Follow Blog via Email
Join 1,449 other subscribersTop Posts & Pages
Archives
Meta
Connect to Chris Perley on Facebook
Blog Stats
- 55,552 hits
Category Archives: Reimagining
New Zealand Forestry: Getting off the Love affair with Simple
The British Columbian forestry sector imploded through 2018-2020. There are lessons here for New Zealand and elsewhere. Continue reading
Shifting the Culture of Development Policy in NZ – From Linear Technocracy to People-Place Complex
Forestry is not about trees, it is about people. And it is about trees only insofar as trees can serve the needs of people. (Jack Westoby, 1990) A fellow forester and I were having coffee – which he complained about … Continue reading
Changing the Framing of our Lands and Forests …. and Hedgehogs – and Foxes
“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” Archilochus The Parliamentary Commission for the Environment (PCE) report Farms, Forests and Fossil Fuels: The next Great Landscape Transformation was released 26th March 2019. Amidst all the calls for clarity … Continue reading
Reimagining landscapes as socio- and agro-ecosystems [1]
Preamble: Dr Mike Joy brought a team of people together to consider the question of how we can help solve New Zealand’s freshwater crisis. The contributions were published by Bridget Williams Books as Mike Joy (Ed) 2018 Mountain to Sea: Solving … Continue reading
Seeing our Water: Our Solutions may lie in Another World
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a … Continue reading
Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces
3 Comments
Getting Politics (and Life!) off the Titanic
William Ophuls has written some very thoughtful books about our political age. Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology is one of them. He challenges our world, not just at the level of tinkering with deck chairs (e.g. biofuels … Continue reading
Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Virtues, Ways of Seeing
1 Comment
Land Degradation – One Insidious Step at a Time
“Once again, the principal villains across Greece, Southern Italy, Southern France, and Spain, were fires, goats, and timber felling. … Able to thrive anywhere, goats often create an environment in which little but goats will survive.” Ronald Wright. A Short … Continue reading
Review – The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young
Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows gives far more than a simple description of animal personality, behaviour and communication. It speaks also to and of humanity. What animals eat impacts on their health and the quality and taste of their … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
1 Comment
The Art of Flying ….. and Life
I am a sucker for murmurations, that greatest and most beautiful metaphor on life. They are so representative of the new (and old) way of seeing the world, of the fundamental metaphysics underlying life. Watch this amazing two minute excerpt … Continue reading
Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces
Leave a comment
Reimagining Landscapes I: Rejecting the Machine
How do you separate the personal from the professional? We are taught to deal in the ‘objective’, in measured things. But the whole idea of reimagining how we look at landscapes – our so-called ‘working lands’ of farms and forests … Continue reading
Reimagining Science for Our Future
Where will science be in the future? If we argue against the excesses and anomalies of Modernity – the metaphor of the reducible machine, knowable by breaking everything into soulless bits – and we also argue that many of the philosophical … Continue reading
Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces
3 Comments
The Purpose of Life: Assimilation into the Borg Collective?
I’m quoting this Hundertwasser idea (below) because I’m interested in human purpose and creativity. I don’t think we’re meant to be deconstructed into cogs in the Corporate machine, obedient and defined by tasks, job descriptions and money. That is Modernity … Continue reading