How wonderful...
09/28/2005
The other day a minke whale beached itself just down the road. I never saw it, but from what I hear, the entire community managed to get it floating back out to sea after a few hours with no hitches. We have dolphins round here too and seals, and you should see the seagulls gliding over the oceans calling out with the sheer joy of being lifted hundreds of feet into the air, the shags dive bombing into the water from a massive distance, and leaving again with fish in mouth. Some places around New Zealand, you wouldn't be too mistaken if you thought you'd left this world, we do, after all, call it godzone. Once, when I was young, I was out in our family boat with my parents and sat for ages while the most incredibly beautiful Blue Shark swam lazily around and around, far from the images of 'jaws' we all grew up with, I just wanted to dive in and swim with it. Sometimes, dolphins race you in the water, and another time an Orcha swam right beneath us. I was out collecting pipis once (small shellfish that you dig for by doing the twist in the sand) when my sister spotted two massive fins in the three feet of water we were standing in. It appears a giant manterey had the same ideas as we did. My friends and I used to lie on a jetty in the Malbourough sounds counting the stingrays as they glided beneath us, then dive in at midnight and splash in the phospheresence that lit us up like christmas trees.
Sometimes you look around in awe at the sheer force of life bursting out around us, the fact that even though we seem hell bent of destroying these animals, almost every month, in summer time the newspapers report another story of dolphins rounding up swimmers and protecting them against the 6 foot white pointer that has wandered into the area. My dad tells me stories of his flight instructor days when he used to watch out the plane window down onto a bay in Christchurch full of basking sharks.
And that is why I feel sick every time I look out at the silent war ranging in the ocean, just on the horizon where boats and their nets are ripping the ocean floor to pieces, drowing everything in their path and then discarding all the broken and lifeless bodies that don't fit within their fishing quota. We only have 100 Maui dolphins left in the world, and they are all in NZ waters. When I hear stories from my parents about the old days where fishing off a beach would land you an entire family meal in a few minutes, I wonder what I will tell my hildren some day. When I was young, we had dolphins, and whales and seals and sharks...
09:20 Posted in environment | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Ecology & Environment
Degrees of seperation
09/26/2005
I can't stand passive consumers. The people who buy anything from anyone, with no thought to what they are actually doing, supporting. I also can't stand people who accept shocking customer service or a really sub standard product and don't do anything about it. The people who think companies rule the world and there is nothing they can do about it. No, it's not as conveniant to have to examine the back of every package to see whether it has been tested on animals, or to ensure a new juice range isn't just another brand produced by global polluter and human rights violater Coca Cola, or to stop eating at global fast food chains because you don't want to go on a trip to deepest africa and see the neon lights of Mc Donalds. No, I wont by any product made by a child sweatshop worker for Nike, or buy eggs from a company that treats chickens like living machines. I will never respect a smoker, because I have seen cigarette companies blatantly advertise to children and addict thousands of people in third world countries who can hardly afford food, let alone another price rise in the cigarettes that used to only cost them 10 cents while market share was being established.
But because I am not directly involved, in this society, it is ok for me to give my monetary support to those who abuse children, animals and the environment, in ways that would bring me to tears if in my backyard. Not only is it ok, its normal. I just dont buy it. I don't think it's fair that when I'm at a party and a doctor next to me lights up his cigarette and proclaims the beauty of free choice, I can't explain to him that his version of free choice is opressing thousands, without sounding argumentative. I don't think its fair that noone who pollutes and injures and wastes and kills never has to even label the fact clearly so that I can see, that I actually have to spend hours of my time just trying to get beneath the layers of secrecy. It's ludacris that a company that blinds and injures rabbits so that their new shampoo may possibly give a little more shine does not even need to tell me about the process, and instead can spin a web of half truths and deliver them via ther PR manager.
And here is why I blame those passive consumers. Because companies are not all powerful, it is an illusion. They get all their power from us, and while we let them sell us any old thing because we have put enough degrees of separation between ourselves and the things that go into the products we buy, the 'bad guys' flourish. Does it not annoy you people that if you were to ever get sick, really sick, those pharmaceutial companies you contunually run to every time you get a cold, or a headache, sore throat or minor injury, have been actively undermining the authenticity of 'alternative' medicine, to a point that you no longer have any choice over the treatment?
Yes it is harder, but it's even harder when the majority of the population leaves it up to a few. And its even harder than that, when those same lazy consumers make it unsociable to challenge the norm and use their mass power, not againt corporate greed, but the very people who are trying, in their own minor way to make change.
20:55 Posted in consumerism | Permalink | Comments (5) | Email this
So many options
09/25/2005
Don't you love those moments where you just sit back and think "I could do anything", when you manage to imagine a tomorrow where you've packed your bags and are on the way to a new and distant country with half a plan and a whole bunch of possibility. Theres always a hundred reasons why not, but in that little space of time, you're just certain it's going to happen.
13:05 Posted in Chatting | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
Hows the weather where you are?
09/21/2005
So it's coming into spring here, after a non existant winter (ie. the wooly jumpers never left their moth balled drawers). We welcomed in the first day of spring, sunbathing on the deck. For those of you not too aquainted with NZ, you may be under the illusion that we all live in little grass huts in the tropics... Most tourists arrive in singlets and spend the next two weeks freezing their way around the country. But not this year. They say NZ has every season in one day, and of course, because we sit very cosily under the ozone hole created by our friends over in the northern hemisphere, tanning is not a hard thing to do here - buit not in winter. Until now. While the other side of the world is getting hurricanes, we are at the height of summer on the first day of spring... only to drop back to the snowy winter months a day later. This weather is crazy. It's too crazy to relax in, you feel that hole expanding with every rise in the barometer, you taste the pollution in every breath of fresh spring air and you feel the clock ticking every time you start your car on fossil fuels.
21:40 Posted in environment | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: Ecology & Environment
Part of the Elite
09/18/2005
It's interesting, all this debate on same sex marriage and same sex adoption. Well actually, it's not really interesting at all, the issues themselves are so obviously non-issues that the reasons they are controversial become fascinating. It has always seemed to me to be a very weird human trait, that groups who have known oppression are the loudest in the fight to oppress others. We have sports stars like Tiger Woods sporting Nike clothing and slave labour, in NZ, various Maori organisations, still fighting for equal status in society, simultaneously demanding that gay people get none, and women, possibly the largest group of people to understand what it's like to be considered inferior, defining other groups along racial or economic lines and doing exactly the same to them.
It's not human nature by any means, it's a view on the world that has somehow been taken by all of us and perceived to be reality. We want to be part of the elite, but others who also join the elite threaten us, if they join, we must somehow lose out. By the elite, in this case, I just mean, an ordinary, respected member of a community, belonging to the 'mass' without being an outsider, abnormal.
The biggest argument against gay marriage is that it 'ruins the sanctity of marriage' - I'm unsure why our 50% divorce rate didn't manage that single handedly. By sanctity, I assume, and am told, we are talking the religious base of marriage, it's awfully funny how religious we become all of a sudden, in fact, I'm sure most of our recent marriage defenders haven't been to church once in their life. We are ruining the sanctity of the elite, if any old person who loves another person, can marry them, what do we 'normal' heterosexuals have anymore? Marriage simply wont mean anything! Maybe we still use marriage to hide a lot of other problems and fear that if people start getting married purely for love, then our lives become a sham. You can tell it's not human nature by the sheer stupidness of it, yet still, we insist on isolating members of our society, issuing them a 'civil union' and telling them to move on, yes we will recognise you, but you still can't join us.
Same sex adoption, on the surface appears to have slightly more murky waters - Babies need their mothers! Really? Is this not the same thinking that kept women in the home, and now we get women annoucing their place is in the home, and that is why two males cannot bring up a child. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Notice the focus on two males? it seems lesbians are still widely believe to be there or the benefit of males and virtually left out of all arguments concerning 'serious' gay issues.
As far as I'm aware, if we continue to bring up children the way we do now, the world will be the same as it is now. We saw it last night on our election coverage, people who are fighting for their cause are miles ahead of the rest of us, in terms of forward thinking, clear mindedness and alternative paths ahead. Maybe it is us who must get over our ideas that children need to be protected, and protection is hiding them away from the world, until they emerge as an adult without any skills or ideas of how things work. Children are far more adaptive than we think, they are not born with closed minds, however they are created extremely quickly by our parenting. Give a child two loving parents, a little idea of the world, and you'd be surprised what you can create. Give children a clue, and you may well remove the innocence that allows marketers to target them, companies to prey on them and the ability for us to stagnate ourselves on age old issues instead of focusing on things that matter.
09:25 Posted in Chatting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Musings
Lazy Sunday
09/11/2005
It wasn't too long ago that I'd virtually forgotten the concept of a weekend, one day melted seamlessly into another in a blaze of activity that seemed to have no end. Now though, it's really nice to get immersed in the rest of life. When you go through a period when you have no time at all to call your own, you really start to realise how much you wasted it while it was plentiful. I don't think I even remember how to operate a T.V, and feel sorry for all those people who just keep turning them on because it's the thing to do. I was never a big T.V watcher, but now wonder how there was ever time for it at all.
These days, the chance to just sit and read through interesting parts of the internet (as geeky as it sounds) is one of my favorite things. Yesterday I explored the world of alternative enery in NZ and was amazed at the breadth of ideas and companies that were born out of a need to change the world for the better. NZ is, of course, the perfect testing ground for new technologies. Small, isolated and dynamic enough to reverse the damage fo the last 150 years, I would not be surprised if we overtook Europe to become the leader in clean transport, de-centralised energy creation, and sustainable living.
Although still fairly hidden away, there is a growing movement away from the poisons of the past. My next door neighbour alone set out on her own crusade to bring organics to this town, and while we still have luddites who can't get over their view of hemp as a drug, people like my mother proudly sport clothes made form the fibre, and give their friends canvas shopping bags for christmas - and my mother is by no means your conventioanl hippy. We're now in negotiations about a compost toilet for the house she wants to build, I think the water tank is a given. And, of course, the entire town of Golden Bay has gone platic bag free.
11:15 Posted in Chatting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saving the world with a smile
09/08/2005
I was running along the beach the other day, struggling to motivate myself to make it to the next log, let alone the entire way home again, when something amazing happened. The actual event, you may think, was not actually that incredible at all, just a quick smile and a joke from a stranger walking the other way. But how many times do you actually do that instead of looking down, or to your right, or staring straight ahead in an effort to avoid all contact? I know it sounds crazy that such a tiny act could transform my day, but it did.
I actually distinctly remember two other encounters in my life that have come at such perfectly timed moments that they have turned my entire day and even week around. Once was when I went to the library after a shocking two weeks of 'breaking up' with my best friend, to find that the last librarian I had talked to had secretly wiped my overdue fine. And I know that $5 isn't much, but it was the fact that this stranger had done something nice to me for no reason at all. The next time was a trip down to Wellington for my mums birthday, after yet another stressful week (my life isn't really full of them, its just that this subject really brings them into focus), and the taxi driver refused my money as a birthday gift to my mum, who he had never met in his life.
I suppose its just nice to know that there people out there, who you may never pass again, or even speak to, but out of a random and needless act of kindness, they change your entire outlook on life. I know its unfashionable these days to sound wide eyed with wonder and naievity, but sometimes you just have to take delight in the simplicity of creating a better world.
20:30 Posted in Chatting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Musings
Politics?
09/07/2005
It is election time here at the bottom of the world, and right now I am embarrassed to be a New Zealander. The land that lead the world with female emancipation, has, it would seem, degenerated into a second rate political circus. Politions are appearing on TV screens and glossy pamphlets as weird and unusual puppets, I receive brochures in the mail warning of the evils of granting basic human rights to same sex couples, and our green party has been hammered for suggesting that petrol is not the way of the future.
I think that we all have a responsibility to vote out of duty to the millions who have fought for and who are denied this fundamental human right, and so we don't end up like America. But maybe things just get a little too good. We take for granted our pristine coastlines, while barely two kilometers out, trawlers are devastating our ocean floors, we drink in our clean air while planning new highways, we market our empty beaches to the world while quietly developing them into the highrise concrete jungles that everyone else is trying to escape.
So we sit back in comfort, allowing our elections to be fought and won on a three month marketing campaign. We're too busy squabbling over who will grant the biggest tax cuts or wipe student loans to actually expect our political leaders to deliver clear, well thought out and practical answers to the biggest questions facing our country. So they sing and dance on t.v and send out airbrushed pictures of themselves, some of us vote, but we all lose out.
18:25 Posted in New Zealand | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: Politics
The Blogsphere
09/06/2005
I've spent the past few days trying to find a decent blog that exists outside the realm of the Google empire. There is just something awfully unattractive already about a single company knowing what I search for, where I live, what's in my email... I just couldn't give them my thoughts aswell. My traverse into the blogsphere sure did uncover some interesting things. Far from the blissful world of free media and personal publishing, I now see that certain people actually planned and cultivated the rise of the unassuming blog and are now raking in the profits. It's the new fame I suppose, sport your Blogger Hoodie with pride and really work that linking. But on the upside, I had a good chuckle when I typed in 'The Worst President in the World' to Google, I suggest you give it a try if you haven't already... Which I assume you have, because I am usually the last person on the internet to figure these things out. I was still in hysterics over finding the 'Last Page on the Internet' until I was kindly told that it was so five minutes ago.
Anyway, what finally prompted me to join in this revolution, was that Monsanto has filed possibly the most frightening patent yet. So if by change, you live under the rock next door to mine and still haven't heard about this, take a look and run straight down to your nearest organic/GE free supermarket. At least those who are trying to bring the teachings of 'intelligent design' to the local science lab have one more question that God just can't answer for them... Who in their right mind would design a world like this?
22:31 Posted in Chatting | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
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My name is Natalie, I am a web designer and partner in small New Zealand based web design company 
