The beer market and the alcohol market have been very resilient. We’re not complacent about that but it is a positive trend. We’re in a market that often has said when things get tough people still enjoy a drink and they still enjoy going to the cinema. So there are a couple of things that people don’t tend to give up. And we’re I guess reasonably lucky that alcohol’s one of those things.

I guess the positive trend he is talking about is the record 470.3 million litres of alcohol consumed by New Zealanders last year. Cheers to a company that ’s aiming for double digit growth for the foreseeable future.

If you’re looking for evidence of human shortsightedness, you might start with landmines. Popular as an inexpensive tool of warfare, landmines now render land uninhabitable and unusable in 45 countries. They’re hard to remove: there’s an estimated 110 million unexploded mines waiting to kill, injure and maim, and at current demining rates, it will take $33 billion and 1,100 years to do the job…

Fortunately, Bart Weetjens is here to help, and he’s got lots of backup: cages filled with African giant pouched rats. The rats have an amazing sense of smell, and Weetjens has trained rats to detect landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger the mines (though they look roughly as large as my cat), but they stand on the mine and dig until a handler picks them up, rewards them with food and removes the ordnance. The rats have already cleared 416,500 square meters of minefield, and can detect more mines in an hour than a professional human deminer can in a day.

Luckily rats are one of the few species we haven’t driven to the edge of extinction.  Imagine if we had to hunt down land mines with kakapo or kiwi.

Credit for photo of Stan the mine finding rat:  Hero Rats, where you can go to sponsor a rat to clear more mines and save more lives.

Hat tip: Seed magazine. Also check out it’s links to the sea slugs that are going green from a horizontal gene transfer process of photosynthesizing, and the danger precipitated by falling in love with large numbers - for instance you are 80% less likely to die from a meteor landing on your head if you wear a bicycle helmet

The Maori Party agree to be bound by collective responsibility in relation to their Ministerial portfolios and their Associate Minister responsibilities. When the Maori Party Ministers speak about issues within their portfolios and Associate Minister responsibilities, they will speak for the government and as part of the government, representing the government’s position in relation to these responsibilities. When they speak about matters outside these responsibilities, however, they speak as the Co-Leaders of the Maori Party or as members of Parliament.

compare this with the collective responsibility clause in the Green-Labour agreement from the last term of government (admittedly not a governing agreement):

The Green Party will not be bound by collective responsibility on government decisions. Where the Green Party has participated in the development of a policy initiative, and that participation has led to an agreed position, it is expected that all parties to this agreement will publicly support the process and the outcome.

Turia and Sharples are ministers of Maori affairs and the community and voluntary sector.  But they are also associate ministers of education, corrections, health and social development and employment. Those are some of the biggest ministries in New Zealand.  Although Turia and Sharples will be sitting outside cabinet they and their party could end up being bound to be collectively responsible for a very significant proportion of the government’s work.

This could work two ways.  Either the Maori Party could use its associate minister portfolios to blunt or even improve the Act-National agenda for these big money portfolios.  Or it could find itself either a lone voice at the table or, worse, excluded from important cabinet table discussions altogether and yet effectively muzzled from criticising the decisions that Cabinet is making.

4. Health care spending takes up a significant portion of our tax dollars. It’s been shown that an active lifestyle leads to better health and that in turn would lessen the burden on the health care system. What would your party do to encourage people to lead a healthy and active lifestyle?

This is an incredibly important question, because our health services are now in danger of being swamped by chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease. While there is quite a lot of focus now on obesity, many of these diseases can be seen as diseases of inactivity. The Green Party has recently released a Preventative Health Strategy, the centrepiece of which is a fivefold increase in the proportion of health spending that is used to keep people well in the first place (to 10%), including the promotion of physical activity.

Our responses to Vorb and to CAN provide quite a lot of detail about this, but clearly we need to reach people of all ages (because increased activity benefits absolutely everybody) but particularly children and young people, because today’s children are the first generation to actually face a lower life expectancy than their parents due to inactivity and diet. Focus has to be twofold, with an increase to everyday activity (e.g. making it safe for children to cycle or walk to school) and an increase in organised sport. Reality is that many different solutions will be required, and the Green Party will be keen to work with groups like MTBNZ to work out how best we can do this if we gain sufficient parliamentary influence to be able to negotiate our policy into action.

The results relied, at least in part, on parties and candidates willingness to engage and respond, so I am sure some parties on that list fared worse than they felt they deserved. But its really about priorities and the Greens have committed to cyclists and cycle friendly politics.  About 750,000 of the 1.2 million cyclists in NZ, are voters (That’s a quarter of all voters.)  And CAN is now encouraging them all to cycle to their polling booths on Saturday:

It notes:

Most journeys are very short (1/3 under 2km, 2/3 under 6km), so most of the demand for more roading comes from trips which could be cycled. Providing for cycling is far cheaper than building major new roads.

Can’s monthly newsletter also has some good links on cycling:

University of New South Wales Science Faculty

Local and international research reveals that as cycling participation increases, a cyclist is far less likely to collide with a motor vehicle or suffer injury and death - and what’s true for cyclists is also true for pedestrians. And it’s not simply because there are fewer cars on the roads, but because motorists seem to change their behaviour and drive more safely when they see more cyclists and pedestrians around.

Copenhagen city planners are take cycling into the cyber-age with a new electronic positioning application

“We have developed a Facebook application called ‘I crossed your path,’ which creates a social network for cyclists, allowing them to link up with people they may have ridden past during the day and potentially establish new connections,”

And 28 Reasons to Bike including No 2: It makes you wealthier:

In fact, some new research shows that high and increasing levels of car dependence actually harms an economy. In a report to the World Bank, researchers from the Institute for Science and Technology Policy (ISTP) in Perth, Australia showed that there are “diseconomies” associated with car use. Auto dependence can drain an economy of its wealth…

Here’s one competitor’s account:

Kenny Chia, a competitor, saw the accident and described the ute driver as impatient. “We could hear an angry horn coming from behind us as we were riding - then the white ute came flying past.”

Chia said the cyclists, who were crossing Kuaotunu Hill north of Whitianga, then realised a milk tanker was coming in the opposite direction.

“The ute was going faster to pass the bikes before the tanker got too close. Near the front, a couple of guys touched wheels and then there was a 10-bike pile-up.

“The injured guy got pushed into the tanker’s moving wheels and then bounced high into the air and did a 180-degree flip. He then hit the ground. He was probably about 2m in front of me, it wasn’t a good sight.

and another:

Competitor Eddie Rosser, 31, of Auckland, was also present and called an ambulance. “The ute carried on and cut in front of the bunch, which had a concertina effect on the riders. The ute… should not have been overtaking us on a blind corner.”

But here’s how the police described the ute’s actions that appeared to lead to a 10 cycle pile up by passing on a blind corner:

Inspector Earle McIntosh said police had found and spoken to the driver of the white ute. Although there were issues concerning the ute, it had passed the cyclists by the time the crash happened.

“The cyclist made an evasive action to avoid other cyclists, not the ute,” McIntosh said. “The cyclists were using the road as if they owned it and came round a blind corner and met a milk tanker.”

I thought they did own the road?  At least they owned it as much as milk tankers and impatient white utes? As Bike NZ argues in the article we now need new road rules that protect cyclists by making the dominant vehicle liable for accidents. Such laws are commonplace in Europe and have played an important roll making our roads safer for cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers alike.

We are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.

The article continues on to list the impact on bats, bugs, birds, turtles and of course frogs.  As you would expect though it’s the sort of problem we can easily resolve.  The article notes that:

Simple changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilled into the atmosphere and, often, immediate energy savings.

Apart from the frogs the species that you would expect us to know more about the effect of light pollution upon is of course humans.  But we are only just beginning to unravel that story:

Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.

For the past century or so, we’ve been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body’s sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.

Although when we consider design standards to address issues of this nature it is normally slated as a nanny state invasion of our right to have our biological wellbeing and circadian balance altered without us knowing.

“I wonder if we never had helmets what our cycle population might be … I’m not advocating getting rid of helmets, I’m just saying I wonder what the social effect of helmets has been,”

is interesting but basically irrelevant to the important debate about promoting cycling in New Zealand.  I’ve biked in Europe without a cycle helmet and in New Zealand with one.  But that is not the noticeable safety difference between the two places. The difference is the way some parts of Europe see cycling as an integral part of their transport system rather than something to be squeezed in between footpaths and cars.  Helmets undoubtedly save people’s lives when they are involved in a crash with a car.

But our energy should actually be focused on changing our roads and pathways so that there are far less opportunities for cars to crash into cyclists. That means investing in modern bike lanes (rather than just painting a white line on an already crowded road), as well as public transport and urban design that integrates with cycling.  Those are the sort of changes that are going to get more people on the road, and more importantly more people on the road safely, than changing cycle helmet laws.

According to the website the film starts from the premise that:

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what’s wrong with our malnourished bodies, it’s no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide ‘Sickness Industry’ and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.

This, in brief, is the bad news: The food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before.

And the solution is breathtakingly simple:

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine…. the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

As well as some detailed policy prescriptions Pollan suggests symbolic gesture:

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: Tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

I’d love to see a bed of kumara growing out the front of the Beehive too.