Stephen Blyth's Blog

I got the impression from some people attending the Connecting Up New Zealand conference last week that they wished the genie would quietly slip back into the bottle. The torrent of opportunities and demands unleashed through the web is just too much. Could we just return to the uncomplicated days pre-Facebook, pre-twitter, pre-everything web! This [...]

If you get depressed thinking about the long running economic crisis and pending ecological meltdown, then Richard Heinberg’s book “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality” is probably not for you. Within a succinct 288 pages Heinberg provides an update on the Club of Rome’s 1972 critique of the ludicrous oxymoronic notion [...]

In something of a departure from what you’ll usually find here, I’m republishing a piece that I wrote quite a while ago. The article below appeared in the now defunct Political Review in mid-1993. A photocopy of the article has been sitting near my computer ever since I became self-employed in 2007. I’ve been meaning [...]

I generally cross to the sunny side of the street when I can. It’s an attitude that I try to cultivate generally, not just during this bleak, long winter. Given the deluge of facts about human impacts on the natural world it’s not always easy. When someone argues convincingly we’ve got a 100 months before [...]

A few weeks ago, Josh Campbell posted a short video to You Tube showing some of the dangers of cycling to work, called Biking in Christchurch. (Warning: content may offend!!) It’s not churlish, buffoonery, like the horrible tv reality programmes. But deadly serious. The 2 minute 57 second video records many near misses. It’s enough [...]

Before Naomi Klein’s new book is available on the shelves here in Aotearoa I’ve managed to learn quite a bit about the central thesis. Klein, well remembered as author of No Logo – a searing analysis of corporate advertising – and her reporting from the frontline at numerous WTO protests, now turns her attention to [...]