CHOICE STALLED! As BayBuzz goes to press, it appears NZ First has pulled the plug on the proposed Clean Car Standard, a huge setback for the Labour-Green coalition and, more importantly, for a nation yet to limit vehicle emissions at…
Tom Belford01 April 2020
If I mention climate change will you stop reading? I think a lot of people would. The reason is that it’s too often predictable, preachy and grim, long on rhetoric and short on practical solutions. When someone does say something…
Paul Paynter01 December 2019
Hawke’s Bay’s coastal strategy has become a pressing topic. Storm surges have wreaked spectacular havoc at Clifton beach, coastal Te Awanga and Haumoana. Hohepa has decided to retreat from low-lying land near Clive for its residents’ safety. And inland residential…
Pat Turley01 December 2019
Global warming poses unprecedented – radical actually – challenges to our prevailing lifestyles. As BayBuzz’s lifestyle and culture editors, here’s our view of the conundrum. The last couple of months have felt noisier. School Climate Strike, Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 December 2019
Last week saw the official establishment of the Hawke’s Bay Future Farming Trust. Here is the mission given to the Trust by its farmer-led establishment group … Problem “Society today is challenging the environmental cost and impact of producing food.…
Tom Belford12 August 2019
Electronic waste (e-waste) is becoming one of the fastest growing categories of hazardous waste in the world, propelled by constant changes in technology, low initial cost and planned obsolescence. Like plastics, which are going to the landfill at a greater…
Keith Newman01 August 2019
Commercial logging and processing is our third largest export trade covering around 1.8 million hectares with about $5 billion earned annually from shipping to Australia, Japan, Korea, China and the US. It’s a messy business, leaving massive amounts of offcuts,…
Keith Newman01 June 2019
Urban trees offer a sense of place and a connection with the past. Environmentally crucial and a cultural touchstone, they have a massive role to play in urban New Zealand. In terms of their environmental benefits, trees provide habitat, sequester…
Pat Turley01 June 2019
NZ may have led the world with the quota management system (QMS) to control harvest levels – a bold move back in the 1980s when NZ was one of the first countries to implement one, effectively reducing overall fishing effort…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 June 2019
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Go on, have another crack at it. In a world frustratingly awash with acronyms, we can at least recognise this one – DDT, that brutally toxic and offensively long-lived organochlorine pesticide used most widely in the 50s and 60s. …
Paul Paynter01 April 2019
The social, environmental and economic value of trees can be thought of as a closely intertwined network of roots in a vast forest. Human sustainability cannot exist without environmental sustainability, and the value of trees extends considerably beyond their direct…
Pat Turley01 April 2019
Before the old coach road was shifted further west in 1893, travelling from Napier to Te Pōhue required 43 river crossings along the Esk River route. From Napier to Taupō was a three-day journey with overnight stops at Te Pōhue,…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 April 2019
Ravaged by fire in pre-European times, destroyed wholesale in the colonial rush to convert ‘wasteland’ into productive farms, and turned into butter boxes to ship refrigerated dairy to the Motherland, less than 2% of these primordial forests survived the last…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 April 2019
Plastic forms an integral part of everything from cars to furniture, office and household appliances and a cornucopia of containers, but its fastest growing, lowest cost form – the bags, wrappers, straws and caps that litter our roadsides, river banks…
Keith Newman01 December 2018
The 75-year-old former school teacher, whose European forebears arrived in the country in the 1860s, has spent a good part of his life as de facto custodian (kaitiaki) of the heritage of the region’s tangata whenua (people of the land).…
Keith Newman01 August 2018
I don’t think there was an ‘A-ha’ moment when I decided I’d had enough of being part of the world’s plastic-waste mess and began to look seriously at cutting it from our lives. It was more of a matter of…
Jenny Keown01 August 2018
In the context of the Government’s proposed 1 Billion Trees programme, and with Ngāti Kahungunu simultaneously developing plans to ‘recloak the land’ through their Kahutia Accord project, we’re set to see some big landscape changes. But what does the Council…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 August 2018
From a distance, a coastal forest may look like the image on the right. I come to think that this view – which I see every day – says it all, that I know exactly what goes on inside it,…
David Trubridge01 June 2018
But the Karamū is arguably our most significant awa, supporting much of Heretaunga’s productive lowland and urban environment – a catchment that encompasses an intricate network of small tributaries, spring-fed streams and creeks, channels and drains that feed into the…
Bridget Freeman-Rock01 June 2018
This is a story of how irrigators can grow and maintain the excellent quality of our Hawke’s Bay produce by having access to reliable and sustainable irrigation, while benefitting our environment and community at the same time. Growers of perishable…
Jerf von Beek01 June 2018
