A Honest Look Back

A fair question often gets raised whenever we talk about environmental stewardship in Aotearoa: how can Māori claim to value kaitiakitanga when early ancestors burned off vast tracts of native forest upon arriving here? It is a question we should answer with total honesty rather than defensiveness. Without getting caught up in exact numbers, our ancestors here and in other countries did clear forests, and that is undeniable.

One Era's Hero

When I was a teenager I read 'Mover of Men and Mountains', the autobiography of Robert LeTourneau, which was my Grandpa's book. Aside from pioneering many great engineering marvels, founding a technical college and successful businesses, he developed giant machines for clearing South American rainforests efficiently, and was considered a hero in his day, even when that book was published in the 1960s. As an environmentally aware teenager in the 1990s I was just flabbergasted. With the passage of time and new understanding of the importance of rainforests to the health of our planet and the indigenous people who lived there, one century's hero is another century's villain.

Connected Across the Oceans

Is David Seymour acting completely on his own, or is he just a loudspeaker for ideas being broadcast from the other side of the world? Let’s sit down and have a real honest talk about the political shifts happening in Wellington right now. We need to look closely at the ACT Party and see who is actually writing the tune they are playing.

In science, there is a famous concept called "deep entanglement." It describes how two separate things can be so tightly linked that whatever happens to one instantly changes the other, even if they are miles apart. We are seeing this exact type of connection in our politics today. The new laws hitting our shores, like the Treaty Principles Bill, didn't just appear out of nowhere. They have a history and a family tree that stretches far beyond our parliament.

The Money-Over-People Signal

The ideas pushed by the ACT Party aren't just random local thoughts. They are deeply tied to a global network of overseas planning groups and wealthy donors (like the Atlas Network). These groups push a very specific message: making money for the sake of money is the only thing that matters, completely ignoring human needs or the health of the earth.