Natural solutions

I’ve had nature on my mind this year. That’s hardly surprising, as I’ve just published a book about it, along with my good friend Trish Whillans, who took the rose photo you see here. Our book is called The Answer: How Nature Can Help You When Life Seems Too Hard (for more pop over to my website, www.lindseydawson.com).
The Answer is not about global warming, or climate change, or carbon footprints, or compost, or recycling. Instead it’s a little book with a simple storyline that imagines a conversation between ourselves and the natural world. It’s based on the notion that getting in amongst the green, slushy, gritty, tangled stuff that makes up the wild world can do us good - because nature can tell us things.
It took a Malaysian conservationist called Osman to remind me of that last year. I was staying at the Andaman Hotel on Langkawi Island. It offers an early morning nature walk. Always a sucker for such delights, I turned up the next morning and off we went into the humid dawn.
Osman was a quiet, still sort of guy. Never raised his voice above a murmur. But his eyes were sharp and alert. To everything. “You might like to step back,” he suggested at one point, indicating our feet.
A broad, seething ribbon of large ants was surging close to our toes on the jungle path, fast and urgent as a black river swollen after rain. “They have a very painful bite,” Osman mildly observed.
As we strolled with him, he pointed out amazing birds, like the racquet-tailed drongo, and all manner of plants, both healing and toxic. Many had steely barbs.
“But nature always has a solution,” he pointed out. “If there’s a plant that can hurt or give you a rash, you can guarantee that there’ll be another plant growing nearby that can fix the hurt. Problem? Solution. Problem? Solution. That’s how nature works.”
I liked that. It set me wondering whether there was a message in there for me too. As in, does nature in more temperature climates, like where I live, have solutions for different sorts of problems – such as fixing emotional woes? And decided that of course it does. I know all too well that if I’m feeling itchy with frustration or mad as a snake, a walk on a forest track always sorts me out.
As Trish kept on taking her photos and we were putting the book together, I had my ears open for ways in which others were seeing (or not seeing) the nature of nature all around them.
I did a wonderful waka tour down the Whanganui River in April and listened to our guide, Niko Tangaroa, as he talked about leaving his structured life as an engineer in Australia to return home and set up a business where he could share the river’s delights with others. With a big grin, he said, “Every morning when I get out on the river, I look up at the sky and say, “Thank you, Ranginui [sky father], for my new workshop!”’
By contrast, in July I had a short, startling encounter next to a rose bush in a French garden with a young American woman. She was so unaware of nature that her only connection with its smells was via the cosmetic industry. I pointed out a pink bloom to her because it had the most beautiful fragrance. “Mmm,” she sighed. That’s so beautiful! It’s just like rose oil. So this is a rose, huh?”.
Then in Fiji, in September, I saw such a warping of nature that it chilled my heart. I was in a bus with friends as we drove through a valley filled with emerald jungle. But the tree profiles were strangely lumpy. The leaves were a densely packed, uniform, brilliant green. We came to realise we were looking not at the rich variety of specimens that should have been there, but at a vast leafy blanket that was smothering miles of native forest under a thick duvet of curling vines . “What is that?” we asked. “Killer vine!” spat a local man. “The Americans brought it here during the war to use as camouflage. Now it is everywhere.” It can overcome the tallest trees and nothing can stop its spread.
Like most pest introductions, the kudzu invation started innocently enough. Japanese gardeners brought it to a Philadelphia garden expo in 1876. Americans loved it. They wanted it for their gardens, too. And now it’s strangling huge areas of the south-eastern United States, too. No wonder they knew it would be good for concealing soldiers in the tropics. Kudzu is very polite in Japan as winter frosts knock it back every year. But deprived of cold it becomes a maniac, growing by as much as a foot per day.
It’s a problem. Out of control. Just like so much of the stuff going on in our lives. But I remember wise Osman and his quiet observation : Problem. Solution. Problem. Solution.
Our little book can’t stop kudzu, but in its small way it might untie a few other knots in modern life.

Gas-guzzling blues

I’ve been trying to remember the words of an old advertising jingle.
Forever rattling out of the radio when I was a kid, it was a
petrol-pushing song for a company called Europa, then “the only
New Zealand oil company”.

After much Googling I finally found it:
“Clean burning Europa,
The petrol with pep.
Keeps your engine sweeter,
Makes your engine step.
All along the way,
Wise motorists say,
‘It’s clean-burning Europa for me’!”

It was sung by a very jolly, English-sounding men’s chorus, with a warbling trumpet at beginning and end.

I was puzzled by the engine-step reference in line four, but my brother (full of knowledge of the art and history of advertising) reminds me that in those days, everyone loved “stepping on it” as drivers strove to get more speed. And we loved cars that looked huge and sassy, like the Chevvy here.

Now that we can go plenty fast enough, we’re more interested in economy. And yet we’re still not thinking straight about oil and how much we need it.

It seems nobody (in New Zealand) is talking about the impending “peak oil” crisis. For a global view, mosey on over to http://www.theoildrum.com/, which recently featured a prediction by top Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens that oil, currently bobbing around at $US85 or so per barrel, will certainly rise to $100 sometime soon. If not this year, then certainly in 2008.
But blithely we go on as if everything’s fine, because we can’t think what else to do. We’ve created the business world the way it is, and only know how to make it hum by keeping on growing. Auckland airport, for instance, is busily investing millions in a new runway. And yet people with foresight, all over the planet, are saying that expensive plans for new airports and motorways and the developments of far-flung towns and suburbs requiring long commutes are pretty much doomed in the long term.

Why? Because oil, already at record highs, is never going to be cheap again. The world’s major oil fields are beginning to suck dry right at the time when consumption is going up and up and up. We, in the west’s developed nations, became completely oil-dependent in the 20th century, to the point where our lives are unthinkable without the stuff. And now China and India, the world’s new power economies, understandably want their turn.

Energy experts are saying we’re in for rough times as we adjust to this new reality. Australians are beginning to think about it. Just last month a headline in the Brisbane Courier Mail screamed: “It’s not Doomsday yet, but if we don’t act now it soon will be.”

The bottom line, wrote journalist Paul Syret is that “that the world’s oil production is close to peaking, with demand for the product soon to outstrip supply.”

The Queensland government has just produced a report following on from research by US energy analyst Robert Hirsch. He concluded two years ago that "as peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented".

Some pessimists reckon we’ll be in crisis very soon: optimists think the peak won’t hit hard until about 2025. But they all think it will hit.

Syret points out, “It will mean a dramatic change of life as we know it, as cheap fuel becomes a distant memory and supply of what is available is hotly contested.”

Some Griffith University wonks recently looked at which Queensland areas would be hardest hit by rising oil prices and flagged outlying urban areas and growth corridors such as Caboolture and Ipswich on Brisbane’s edge.

I live in a growth corridor, too. Our house is about 50km from most of my work activities and social life. I drive back and forth several times a week. My fuel bill is climbing and climbing. Maybe, at some stage, we’ll decide it would be smart to move closer to town. But by then, our house’s location might be a real liability in resale terms. Mmm. How will we know to pick the right time?

One of the Queensland report’s authors described the looming problem as a “double whammy, with higher fuel prices pushing up not just transport, but food prices and everything else as well. He argues that the government must “stop making things worse” with car-dependent suburbs, and start embarking on a “massive investment in outer suburban public transport services”.

There’s scant evidence that anyone in Wellington is thinking this way, even though New Zealand, so very far away from the world’s refineries, is even more vulnerable than Australia.
But a different future is so unimaginable that we all carry on, business as usual, as if cheapish oil will be here for ever.

The irony is that while arguments rage about global warming and the need to reduce carbon emissions, oil is getting scarcer all the time. Maybe that’s how the problem will get fixed – for waning oil flows, surely, will produce lower emissions. But if the supply problem does get really serious, our carbon footprints will pale into insignificance compared with the challenge of feeding and housing ourselves.

Just really cheer you up, the peak-oil people also point out that mass tourism is unlikely to last. When air fares rocket, all those nifty travel packages will be but a memory. So if you’re thinking about taking yourself off on (maybe your last) cheap world trip, right now could be a damn good time.

Blasts from the past

BACK IN THE DAY

I'm doing a presentation in a few weeks to a group of car retailers and financiers. Because I've written a book about the trials and the terrific bits of being middle-aged, and edit a magazine for that same group of consumers, I quite often get asked to talk about us quaint old geezers. Businesses know that the 50-plus crowd is one that they should be marketing to, because the baby boomers is roaring along in fine style, some just starting to retire and with more money and time than most other people. But for the young, they're still old fogies.



I've had fun today browsing through some magazines from my archives, looking for ancient ads that I used to enjoy putting in the pages of Next magazine. The idea was to show people how much things have changed over years. My god, have they ever.

The ad here dates from the 1950s (when the baby boomers were babies), when only very very rich people flew anywhere, and when Pan Am still existed, and Lockerbie hadn't happened (let alone 9/11) and it took days to fly to Europe and maybe jet-lag hadn't even been invented, let alone economy class syndrome. It took so long to get anywhere that the plane would land and the crew and the passeners would all fall asleep, an event no doubt preceded by a darn good dinner and a martini or two, and then they'd all set forth again, fresh and rested, the next morning.

Back then (though for some reason or other, people are starting to say 'back in the day' now - why is that?) the dear old blunt-nosed Strato Clipper could fly 4000 miles at a stretch, which probably sounded a lot to people who'd only ever chugged along on ships before then. But they did do it in style. The fine print says the de luxe flights ("President service", if you please) featured "superb hot meals, complimentary champagne and choice of individual sleeping accommodation". Mmm. Were it not for the roar of all those propellors, it might have been a nice way to go.