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

Posted in Forestry, Land Use, Land use policy, Reimagining, Resilience Thinking, Strategic thinking, Thought Pieces, Wicked Problems | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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

Posted in Building Regional Economies, Land Use, Land use policy, Reimagining, Socio-ecological Systems, Thought Pieces | Leave a comment

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

Posted in agricultural strategy, Alternative Vision, Building Regional Economies, Land Use, Land use policy, Land use strategy, Landscape function, Reimagining, Thought Pieces | 3 Comments

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

Posted in agricultural strategy, Alternative Vision, Building Regional Economies, Commodity trap, Land Use, Land use policy, Linkages, Reimagining, Resilience Thinking, Socio-ecological Systems, Thought Pieces, Water retention, Wicked Problems | 2 Comments

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

Posted in Land Use, Neoliberalism & Corporatism, Reimagining, Thought Pieces | 7 Comments

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

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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

Posted in Alternative Vision, Land Use, Land use strategy, Landscape function, Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments