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.