity of Israel’s war crimes over 75 years and allows that brutality to continue.
I would request that in the interests of no longer continuing to collude in war crimes, as well as the safety of the Palestinian people, let alone compassion for their constant suffering, that you publish a fair and balanced historical outline of what has really happened in Israel/Palestine since 1947, as well as the current situation
Please note I will be publishing this complaint on my blog, as well as your response.”
The recent tragedy of the attacks by Hamas on Israeli, are just one more example where NZ politicians rightly condemn the violent attacks by Hamas but do not condemn the root cause of them, the brutal 75 years of genocide against Palestinians by the Israeli government, military and their settler thugs.
As a New Zealander I have often made complaints to our State funded television broadcaster, TVNZ about their blatant bias towards a U.S. view of international events
Neither do our media or our gutless political science academics like Robert Patman ever report on the Nakba and Israel’s ongoing genocide. ‘For many Palestinians the status quo is not working for them“, Mr Patman says- not working?- you mean Palestinians are a bit annoyed about being murdered, tortured and imprisoned by a brutal racist regime for 75 years!-and the “international rule based order ” that Mr Patman so fervently eulogises about is the very one that has allowed the United States to brutally and genocidaly invade Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya ad infinitum, as Mr Patman well knows- but of course to Mr Patman those are not important issues.
So one can see that our NZ academics are as a-moral and gutless as our NZ politicians.
And our New Zealand news media are also as guilty and corrupted in this process, as the following article about RadioNZ and its “Putin Propaganda’ concerns, clearly demonstrates. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/07/new-zealands-russian-edits-scandal-how-a-national-broadcaster-demonized-the-truth/. The RNZ journalist had re-edited propaganda articles from Reuters and other sources about the Ukraine war to instead provide factual information and greater background- and of course telling the real facts was just playing to ‘Putin’s agenda’ -as the RNZ CEO pointed out!
One of our main online news media in New Zealand, ‘Stuff’ recently posted an article about Hamas and Israel entitled ‘Hamas Apologists are Siding with Evil -End of Discussion’. The author, one Damien Grant is supposedly a ‘libertarian”- although clearly the liberties that Grant espouses dont apply to Palestinians. Disregarding all facts, Damien exhorts his readers to believe that Israel is not a genocidal entity that has imprisoned Gazans for 18 years- and for many of them; since 1948-is not an entity that rations food and water and all other services. Damien assures us that ‘For those in the territories, Israel allows as much self-governance as its security can tolerate”. In his most superbly farcical and tragically criminal statement Damien states ‘to be sure, sometimes their (Israeli) security forces respond to militant attacks that result in Palestinian civilian deaths, but no Palestinian music festival has seen hundreds attacked, murdered, and kidnapped’. Is Damien trying to suggest that Palestinians are permitted by their persecutors to hold music festivals? Perhaps while Palestinian families are searching for their next meal? Such is the level of ‘ignorance’ (to be charitable) that continues to condemn Palestinians to a life of imprisonment and persecution under Israeli rule.
What is obviously more important than truth and facts is to follow the ‘Rule Based International Order” ( or there will be repercussions…)
On 7th October , the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Hamas, a militant group in Gaza , the home to three quarters of a million Palestinians imprisoned behind concrete and wire fences by Israel since 1967, launched a surprise attack against Israelis.
In reality, this is one more desperate attempt by Palestinians to reassert their legitimate rights as free Palestinians, rather than prisoners of the Israeli apartheid regime – which many have described as slow motion genocide, since the 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe) when Israeli soldiers, with the full support of the US, UK and many other Western countries, killed thousands of Palestinians and brutally forced many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.
247 villages in Southern Palestine were ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. The refugees from those villages were then forced into a concentration camp that came to be known as the Gaza strip.
And while any responsible government should deplore any violence by any party in another part of the world; the response from Western governments, including my own New Zealand government, has been to condemn Hamas’ violence, without in any way acknowledging that the causes for this violence are the direct result of the barbaric actions of multiple Israeli governments since 1948. A long-standing pattern of ‘legalised’ (by Israeli courts) sustained violence against Palestinians for their crime of owning land that Israeli settlers wanted to acquire at no cost.
Let us not pretend that Western politicians are not aware of these barbaric crimes by the Israeli state- crimes which continue to this day, and every day, and yet somehow, year on year, we do not hear condemnation of these crimes by the Israeli state and the settler thugs they support. Instead we hear that Israel is a key partner of the US, the UK and the EU in helping conducting the West’s business of extortion of Arab and Iranian assets in the Middle East.
And for many years the United States purported to act as an ‘honest broker” between the Israeli state and Palestinians; pretending that a Palestinian state was still a viable option, while all the while providing unlimited military and other resources to the Israeli regime to continue it expansionist agenda in Lebanon and Syria, and almost nothing to the West Bank and Gaza enclaves.
This is one moment in this decades’ long war against Palestinians where Western countries could really do the honourable thing, and strongly pressure Israel to ensure it complies with international law by tearing down the walls containing Palestinians in their tiny prison encampments, grants them full rights as Israeli citizens, allows the right of return for all Palestinians since 1948 and fully compensates Palestinians for the theft of their lands.
Do we in fact have any Western politicians with any honour?
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Postscript
As Jonathan Cook so lucidly outlines ,the West’s enthusiastic swooning over Israel’s ‘retaliation’ is sick-making; and who gives a flying f*** that Israel’s much vaunted ‘intelligence” (read ‘Terrorist’) services didn’t have advanced warning of Hamas’s attack? How about some long term justice for the Palestinian people (after 75 years of Western enthusiastic support for Israeli injustice). As Jonathan says; ‘This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals’.
The world for humans continues to become more uncertain and more unstable; although you would largely not know that from our mainstream media. Climate Change is a little problem but we are working on it ,they say. Lets just ignore that we nowhere near achieving any of our much vaunted global targets of containing, let alone reducing, Co2 emissions- we are therefore definitely heading for global climate disasters in less than a decade.
And once independent academic analysts like Robert Patman in New Zealand along with the rest of the West, now regurgitate the nonsense of China being a threat to the West (and to New Zealand) and thus the appropriateness and necessity of the West continuing its brutal and sadistic “rule based international order” to confront both Russia and China.
Strangely too we hear very little mention in Western mainstream media of the drumbeat of a new multi-polar world. A world where the West can no longer dictate the economic terms through violence, war and blackmail of the South. Perhaps the images of African Sahel countries finally booting out their French colonial occupation forces raises some eyebrows in countries other than France, but there appears little recognition that this anti -Western movement is gaining steam across the South.
Or perhaps you missed the very quiet admission by the US’s General Milley recently that the much hyped Chinese ‘spy’ balloons that drifted over the United States in February 2023 actually didn’t have any spy gear installed on them at all.
And let’s just forget about climate change, what is more important than ensuring our global economy and consumerism keeps expanding?- right to the very end…
You of course know the old (true) metaphor) that frogs in a pot which is slowly heated up, can’t register when the water is too hot for their survival and get boiled alive..
Well, something very similar is now happening for humans across the Northern hemisphere.
And something very similar is likely to begin occurring in the Southern Hemisphere in early 2024 with the advent of El Nino and the rapid rise in Pacific ocean temperatures.
But it’s obviously all ok, because all our politicians around the world have far more important things to worry about– their next election defeat for starters, cosying up to big business for another, or sending another billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine. It’s as though climate catastrophe doesn’t really matter- if we just talk about it from to time and do nothing- that will placate the masses…
The response to the Greek Islands’ wildfires largely caused by climate change are just one of so many hypocritical and insane responses to climate change. The primary purpose of the fire response is not to eliminate the risks to vegetation and wildlife- oh no!-its to ensure that more tourists can flown in next year – and consequently ensuring that CO2 production from the thousands of tourist jets flying in and out of Greece ensure further climate catastrophe. Or we may give the example of why Paris has spent billions to clean up the Seine River -not to ensure river wildlife can return to the river after a century, but to ensure there will be millions of humans attending the Paris Olympics- all coming in on those CO2 producing jet planes from around the world…
We need to ensure our communities can more easily adjust to the changes to our world and lifestyles that will occur whether we like it or not. Global trade will shrink as a result of more dangerous weather and destruction of sea, air and land routes. Transport insurance costs have already risen and will continue to escalate sharply as risks increase exponentially in the next few years. Local weather is becoming more and more unpredictable and dangerous. Multiple points of access to resources at a local level will become a priority.
In addition, to try and mitigate some of the impacts of global warming, species loss and destruction of soils and all the other species that we rely on for our survival, we need to urgently action the following.
In no particular order of priority (because they are all priorities), the following initiatives need to be initiated—NOW! …..
All food and products are produced within a 20km radius of major population centres. This limits both the transit/CO2 costs to the customer, and the transit costs of the producer.
Essential resources that cannot be produced or accessed locally are stockpiled in key places locally.
Transportation routes to other countries and locally, are multi-dimensional- ie different modes of transport which minimise biodiversity and climate harm.
All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
All government and local government decisions take into account the environmental impact on emissions and biodiversity.
Businesses annually account and taxed for the environment costs of their business operations. All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
All homes and businesses are retrofitted with high standard insulation. Where feasible solar panels are installed which link to the electricity grid.
Water from roofs is stored for either personal use or recycled into the water supply.
Urban areas and individual housing must have trees planted in every available area where food is not being produced.
All towns and cities are required to provide free or very low-cost community gardens and individual allotments for citizen food production.
Other species have the same rights as humans. A formal recognition by the UN and all state actors that all life is sacred and do not exist solely for humans’ benefit.
All products produced are capable of repair (or cannot be sold) and real recycling and repair occurs locally.
Governments and businesses are required to restore indigenous biodiversity to an agreed percentage each year.
Air travel is banned unless for absolutely essential business and family issues (e.g. tourism, global sports and cultural events are limited).
Solar, wind-powered or sustainably charged battery-powered sea, air and train vessels are developed and effectively utilised.
Farming is required to transition to sustainable practices within 10 years (no sprays, chemical fertilisers, and no ploughing- (use of permaculture, organic farming and biochar among other tools).
Indigenous trees are planted on a vast scale, on the understanding that they will never be cut down and ‘harvested’.
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The above initiatives may seem extreme to you- or even perhaps ridiculous and totally unnecessary. Why, you might say, can’t we, as Bill McKibben argues in his New Yorker article, simply return to 1960s levels of consumption?
The reality is that we have gone too far- way too far, beyond that. We have since had 80+ more years of consumption gone crazy, of CO2 production through the roof and an enormous amount of the biosphere destroyed. We not only need to stabilise humans’ impact on the living world we rely on for our existence, we need to start to actively repair it.
And yes, many of these proposals will have an impact on jobs; but without this forward planning job losses are going to be least of our worries- there will be little long term employment ins world of climate uncertainties and ongoing climate disasters.
Planning and actioning changes now, to cope with some of the enormous impacts climate change will have on our lives, will reduce some of the high risks of loss of income, food and essential resources that every one of us will face in our new climate world.
The alternative does not bear thinking about.
Postscript
In response to the recent US Congressional hearings on whether UFOs and aliens really exist, many of the U.S. public have stated that we really need to know whether we as human beings are really ‘alone’ in the Universe.
The unequivocal answer is of course that we are not alone, there are millions of sentient species right here on this planet that we have never bothered to try and communicate with as equitable partners. They may not look like us, behave like us, destroy the planet in the way that we do, (just like in fact our hypothetical alien friends from outer space would do), but they are, nevertheless our partners on this little world- and we are NOT alone!- let’s start to behave as though they really are our partners on this world!
It is not that the F16s are likely to be a ‘game-changer’ -as the Western media have called all of the previous Western wonder-weapons provided to Ukraine. It is the fact that the decision to provide these weapons is one more example of the West crossing the red-lines they promised they would not cross about the provision of more military support to Kiev.
The West, after saying that training Kiev’s pilots on F16s would take at least 18 months, now says the training will take 4 months. This very likely indicates that the pilots flying the F16s will not be Ukrainian – they will be Western military ‘retirees’ or ‘volunteers’ and/or be operated out of Polish airbases..
Kiev and the West is determined to ‘defeat’ the Russians in Ukraine- to ‘return’ Crimea and the Donbass to Ukraine (and then to carve up Russia in the way the neocons attempted to in the Yelstin years) . Given that President Putin gave the key rationale for the Ukraine invasion as protecting Russian speakers in the Donbass against neonazi Kievan troops, and given that Crimea has been a part of Russia since Catherine the Great annexed Crimea in 1783, a ‘return’ of Crimea and the Donbass to Ukrainian control would be an existential threat to the whole Russian Federation (not just Putin) and the Russian population would never accept that loss.
This is particularly so since Kiev has made it clear that it regards Donbass’ Russian speaking citizens as second class citizens who either have to be forced to speak Ukrainian or be exiled to Russia. Similarly Ukraine has made it clear that anyone in Crimea who has supported Russia (95% of the population at last count) will be deported to Russia once they ‘reassert’ control of the Crimean peninsula.
Western ‘intelligence’ and their military leaders are presumably aware of the existential nature of this war to Russia; although a knowledge of history and facts is not a prerequisite for decision-making in the US).
While NATO and the West insist they are not at war with Russia, the facts speak otherwise. Kiev’s military would have collapsed more than 6 months ago without NATO weapons; without NATO’s satellite and drone surveillance of Russian troops, without its ‘advisors’ on the ground in Ukraine, without the training of Kiev’s troops to use NATO weapons, and without the ‘retired’ NATO military ‘volunteers’ on the front line. NATO thus continues to pretend that its only providing ‘assistance’ to Kiev- the reality is very different – this is a NATO war.
It is now a very small step for NATO soldiers with NATO uniforms to be on the ground in Ukraine and supporting Kiev from NATO airbases and missile sites in Europe. Once that final line is crossed-possibly in the next few months, China will have no choice but to enter the war on Russia’s side. China has certainly provided economic support but likely no overt military support to Russia since the war began, and is fully aware that once Russia is disposed of and carved up, (as NATO strategists have made clear is the goal) they will be next.
The extension of the military ring around mainland China and the recent development of a second AUKUS/NATO military containment ring in the Pacific with New Guinea and other Pacific nations, plus the West’s universal abrogation of the ‘One China’ principle regarding Taiwan that the West had previously signed up to, are clear signals to Beijing that war with China is coming, and coming soon. Russia must survive for China to survive.
China continues to play a constructive and peace-making role in Ukraine as Patrick Lancaster notes, although to date, without success, unlike its outstanding recent success in brokering peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran to the great consternation of the U.S., U.K. and Israel, who had hoped that an Iran/Saudi confrontation would be the catalyst for regime change in Iran and access to its oil once again as in the ‘good old days’ of the brutal American controlled Shah.
The United States is desperate to ensure that it maintains total control of the economic strands of the global economy; it rightly sees the expansion of non-US dollar transactions as a major threat to it’s control, and its consequent capacity to threaten and cajole and extract the wealth of other nations who do not obey their wishes. And there are many in the West who are quite deranged enough for the world to endure World War 3 so that the West’s avaricousness can be maintained.
If the dollar collapses, the United States already in huge debt, will collapse rapidly. Its capacity to maintain its 600 plus military bases around the world will cease – and like the decline of the Roman Empire on fast forward, its military men will return home to vent their frustrations on the Empire.
Thus neither side in this war can afford to lose. Those of us on the periphery of this battle of the giants, need to maintain our safety as best we can!
As the world heads into an unknown climate world, we need to be planning for a different future than the globalized one we imagined we would continue to live in.
In my little country of New Zealand, tucked away deep in the South Pacific ocean, rapidly warming surrounding oceans are creating a new climate world for us of sudden intense rainfall with increasingly damaging floods and higher temperatures.
More intense and more frequent weather events are allowing us the opportunity to see how completely dependent the living world is, including us humans, on the weather.
Where once we could rely on relatively stable weather patterns, the reality has dawned on us that our weather will become increasingly more unstable, intense, erratic and more damaging; not just for a few years, but for many many centuries to come.
But nowhere do we seem to be planning for this inevitable future. A globalised world of long supply chains of ocean going behemoths, cargo jets and steel rails are becoming rapidly increasingly vulnerable to weather events and ever-increasing insurer’s costs. (even if we ignore the impact of the massive CO2 injections to the atmosphere those long supply lines make!)
We must therefore rapidly plan for vastly localised food, energy and other necessity production and distribution; with short supply lines which are less impacted by climate extremes.
The result of localised production will be a smaller range of products, often less sophisticated, an immense reduction in exports to far-flung places which will be offset by localised production employment, cheaper local food and products produced on a smaller scale which require far less local resources and exploitation of the environment, and ultimately a political realisation that each economic /state entity can be largely independent of its bigger and more powerful neighbours and just needs to simply be accountable to its local population.
This does not mean a return to feudal times or the loss of many of the gains in communication and shared knowledge humans have acquired in the past 200 years. But it does mean an end to the big international corporations whose only motivation for existence is greed rather than also serving their local populations.
It also means a gradual decline in consumerism and international tourism as populations re-learn to connect to their local environments and draw strength and joy from their local communities without further destroying their own natural environments.
In the case of building a sustainable world for humans other species- less is most definitely more!
While a savage war grinds on in the Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of young men and women on its battlefields for no good reason (along with the other less visible but nonetheless as brutal wars in Yemen, Palestine, Syria and various states of Africa); planet Earth heads ever more rapidly down the slope to a new world: a world where wild weather is the norm, where temperatures and sea-levels climb ever higher at an increasing rate, and where fewer and fewer living things can exist.
A world where humans have increasingly become the predominant inhabitants. A world of humans convinced of their supreme intelligence and foresight when all the factual evidence suggests otherwise. A world where humanity’s short-term avarice has become the dominant driving force for major decisions about our long-term future.
Global warming and loss of bio-diversity are creating a world for which humans and others species are not prepared and will likely not survive in. That global warming and biodiversity loss is purely driven by greed. We do not need all this inanimate ‘stuff’ we have created to lead a full and happy life, but we are hell-bent on acquiring it!
Note that the emissions shown in the above graph relate to the country where CO2 is produced (i.e.production-based CO2) , not to where the goods and services that generate emissions are finally consumed.
But the greatest threat to us is not so much the steadily increasing temperatures and wilder weather around the globe caused by man’s constant production of Co2- but the loss of other species. Note that the graph below by Living Planet relates only to ‘wildlife’ , which in their terminology, only includes figures on vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. It does not include insects, corals, fungi, or plants. The corresponding loss of total volumes and different species of insects is equally catastrophic. And man, not simply through his/her actions in increasing global temperatures, but predominantly through loss of habitat to produce more stuff, is the cause of these losses.
If we were to take the current reductionist simplistic approach to these losses we might say that we have no idea what impact these losses will have on humans, or what ‘benefits’ we could extract from those species if they were to survive. However if we were truly the intelligent species we claim to be, we would be examining the relationships between all these species, including ourselves and determining to preserve wherever possible, the current species we have.
We simply do not have a clue how each of the millions of species on this planet uphold the web of life here.
Increasingly ‘science’ is coming to the conclusion that all living things are sentient– they have awareness and are thus worthy of our respect, empathy and kindness, and a recognition and desire by humans to wherever possible preserve the lives of all other living things.
Death by a thousand cuts: Global threats to insect diversity. Stressors from 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock anchor to climate change. Featured insects: Regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) (Center), rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) (Center Right), and Puritan tiger beetle (Cicindela puritana) (Bottom). Each is an imperiled insect that represents a larger lineage that includes many International Union for Conservation of Nature “red list” species (i.e., globally extinct, endangered, and threatened species). Illustration: Virginia R. Wagner (artist).https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118
And while various mainstream media in the West (and almost nothing in China and Russia) talk about the latest research about climate change and biodiversity and how we need to be doing ‘something’ to address it, and while politicians and bureaucrats put in place global and state agreements to ‘manage’ climate change-in reality , nothing is happening to reduce the risks to us all.
And agreed, the path we are heading down is now a predetermined one, to very high global global temperatures for the next few hundred years or more that will almost certainly make life a living hell literally, but no-one is actually creating the mechanisms to stop humans creating more and more energy for more ‘stuff” we don’t need.
Our rate of destruction of this planet is not reducing!
And yet we humans are Masters of the Universe, are we not?
Moon of Alabama recently posted a blog on how Western mainstream media copies the memes about the supposed relationship between Russia and China being one of Russia as the ‘junior partner”. As Moon of Alabama demonstrates, the phrase’ junior partner’ is repeated an nauseam throughout the MSM media (the phrase is repeated verbatim in at least 12 mainstream media articles .
This is however by no means the first time that MSM have regurgitated opinion and phrases as ‘fact’. We saw the phrase “Insurrection’ bandied about by not just US but other English speaking media in the days and months after the mob invasion of the US Capitol on January 6th 2023. Clearly not one of the journalists and editors who published those articles even bothered to look up in a dictionary what the term ‘insurraction” actually means. A single largely non violent mob invasion of a building where a government sits and has no capacity to bring down that government, is not an ‘insurrection’.
I would suggest that where you see these identical media phrases duplicated and parroted across media channels, you can come to the easy conclusion that the media articles are in fact simply propaganda with often no basis in fact because the journalist has not in fact investigated any of the facts- they are simply regurgitating someone else lines- often a government official or politician with quite another agenda than truth or freedom or honesty
The danger to Western populations is that, by repetition, people come to believe these parrotted phrases as facts. If that media company says it- and that one- and that one- it must be true! And conversely when people begin to understand that many mainstream media articles are in fact pure bullshit- they come to believe that everything is a lie- to ‘trust nothing and nobody’- it’s a recipe for disaster in the ever increasing environmental disasters that now impact us all.
We need independent media (not tied to current political agencies or big business) that have the capacity and honesty to truly research and investigate events and can give at least one version of the truth!
We need media that is not beholden to the current allocation of largely corrupt of politicians and bureaucrats for their ‘truths’- journalists who look for the nuances and not simplistic catch-phrases- and readers with the intelligence to both examine the contradictions in the media that is presented to them, who take the time to look for other interpretations of the ‘truth’, and who examine thoughtfully what is ‘conspiracy theory’ or disinformation , and what is not.
Our planet depends on it. With the ever increasing threat of the Russia/NATO war in Ukraine escalating into a full-fledged war between the Russo/Sino bloc and white Western nations, along with the ever increasing severity of the climate catastrophe and catastrophic loss of the natural world, we are in desperate need of reporters who show some intelligence, bravery, honesty and independence from our white-washed mainstream media.
In New Zealand, my home country, we have recently seen two unequivocal examples of the impact of climate change on our landscape and society. The most recent example, Cyclone Gabrielle , brought heavy rains and winds to much of the northern part of New Zealand, leaving 7 dead and huge damage to roading infrastructure, farms and many homes, as well as many tragedies great and small; human and animal lives lost, people injured and livelihoods destroyed.
CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF.co.nz Destruction in Esk Valley, Hawke’s Bay, after Cyclone Gabrielle tore through the area.
While cyclones are not infrequent summer visitors to New Zealand shores, the intensity of this weather event, coming just 2 weeks after severe flooding in our biggest city Auckland, and the significant damage the cyclone caused, have made it clear to New Zealanders; politicians, business people and citizens alike, that we will see much more of this type of weather event in the future as a result of global warming, and in particular because of our warming Pacific seas which feed the cyclones further and further south.
Our politicians talk about ‘building resiliency’ and ‘better planning for future events like this’, but nobody is talking about how to reduce our climate footprint or change our behaviours.
As just one example of the need to change behaviours, much of the impact of Cyclone Gabrielle would have been substantially reduced if we had had more long term forest cover rather than open grassland on hills and water catchments. Long term old growth forest not only softens the impact of heavy rain on soils and therefore reduces runoff, but also holds the soil together better with roots that go deep into the subsoil, reducing the risks of slips and the soil erosion that results in much of the mud that we saw pouring through people’s homes and farms.
Old growth multi-species forest also mediates the actual climate, increasing moisture in the air in dry weather and reducing the impacts of wind and rain in wet weather . Instead, New Zealand has seen the steady destruction of old growth forest, almost none remains on lowland areas, with pine forestry, grassland for sheep and dairy, and urban development replacing those anchors of stability and those islands of species diversity.
Pine plantations, mostly pinus radiata, (otherwise known as Monterey Pine, from California) and the consequent logging businesses, are huge money making activities in New Zealand. Labelled as ‘sustainable forestry’, large areas of New Zealand are now devoted to growing pinus radiata -most of which is exported as either wood chips or raw timber logs to foreign places. The pine trees have replaced in many cases the unique indigenous forests of New Zealand which hosted New Zealand’s multiple unique bird species.
In 25 years of pine tree growth, some birdlife and insect life will have returned, but that is immediately destroyed in the levelling of the pine forest when logging occurs . The tree trunks are hauled away in huge logging trucks to the ports for export but usually the branches and other remnants of the trees are left on the hillsides.
When heavy rains comes, the rains pulverise the denuded soil, washing the topsoil into streams and sending the branches (the ‘slash’) pouring down the streams into the rivers to then smash into bridges on their way to the sea and to finally coat beaches with their broken branches and the mud.
Are we then going to change our ways in New Zealand about this massively environmentally destructive, but lucrative logging ‘business’? You bet your life we are not!
The business of pine forest logging is just one example among many of a world where business rules are pre-eminent (i.e .money trumps everything).
Our politicians and businessmen will talk about the tragedy of people losing their jobs and of small communities imploding if we don’t continue ‘business as usual”.
They will argue it will be impossible to construct a sustainable way of life and no longer continue to destroy our world in the way we have learnt to in the last 200 years with our business farming methods (dairy, sheep and other monoculture farming).
Their ‘normal’ is the destruction by human ‘development’ of our living world that once sustained so many species in the past in New Zealand.
Options for the development of self- sustainable rural communities, where exports and big business become a thing of the past, are simply not an option! That is, until the damage to infrastructure and insurance costs make it no longer a business option!
So, rather than planning for the changes that need to happen now to mitigate climate change, we will experience sudden and dramatic dislocation at some point (not so far away in the future) when even bigger storms wash away our current livelihoods!
New Antarctica 