Whitebaiting is an iconic part of life that most New Zealanders take for granted, but this traditional harvest is now threatened by the damage we have wrought for a century or more on our waterways, but particularly in the last few decades with intensification of dairy farming. We have doubled the number of dairy cows […]

Blogger: Mike Joy, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science at Massey University Much of the rhetoric coming from the government around mining in National Parks has centred on so called “surgical mining” – the idea is that you can make a small hole and that this hole is the total impact.  This is just classic greenwash.  […]

Guest Bloggers: Mike Joy, a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science at Massey University & Masters student Amber McEwan Of all our threatened endemic iconic species there is only one that almost all New Zealanders have come in contact with.  Our other threatened species are on offshore islands or in very hard to access places, seen only by […]

Freshwater quality in New Zealand has reached crisis point.  Decades of treating our rivers as convenient waste removal systems is now coming back to haunt us.  New Zealand lakes, rivers and streams have experienced and continue to experience exponential increases in pressure from farming intensification, residential subdivision, wastewater discharges, water abstraction, erosion from bad land […]