Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to mark taslov,
their wacky yo-yo crackdowns on the internet
Yeah, not so long ago I was telling friends and colleagues give it a couple of weeks for the Party congress to be out of the way and it'll go back to normal.... But we're still in Party congress mode. You could try this suggestion from Sinoglot, but the comments to that post suggest it probably makes no difference. I look forward to the day we can proclaim "Long live the great Chinese intranet!"
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to mark taslov,
Better rattle your dags ;)
And I've visited and lived in much worse than Beijing. I still remember not long after I moved to Taiyuan one of the older, wiser expats telling us young'uns that to avoid lead poisoning we should always wash our face and hands as soon as we got home from any trip out to minimise the amount of 'dust' we ingested and eat plenty of brocolli as it's supposed to be good for leaching heavy metals from the system. And when the plane landed in Yuncheng and the door was opened I instantly smelt coal and thought, "Ah, back in Shanxi.... home... sort of..."
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
If no more tourists come to Godzone , would that not be a good thing, cetera paribus , for the environment?
Largely irrelevant, I think.
1: All activity damages the environment. The problem us humans have to figure out is how to limit that damage while maintaining a decent quality of life.
2: Tourism is no more a problem than any other human activity. All humans have always needed to trade and travel and tourism is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor is that going to magically vanish. I suppose we could go back to the days of sail.... If I were a sci-fi writer I'd write a novel in which nuclear powered ships sailed the globe delivering goods and travellers to their destinations, Australian mining was powered by the immense photovoltaic potential of that pile of bone dry dust, and all countries used a particular mix of renewable energy generation to suit their own natural conditions, and some bright spark had figured out how to process nuclear waste and/or cold fusion without killing us all.
Or, as you wrote:
Exceed the capacity of the soil , and pollution and economic loss will result.
Expand that to the 'capacity of the environment', and adjust the inevitable consequences accordingly, and we agree.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
but we can only imagine how bad our position will be in a few more years.
Warning: Not for the faint of heart. But these pictures from Yuncheng, Shanxi might help. Text is all in Chinese, and the pollution source is more heavy industry (specifically a paper factory in this case) than heavy agriculture, but a buggered-up environment is a buggered up environment. And a buggered up environment is not something I want to see when I get back to New Zealand.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
Farmer Green thinks that it matters little in the long run what tourists think of our agricultural practice, tourism being essentially recreational pollution.
But the problem isn't limited to agriculture.
A common view is that the lack of human population makes the destination attractive.
Maybe. But it's no good for tourists to go back home and tell their friends and families that the few people there are have a terrible attitude to that beautiful and formerly clean environment.
It does matter what those offshore who buy our food think of the way we operate; the common view is that we are reliable clean operators producing safe nutritious food in a reasonably sustainable fashion , at least in comparison to what goes on elsewhere.
And there's another area where NZ Inc needs to lift its game, because clean, green 100% pure has been adopted by our agricultural exporters, too. It's no good having infant formula exporters regularly failing inspection by China's Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, for example - which has happened more than once this year - because Chinese parents tend to be rather unforgiving with companies that play fast and loose with their children's health, safety and well-being. All those infant formula companies claiming a New Zealand connection (whether or not their formula is actually made in NZ) play up the clean, green, 100% pure, reliable, safe image. China is now NZ's second largest source of tourists, Yao Chen is doing a superb job of advertising NZ's beautiful scenery simply by getting married in Queenstown and posting honeymoon pictures on Weibo. Naturally it will be good for neither NZ's dairy exporters nor tourist importers if dairy exporters continue to fail inspection and tourists get back to China and tell their friends and families and post on Weibo "Wow! Lurid green algae-choked lowland lakes and rivers! Just like home!" Rinse and repeat for NZ's other export markets and tourist sources.
In this regard it must be noted , as other scientists at Massey have repeatedly pointed out, that we cannot have fertile soils without having some enrichment of the waterways.
No phosphorus added to the deficient soils of NZ = little or no production.Well, yes. But surely these things can be managed better so as to minimise collateral damage?
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Many years ago friends of a friend from Belgium were visiting NZ. I told my friend to put his friends in touch with me if they were passing through Wellington, where I was trying to find a job. I showed them around for a couple of days. They wanted to try a local brew, so I took them to a pub and ordered them Speights. They said, "Wow, this is good stuff! But then again, we have just spent a month in Australia..." Then they said, "Y'know, this clean, green 100% pure thing is bullshit. If you guys had anything like Belgium's population density and still treated your environment the way you do, NZ would be a toxic waste dump". And all I could do is agree.
I'm pretty sure I've told that story a gazillion times already, but what the hell, it shows an aspect of this issue that the government and all those hating on Dr Joy are willfully ignoring: Tourists ain't stupid. Or blind. They get to New Zealand, look around, and compare the reality they experience with the cowshit marketing they were fed back home. Then they tell their friends and families. Marketing fail.
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Leaf in gate
Heh, when I first saw that photo I thought it was some fancy piece of jewellery. There's something jade- or pounamu-like to the pattern of the colouring of the green ring. A photo that makes you focus and refocus questioning what you're seeing is always a good photo.
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Nora, that middle one, 'Left lane exit only', is beautifully desolate.
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Hard News: Calling the race before it's over, in reply to BenWilson,
Chris Hipkins,..., is 34 years old.
Relevance?
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Capture: Art On The Street, in reply to Nora Leggs,
part way down Dominion Road
Awesome!