I'll be off the air for the next few weeks, right through until the end of January.
No - I haven't died and gone to Heaven. Instead, I'm over in Adelaide, Australia, living at my parents' house and dealing with a very old computer and internet hookup.
With this setup, access to them newfangled things like blogs is somewhat less than easy!
I've left my husband back in New Zealand, and my friends, along with my beautiful little laptop (*sniff*), and am missing all three desperately.
But the upshot is that, although I have the kids over here, I won't be posting until I'm back in New Zealand, and powered by Apple once again.
Please have a wonderful Christmas and New Year, everyone! I look forward to being back online in 2010 - with bells on!
Merry Christmas!
--
Cluttercut - Be the change
Friday, 25 December 2009
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Home - sweet, sweet home!
After over 18 months of house-hunting, we've bought a home!
And it is beautiful.
The home is a cottage-style house, twenty years old, on three acres of land, fifteen minutes from Dunedin.
The house isn't large, but it suits us. Everything is large enough but not too big. There's lots of fruit and nut trees, plenty of room for the kids to run around - and sheep and chickens!
So if you've been wondering why everything has been quiet here at Cluttercut, now you know!
Home, sweet home. I can't wait to move in!
--
Cluttercut - Be the change
And it is beautiful.
The home is a cottage-style house, twenty years old, on three acres of land, fifteen minutes from Dunedin.
The house isn't large, but it suits us. Everything is large enough but not too big. There's lots of fruit and nut trees, plenty of room for the kids to run around - and sheep and chickens!
So if you've been wondering why everything has been quiet here at Cluttercut, now you know!
Home, sweet home. I can't wait to move in!
--
Cluttercut - Be the change
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Racism and population growth: Copenhagen climate summit
As part of its coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, the UK telegraph posted an article about population growth.
The article named population growth "the issue accused of causing driving climate change that no one at the Copenhagen climate summit dares to talk about."
Attached to the article was this photo:
And it made my blood boil.
I'll tell you why.
Although population growth certainly is a key issue of resource management, equity, and wellbeing for people across the globe - as well as being a critical issue we must address in order to control runaway climate change - I am heartily sick and tired of racism in journalism.
You see, I'd be pretty willing to bet that if you pooled the resource use of every one of the struggling souls in this photograph, and compared it to, say, a typical white, two car family in western society with only two or three children, the white family would use far more resources, even though it has far fewer people.
And that's the clincher.
Resource use is the real issue - not numbers
I consider our family to be pretty heavy "greenies". We eat vegetarian, we recycle, we grow food, we track our resource use and deliberately choose environmentally sustainable and local options as a preference. On earth footprint quizzes, we inevitably have the lowest footprint of pretty much anyone we know.
Yet still my two kids would probably use a lot more resources than the children in that photograph. When was the last time any of them went out for dinner? Drove in a car? Ate a chocolate bar? Had new clothes? Was given a toy for their birthday?
As a mother, the inequity of the situation angers me. And the audacity of the journalist in using such an image of poverty to externalize the issue of population growth, instead of leading it right home - where it belongs, and should be dealt with - is beyond shameful.
This underlines the problem. By posting photographs of people we in the West so readily identify as other, we identify the population problem as belonging to someone else, not to us.
Population growth, as the caption in the article underneath the photo I'm talking about says, is "especially in developing nations".
In other words, we don't need to bother about it. Just keep on using those re-usable shopping bags and screw in a compact lightglobe or two, and that's about all we need to bother with! It's not up to us to actually limit our family size!
We can keep on buying our kids plastic crap, keep on driving our cars, keep on eating our burgers. We're not the ones with the problem. It's all their fault!
Global heating is OUR problem - as is racism!
The Copenhagen climate summit is interesting reading. But sometimes it is easy to forget that this is our lives and futures that are being debated - not someone else's.
Thus far, we humans have done a pretty piss weak effort when it comes to dealing with our atrocities. While I sit here pondering the increasing size of my rear end, others in the world watch their babies starve. It's all wrong and it's all horrific and, in most cases, it is also unnecessary.
We've done a crap job at dealing with racism. There are still huge inequities in both Australia and New Zealand for our minority indigenous populations, and we are not alone in this - other countries that were colonized also have records that are less than perfect.
Time to point the finger at ourselves
Population growth is not someone else's problem. It is ours. Depending on our resource use, even one child can be unsustainable, and that's what this article - and those who would point the finger at poverty-stricken third world families - miss completely.
We all need to change our ways. All of us. We need to manage our numbers and our resources wisely and well, and consider all members of the human community as equals and as brothers and sisters.
Because humanity now faces the greatest challenge that we have ever faced. And if we do not learn to work with the earth, and with each other - with respect, and love, and thoughtfulness - not only may we not deal effectively with climate change.
We may not actually deserve to.
--
Cluttercut - Be the change
The article named population growth "the issue accused of causing driving climate change that no one at the Copenhagen climate summit dares to talk about."
Attached to the article was this photo:
And it made my blood boil.
I'll tell you why.
Although population growth certainly is a key issue of resource management, equity, and wellbeing for people across the globe - as well as being a critical issue we must address in order to control runaway climate change - I am heartily sick and tired of racism in journalism.
You see, I'd be pretty willing to bet that if you pooled the resource use of every one of the struggling souls in this photograph, and compared it to, say, a typical white, two car family in western society with only two or three children, the white family would use far more resources, even though it has far fewer people.
And that's the clincher.
Resource use is the real issue - not numbers
I consider our family to be pretty heavy "greenies". We eat vegetarian, we recycle, we grow food, we track our resource use and deliberately choose environmentally sustainable and local options as a preference. On earth footprint quizzes, we inevitably have the lowest footprint of pretty much anyone we know.
Yet still my two kids would probably use a lot more resources than the children in that photograph. When was the last time any of them went out for dinner? Drove in a car? Ate a chocolate bar? Had new clothes? Was given a toy for their birthday?
As a mother, the inequity of the situation angers me. And the audacity of the journalist in using such an image of poverty to externalize the issue of population growth, instead of leading it right home - where it belongs, and should be dealt with - is beyond shameful.
This underlines the problem. By posting photographs of people we in the West so readily identify as other, we identify the population problem as belonging to someone else, not to us.
Population growth, as the caption in the article underneath the photo I'm talking about says, is "especially in developing nations".
In other words, we don't need to bother about it. Just keep on using those re-usable shopping bags and screw in a compact lightglobe or two, and that's about all we need to bother with! It's not up to us to actually limit our family size!
We can keep on buying our kids plastic crap, keep on driving our cars, keep on eating our burgers. We're not the ones with the problem. It's all their fault!
Global heating is OUR problem - as is racism!
The Copenhagen climate summit is interesting reading. But sometimes it is easy to forget that this is our lives and futures that are being debated - not someone else's.
Thus far, we humans have done a pretty piss weak effort when it comes to dealing with our atrocities. While I sit here pondering the increasing size of my rear end, others in the world watch their babies starve. It's all wrong and it's all horrific and, in most cases, it is also unnecessary.
We've done a crap job at dealing with racism. There are still huge inequities in both Australia and New Zealand for our minority indigenous populations, and we are not alone in this - other countries that were colonized also have records that are less than perfect.
Time to point the finger at ourselves
Population growth is not someone else's problem. It is ours. Depending on our resource use, even one child can be unsustainable, and that's what this article - and those who would point the finger at poverty-stricken third world families - miss completely.
We all need to change our ways. All of us. We need to manage our numbers and our resources wisely and well, and consider all members of the human community as equals and as brothers and sisters.
Because humanity now faces the greatest challenge that we have ever faced. And if we do not learn to work with the earth, and with each other - with respect, and love, and thoughtfulness - not only may we not deal effectively with climate change.
We may not actually deserve to.
--
Cluttercut - Be the change
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