Stephen Blyth's Blog

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 [...]

Quite by accident when looking for lunch while on a rambling walk along the Otumoetai foreshore in Tauranga, Roz and I tripped over the fabulous, fecund Let’s get growing community gardens. Sited in the Otumoetai Railway Reserve, the allotment style gardens are a vision of paradise on earth. You’ll have to look at the pics [...]

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 [...]

Conservation scientists are trying to ensure mala or the rufous hare-wallaby as it is known to it’s friends, does not become extinct (pictured right). The small mammal, whose habitat once included the desert of Australia’s dry centre, is the focus of a recovery effort by the Australasia Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG). Focusing on the [...]

View Community gardens in Aotearoa New Zealand in a larger map See the map above, well I’d like your help to add to it. As part of some research I’m doing for an article on community gardening I want to know what is happening around Aotearoa New Zealand. By the looks of things there is [...]

Most of the activist and grassroots community organising I’ve been part of has struggled with some of the basics. It was something that took up a surprising amount of effort. Where are going to meet? Are there enough chairs? Can we make a cuppa after the meeting? I don’t remember a time we ever had [...]