What’s Coming up Soon:
Clothing Upcycling Seminar, Dunedin
Weds 24th April 11am – 4.30pm Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2nd Floor Conference Room
Seminar run by Kirsten Koch as part of a sociology masters at the University of Otago. Designed to mark ‘Fashion Revolution Day’ (April 24th) by showcasing local designers who create clothing from upcycled and discarded textiles.
Clothing Upcycling Seminar, Dunedin Timetable
11 am Karakia and Introduction
11:30 am Speaker One (Kirsten Koch)
12 pm Speaker Two (Elena Poletti)
12:30 pm Lunch and natter (45 mins)
1:15 pm Speaker Three (Kerry Mackay)
1:45 pm Speaker Four (Simone Montgomery)
2:15 pm Afternoon Tea (15 minutes)
2:30 pm Speaker Five (Desi Liversage)
3:00 pm Speaker Six (Kezka Zeitgeist Bizarre)
3:30 pm Speaker Seven (Fiona Clements)
4:00 pm Speaker Eight (Fiona Jenkin)
Please Register your attendance in the facebook event
https://www.facebook.com/events/702315760165443/
Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/UpcyclingClothingSeminarDunedin/
Future Living Dunedin Workshop
May 18 2019 – Nigel Cowburn Water Workshop
1.30pm – 4pm, Dunningham Suite, Dunedin Public Library
Registrations available soon. Free
Ecological, whole-systems, holistic approach. If you want to save money, have a beautiful working environment and genuinely protect nature – call me. Read my BLOG
For farmers, owners (or project managers) of large site developments (industrial sites, subdivisions) I offer a genuinely sustainable approach and apply long-term, large scale thinking to find effective solutions to riparian, stormwater and spatial challenges. This involves site analysis coupled with a wide knowledge of materials and plants to produce an economic, attractive, high performing outcome.
Research Interests – working with AbacusIBio on:
- finding farm pollutant sources e.g. P & N; design P & N specific planting mixes to keep pollutants out of streams and drains
- variable-width buffers (potential 50% less land area required with 2x the effectiveness) reducing the cost of riparian planting by up to 70%
Bachelor Landscape Architecture (Lincoln)
Diploma Rural Studies – Ecology (Massey)
Future Living Skills Workshops
Explore sustainable living skills, with Jennie. Meet others who want
to make a difference, while learning about consumer choices, home
grown food, sustainable housing, lower carbon travel, energy savings
and water conservation.
Two workshops available:
EIGHT WEEK COURSE | $40
Thursdays | 7pm to 9pm | Starts 2 May | Ends 20 June
St John Church Hall, 92 Beach Street, Waikouaiti
WEEKEND WORKSHOP | $40
Saturday, 15 and Sunday, 16 June
Dunedin Theosophical Society Rooms, 469 Hillside Road, Dunedin
For bookings please phone Jennie 027 330 7311 or jennie.l.upton@gmail.com
2019 Courses
https://www.facebook.com/events/442251299844033/
Environment Aotearoa 2019 Report is out now, Go check it out for yourself here…
https://www.mfe.govt.nz/environment-aotearoa-2019
https://www.mfe.govt.nz/Environment-Aotearoa-2019-Summary
The report brings together the knowledge base from three years of reporting and identifies nine priority issues:
- Our native plants, animals and ecosystems are under threat.
- Changes to the vegetation on our land are degrading the soil and water.
- Urban growth is reducing versatile land and native biodiversity.
- Our waterways are polluted in farming areas.
- Our environment is polluted in urban areas.
- Taking water changes flows which affects our freshwater ecosystems.
- The way we fish is affecting the health of our ocean environment.
- New Zealand has high greenhouse gas emissions per person.
- Climate change is already affecting Aotearoa New Zealand.
ACTION:
OMV GSB Limited as OMV Great Southern Basin Ltd (Oil and Gas Exploration Company) announcement and application to discharge.
ODT Article (https://www.odt.co.nz/business/gas-and-oil-exploration-move-otago-coast)
OMV has announced it’s ‘..plans to possibly three exploration and seven follow-up appraisal wells off Otago’s coast in the Great South Basin.
The 10 oil and gas prospects are within a 100km-150km arc, southeast of Dunedin.
OMV has also applied to the Environmental Protection Authority for a marine discharge consent to release contaminants to sea.’
EPA public Notice; https://www.epa.govt.nz/assets/FileAPI/proposal/EEZ100018/Notification/f6a62f48e4/EPA-Public-Notice-OMV_GSB-EEZ100018.pdf
Submission
The public have until 5pm on 27 May 2019 to make a submission on the application. Tips on how to make a submission exists on the EPA website can be downloaded https://www.epa.govt.nz/public-consultations/how-to-make-a-submission/
Stop Oil and Gas Drilling in Otago – Petition by Generation Zero
350 Aotearoa
Current Campaigns on Fossil Fuel Petitions
Top of the list is ‘Fossil Free Banks’
Petition to get the existing banks not investing in Fossil Fuel to to a policy guaranteeing they never will. TSB, Kiwibank, and the Co-operative bank currently do not invest in, or loan money to fossil fuel projects.
Pledge to Join the Resistance against OMV
https://act.350.org/letter/pledge-join-resistance-against-omv/
What Norway is doing from Resilience.org
What action can we take together?
Zero Carbon Act: Ring or email your MP NOW!!
What is the Zero-Carbon Act? Why is it important? In 2015, 195 nations of the world agreed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to reach zero-carbon by 2050(30 years only). THis is necessary to keep global warming at, or below 1.5 degrees, the maximum level at which a livable world is possible. Parliament will discuss this Bill very soon and Government needs cross-party agreement to develop an effective Zero-Carbon Act. We invite you to call your MP soon to have you say on this Act. Young people depend on us all for a safe and livable future. Naomi Klein says: “ To Change Everything, we need everyone!”
STOP the Minerals Forum Coalition
The minerals Forum takes Place May 28/29 at the Dunedin Events Centre
If you are interested in taking part in this please do so with respect and Nonviolence.
Meetings Weds 6pm – Blackstar Books, 111 Moray Place
https://www.mineralsforum.co.nz/
Foulden Maar: THE DESTRUCTION OF FOULDEN MAAR – ANOTHER MINING DISASTER
New Zealand’s pre-eminent fossil terrestrial site of the Miocene age… it’s the only pre-ice age Maar in the southern hemisphere which has been fully drilled [to its base]. . . there are few others like it.1
Professor Daphne Lee, Geology Department, Otago University
FOULDEN MAAR, 10KM SOUTHEAST OF MIDDLEMARCH, CENTRAL OTAGO, is a 23 million years old, small but deep volcanic crater. After becoming a lake, it gradually filled over the following 130,000 years with layers of microscopic silica-bearing plant life. It contains exceptional levels of fossilised organic material, ranging from microscopic algae, insects, fish, birds, mammals and reptiles.
Foulden Maar is considered by Otago University Geology Department to be of international importance as a paleontological site from which it is possible to reconstruct entire ecosystems from the past. Its layers of strata provide one of the best records of pre-historic climate change in the world.2 The world’s oldest known galaxiid, or whitebait, the oldest known fossilised eel in the southern hemisphere, have all came from Foulden Maar and scientists believe it could contain moa and even crocodiles. International geologists and scientists are currently studying the few fossils and geological samples that have been extracted from the site.
While it carries no legal weight , the Geoscience Society of New Zealand Geopreservation Index Rating of Foulden Maar is being upgraded to A = international importance.3 This is what they say about it:
“The lake sediments infilling the crater were deposited very close to the Oligocene–Miocene boundary, a key time in Earth History
BUT WE NEED TO ACT NOW
Trans-national company Plaman Resources Ltd, known for purchasing distressed assets,4 is currently gearing up to opencast mine the reserve of an estimated 33 million tonnes of diatomite (microscopic algae and fossils) for the next 27 years. In 2014, major shareholder of Plaman, Iris Corporation of Malaysia, announced plans to use Foulden Maar diatomite as a fertiliser on palm plantations in Southeast Asia. While not a fertiliser in itself, it will be used as an additive to inhibit soil leaching and improve resistance to the fungus related disease Ganderma.5 The announcement that NZ diatomite would be used for this ecologically destructive activity caused national outrage. Things went quiet for a couple of years in the public arena, until Plaman announced the diatomite would now be used as a new and unique animal feed additive6. The market for this will be off-shore factory farms and feedlots.
The Maar and all it contains will be destroyed and this invaluable site lost to us forever. This is not regional development. This is regional disaster, and instead of a golden egg, we are left with a 180 metre deep void.
CALL TO ACTION: MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE IN REQUEST FROM sustainabledunedincity@gmail.com
Overseas Investment Office submissions Plaman Resources currently have an application with the Overseas Investment Office for permission to purchase 400ha of sensitive land around the mine site without which they will not be able to operate on the scale they want. We have put in three submissions. We hope that the new Ministerial Directives to the OIO from Grant Robertson (which now include environmental impact and sustainability) will make some difference in how applications are considered.
Anyone wishing to make a submission, long or short, should immediately contact Eugenie Sage’s private secretary Janet Harris (04 817 8891 | Janet.Harris@parliament.govt.nz ) or Paula Merwood from the OIO (pmerwood@linz.govt.nz | 04 495 6204) to see whether there is still time.
ODT and letters to the editor In the absence of any reporters at the ‘drop-in’, we sent the above mentioned document and the Plaman Project Overview document to ODT journalists Chris Morris and Simon Hartley. The following day, Chris Morris reported the mine’s interest in the bridge and the proposed level of trucking was finally out of the bag. It was the catalyst for a flurry of letters to the editor. Initially focussed on the level of heavy trucks on the road, the parameters of the discussion within these columns have been broadening to look at the environmental impact, the importance of the site geologically and the low value of the diatomite itself.
We need to keep these letters going. They are important as the ODT has a singularly uncritical view of the mine and mining in general, and this is one way of getting information out and keeping Foulden Maar on the radar. (150 words maximum. Send to editor@odt.co.nz . Put ‘Letter to Editor’ in subject line. Include your name, address and phone number.
Iwi contacts As of yet, we have had no contact with iwi. If you have suggestions of whom to approach, please do let us know.
PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU WOULD LIKE MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS TO WRITE YOUR OWN SUBMISSION TO OIO, ODT, DCC OR ORC.
RESOURCES:
Movies to watch: we are collating all the movies we have available in the Dunedin CIty community for sharing in the below google spreadsheet, If you have one to add please do so.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d8_tQ3vanKvvOIqnyQ3FgQ6a9ptKoSkeO3PX9t9CA-4/edit#gid=0
……
Robert Costanza – Treating our Societal Addiction to Growth
was held on Wednesday 10th April, 6pm. St Davids Lecture Theatre, University of Otago, Dunedin hosted by Catchments Otago
http://www.catchmentsotago.org/news/2019/2/14/public-talk-treating-our-societal-addiction-to-growth
http://www.catchmentsotago.org/
Societies, like individuals, can become addicted to patterns of detrimental and unsustainable behaviour. We can learn from successful therapies at the individual scale, like motivational interviewing, which engages addicts in a positive discussion of their goals, motives, and futures. One analogy at the societal level is community engaged scenario planning; engaging entire communities in building consensus about preferred alternative futures. Effective therapies are possible, but require a re-balancing of efforts.
http://www.robertcostanza.com/
The 12 Takeaways were:
1. New meanings and measures of success.
2. Limits on materials, energy, wastes and land use.
3. More meaningful prices.
4. More durable repairable products.
5. Fewer status goods.
6. More informative advertising.
7. Better screening of technology.
8. More efficient capital stock.
9. More local, less global.
10. Reduced inequality.
11. Less work, more leisure.
12. Education for life, not just work.
https://wellbeingeconomy.org/ in 2017 New Zealand took part in this, where is this now? Sustainable Dunedin City has signed up as a member to receive more information.
Kate Raworth – Donut Economics
Films for Action
https://www.filmsforaction.org/ is the largest learning library for social change online, with over 4500+ films to watch.
Charles Eisenstein
https://charleseisenstein.org/
https://charleseisenstein.org/courses/unlearning-for-change-agents/ if anyone would like to join a local pod of unlearning please let me know, as I have signed up for this course and would love some friends to join me. Fiona Clements – Senorita.awesumo@gmail.com
National Geographic
Recommended watches:
David Attenborough Climate Change – The Facts https://youtu.be/0ypaUH57MO4
“Right now we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change. At the current rate of warming we risk a devastating future,” Attenborough narrated. The iconic documentary-maker and environmentalist warned, “science is now clear that urgent action is needed.”
Brene Brown – The Power of Vulnerablilty https://youtu.be/iCvmsMzlF7o
Zero waste Cracker Recipe
As I’ve been attending events recently I’ve noticed that there are a lot of plastic wrapped goods being brought along, one change I’ve made is to make my own crackers to avoid the plastic wrapping, here is my favourite recipe below. Give it a try, they are very tasty.
Savoury Crackers
¼ cup of sunflower seeds
¼ cup linseed/flax seeds
¼ cup sesame seeds
2 Tbls chia seeds
1 tsp sea salt flakes
1 cup flour (I used a mix of buckwheat flour/brown rice flour I added an extra ¾ cup of flour)
Mix Dry ingredients together.
⅓ cup olive oil
½ cup if water( add more water if you need to)
Add liquid to dry ingredients to make a dough, split this in half( i split into ¼), roll or press out each half between 2 sheets of baking paper and either cut into shapes or strips, sprinkle with the sea salt.
Bake at 180 degrees for 15 – 20 mins, makes 2 trays (keep an eye on them so they don’t burn)
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