Sold my last pair of 'Iris' sandals today. They have been a style for all ages providing all those aspects I always looked for in a shoe style. Comfort, looks, room for colour, individuality and last but not least profit. These filled the bill.

It has been some time since I last posted. I've been busy developing my new work time, the making of leather handbags. Loving it but it ain't easy. I see that my Green Beacon Project idea has been tapped by a few people, not many, but it has been noticable that in New Zealand here a well known and wealthy ex-fund manager come newby on the Conservation Block has begun to talk about the gradual removal of all domestic and wild cats from our islands along with other mammal predators of course. (The cats have been a bit of a pinch for him as cat owners nationwide jumped up and down with indignation.) Gareth Morgan is the name of the money man and he has begun to speak of something I coined a while back called Nature Capital and the need to estimate this and get it onto the consolidated accounts of each Nation on Planet Earth. As Nature is degraded so that number drops and the budgetary figures change there-by highlighting the rapidly declining virgin old Earth, or conversely as that Natural World is enhanced it is added to the Capital side of the accounts. These are just ideas but all through the ages ideas have been powerful so in my tiny way I'm putting them out there. In New Zealand our current push is for the rivers to once again to be mostly swimable as many no longer are in parts (our Government currently wants them wadeable which when I first heard it I thought was a clever joke but sadly no). The problem is intensive dairying, a hugely profitable enterprise, that needs to start thinking about Nature Capital fast, to start fencing rivers and streams to keep animals out and to learn pasture management that enhances Nature Capital. New Zealand was once the Land of Birds, only a few small reptiles and a couple of tiny bats that weren't birds. There were insects of course but birds were king. The ocean prevented mammals getting here. Some birds were from the Ancient Southern Continent of Gondwanaland but many arrived by wing and water and evolved in their new environment. Imagine the forest when the first Polynesians got here, giant flightless Moa of gigantic size, a similarly gigantic Eagle that preyed upon them, many, many flightless birds including different types of the nocturnal Kiwi and a giant flightless parrot the Kakapo. Imagine the noise. But of course the new human arrivals bit the apple of Nature and that Virgin World of old Aeotearoa began to face a new reality. The sad thing for Earth is that this occurred only 800 years or so ago, every other significant piece of land had been populated by humans except here. What a wonder it must have been, lying in the far Southern Pacific unknown to people, a mass of forest and grassland trilling with the sound of bird call.

The Green Beacon Project. See "From Plunder To Wonder In 100yrs blog.

Virgin New Zealand. From plunder to Wonder in 100 years.

What I would love to see begin. How about you? New Zealand makes a decision to begin investing in a new direction, giving the nation a goal and, with time, unity. Invest $100M per year from now until the end of the next century in the growth and development of our forest, a total of $10B in today's money, small bikkies over a century. My feeling is that as the project proceeded momentum would gather. We would be the great-grandmothers and fathers of a truly 22nd century wonder. My idea is to use mostly volunteer labour, invite international people to NZ to help, give them ownership too of a new world. Start cleaning up existing forested areas, but more importantly start developing new ones and enlarging the 'islands' of forest that exist now on the mainland to give visible proof of action. The birds, the ferns and the forest take over and we live off it's life through tourism, education, medical developements and so on. The final goal is a nation that devotes land to feeding itself, housing itself, transporting itself etc. Export ceases to be agriculturally based. Gradually business would change and adapt just as it has over the last 100 years and gradually our lives would adapt just as they have over the last 100 years. Dreams come from small beginnings, starting this dream would cost us a little but lose us nothing, beginning this road is the hardest part, driving over it as the years peal by would be easy, and the little ones will look back at those old pictures in their school books with wonder, and love, for those old people.

I've been mucking arround using my blog as a draft if you like of a short story idea. It's pretty messy at present but a bit of rewritting might help in time. I hope so. Never done anything like it before. The idea came to me after an epileptic seizure some years ago, a space where often creative bursts have seemed to have taken place. I'm good these days, fingers crossed, but the memory of that story sticks and have decided to do something with it. Have a bit of travel in New Zealand to do to research aspects and landscapes. Maybe I'll post some pics.

The Big Tomato

All red on the vine the big tomato dominated all, all the green, all the branch, all the plant, but most of all  other tomatos. It stole their sap as it grew and sucked their juice until I put it in my stew.

Where to from here?

'Choke, choke, gimme a poke', the card player ordered the dealer roughly as he slid two cards forward. 'Zha, zha, thank-you ta', he burbled on receiving them and slipping them into his hand. 'Whew', I said quietly to myself, 'where do these guys get of on this nonsense, sweeping back my hair, watching and shaking my head. The player at that instant laid down his cards, surveyed the rest at the small table and drew the $10,000 worth of chips toward himself grunting quietly to himself and then coughing loudly and deeply. At that instant my interest was piqued and that is the essence of our financial woes, wear a suit, stop coughing, burbling and grunting and there you go, draw $10,000,000 dollars worth of chips your way. Boom! Boom! No bears in sight...nec minit.