KEY POINTS:
What are you doing personally to make a difference?
I've shifted to using the bus most of the time. I'm lucky I live in town and can. I work for better environmental policy and practice both via my work as an educator and through voluntary work in the Environment and Conservation Organisations, ECO (www.eco.org.nz).
I have travelled less by air than I might have otherwise done. I avoid high energy products like aluminium cans and products where the environment is damaged in producing them, like bottom-trawled fish (eg, orange roughy) and products with palm oil in them (since these palms are displacing tropical forests).
I don't buy tropical rainforest timber products. I don't burn coal. I've got curtains and insulation in the ceiling. I take care when I do travel to avoid moving seeds and insects so I don't help invasive species move around.
What more could you do?
I could still use the bus more or walk more, use the train not aeroplanes or drive (within NZ); print fewer documents; install a solar water heater; improve insulation under the house.
I could plant more trees. I have plans to install a cleaner burning wood burner.
What is your biggest environmental sin?
Flying.
Global Warming - Man or Nature?
It is climate destabilisation, not just warming. The evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the thousands of scientists who contribute to it, and lots of other science is overwhelmingly that it is due to human-generated greenhouse gas emissions (including agriculture).
It is plain that we must get busy reducing our emissions very substantially and that the sooner we start, the easier and cheaper it will be to reduce enough to limit the amount of serious harm from global warming and climate and ice cap destabilisation.
We can also get busy with temporary sinks by planting trees, but we've got to make sure these are not invasive species and that we don't plant them where there are native ecosystems.
