New Zealand

This River is a Person in New Zealand Law

- Adam Clare

The Whanganui River its the first river to have the same legal stats as a person. The New Zealand federal government recently passed a bill granting the river legal personhood. This means that the river is afforded all the rights as a person under New Zealand law. The river’s rights to clean air, legal representation, and other protections people get are now granted to the river itself. This will protect not just the river, it also represents a change in how NZ thinks about the law.

With progress and time we should see other natural entities be granted the same protection as humanity in other jurisdictions.

Long revered by New Zealand’s Maori people, the river’s interests will now be represented by two people.
The Maori had been fighting for over 160 years to get this recognition for their river, a minister said.
“I know the initial inclination of some people will say it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality,” said New Zealand’s Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.
“But it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies.”
The Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, will be represented by one member from the Maori tribes, known as iwi, and one from the Crown.
The recognition allows it to be represented in court proceedings.

Read more.
Thanks to Delaney!

A New Zealand School Abandons Rules, Ends Bullying

- Adam Clare

Having zero tolerance policies in schools is a truly horrible way to treat children. It can blunt curiosity and punish severely for minor infractions, combine such oppressive control with bizarre rules (like no playing schoolyard games) and you’ll bored, agitated and disengaged kids. When children aren’t able to express themselves in more traditional ways (like play), they tend to lash out.

With all of that in mind, a school in Aukland decided to toss out the rules. The results were a decrease in bullying and an increase in attentive learning!

Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.

“The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It’s during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school.”

Parents were happy too because their children were happy, he said.

But this wasn’t a playtime revolution, it was just a return to the days before health and safety policies came to rule.

AUT professor of public health Grant Schofield, who worked on the research project, said there are too many rules in modern playgrounds.

“The great paradox of cotton-woolling children is it’s more dangerous in the long-run.”

Society’s obsession with protecting children ignores the benefits of risk-taking, he said.

Read more at tvnz.

Pacific Island 100% Solar Powered

- Adam Clare

Tokelau is a small island in the Pacific that has switched it’s entire power grid to solar, this is the first of a few islands in the region that will be fully independent from having to import fuel for electricity.

Before the solar power grid was completed, the New Zealand-administered grouping of three coral atolls, with a population of just 1,500, relied on diesel generators for electricity. Project coordinator Mike Bassett-Smith said the diesel was not only environmentally unfriendly, it also cost the islands, which lie about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, around NZ$1.0 million ($825,000) a year.

Bassett-Smith, from New Zealand firm PowerSmart Solar, said the change would allow Tokelau to switch money from fuel purchases to social welfare projects.

“For Tokelau, this milestone is of huge importance for their continued well-being,” he said in a statement received Wednesday.

Read more here.

New Zealand a Haven for the Eco-Conscious

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

I’ve never been to New Zealand but I’d love to go; but, if I were to go it sounds as if I’d just have to live there. New Zealand is experiencing and influx of immigrants that are moving there for only environmental reasons.

Liam Clifford, a director of London-based GlobalVisas, writes on the company’s website that while some eco-migrants are from low-lying island nations, many are wealthy Americans and Europeans choosing to start a new life in New Zealand.

“It is seen as a country with a temperate climate that will escape extreme weather. It has a superior environmental record and is developing renewable fuels, and is shielded from conflicts by the Pacific Ocean.”

…
John Zamick chose New Zealand as a new home for his family for entirely environmental reasons.

In the UK rising temperatures and sea levels threatened to turn the “semi-arid” East Anglia region into a desert – if the low-lying plains are not swamped by rising seas instead.

The businessman, who now co-directs a biodiesel company in Nelson, saw the writing on the wall when he studied the droughts and other long-term environmental effects of global warming in Europe and North Africa.

Microwave CO2

- Adam Clare

Something that I’ve never thought about is happening in New Zealand and that’s using microwaves to store carbon in charcoal.

“The application of microwaves to charcoal making is new,” says Tim Flannery of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, an expert on climate change and not associated with Carbonscape. “If it increases efficiency in the charcoal-making process it could prove to be a real winner.”

The plant is months away from running at full capacity, and is currently being used to produce charcoal that can be used to fertilise soil and for academic research.

The use of charcoal as a fertiliser, or “biochar”, is well known. Nearly 500 years ago, tribes in the Amazon used to smoulder their domestic waste, and the resultant charcoal was mixed into the soil. In places in the Amazon, this terra preta, or black earth, is nearly half a metre thick.

Charcoal makes the soil more fertile by binding nutrients to itself and making them available for plants, and is extremely resistant to breakdown. “You do quite often get a very significant boost in soil fertility and water holding capacity,” says Michael Bird at the University of St Andrews, UK.

“The unknowns that remain are exactly how long [the charcoal] stays in the soil. In some circumstances it can be millions of years, or decades, depending on how it is made, and soil conditions.”

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