Annihilation

I’ve done it again. I’ve stumbled on to a book with a premise that really intrigues me and then leaves me floundering with more questions than answers. This drives me crazy. Other people love this book. I love answers. Fully committed though, I launched myself upon the movie when it turned up on Netflix.

More confusion as the writers took another turn with the story. My frustration now consumes me, but at least there was some resolution in the movie. But what is this story that managed to evoke such a range of emotions? Read on…

Annihilation is the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s  Southern Reach trilogy. Southern Reach has control of Area X. This is an area of land that has apparently inexplicable changes happening to the environment, people and animals that live or have lived within it. Southern Reach has been sending teams into Area X for 30 years and up to this point, there has been a very high failure rate. One by one the teams either go crazy, kill themselves or return a shell of their former selves. Nothing stays untouched by the environment inside Area X. I say ‘inside’ but in reality there is no visible barrier that separates the real world and the one that is evolving inside Area X.

Southern Reach have decided that for their 12th mission it is time to send forth an all-female team consisting of an anthropologist, a psychologist, a surveyor and a biologist. They remain nameless for the duration and the chasm that exists between each of them is palpable and one wonders if it is deliberate. The very experiences that should bring them together are ripping them further apart due to an underlying distrust. Encounters with the inexplicable and alien continues the downward spiral as they search for answers.

Then my mind wanders and I can’t help but wonder, “Only 12 expeditions in 30 years?” That doesn’t sound quite right to me. History dictates that in our desperate need to find reason where there is none, we would have bombarded the area with specialists and most of all, military. Certainly not fluffed around so that there was more than 2 years between missions while Area X steadily grows larger! And the questions continue.

Hopefully you do better than me in your search for answers. Maybe you don’t need any and are happy to just immerse yourself in the possibilities alone. More than likely I gave up far too easily and just need to get stuck into VanderMeer’s next two books in the Southern Reach series, Authority and Acceptance and keep searching for those elusive answers.

 

Alternatively try something completely different, if you gave up like I did:

 

Be an Eco-Champ for Science Week

Start championing the environment. Become an Eco Champ –  here’s how:

This year’s Primary Science Week (14-18 May) is where the action is. Have a look to see how you can take part.

• Find something that is important to your school
• Record observations like the number of pieces of litter picked up on the beach, how many grams of soft plastic collected at school, the number of footprints on tunnel traps, chew marks on cards, observe number of birds at the local park or collect weed seeds off socks and count them.
• Collect and record data over time and analyse it.
• Discuss the changes you observed and suggest how you could find solutions.
• Look at what happened after you made changes, what happened before and after.
• Communicate what you did.

Take a look at our Science Fairs page and books for more information on getting scientrific!

Gardening

So why not pick a project you want to champion and get stuck in cleaning up the environment? Why not start a worm farm or compost heap at school for all those apple cores from your lunch boxes then use all that lovely compost to start a school vegetable garden? Be part of Sustainable Christchurch at home, in school or out in the community.

Become an environmentally friendly school with the help of Enviroschools and see what’s growing near you by visiting a community garden.

Learn how to grow your own food in school and start a school garden. There are lots of resources to help take a look at:

• Edible Christchurch
• Create An Outdoor Learning Garden Guide   [PDF, 2GB]

• Kids Edible Gardens Guide

• Books for children about gardening and compost
• Learn how to compost your organic waste
  • worm composting [PDF, 3.1 MB]
  • composting [PDF, 2.6 MB].

Recycling

Clean up rubbish at your school beach or local park or start a recycling scheme at your school or find out more about soft plastics recycling  Check out information on tackling litter and resources for school  from  Keep New Zealand beautiful. Check out how the Recycling plant (Material Recovery Facility) works and how to recycle right with these videos:

• Recycling plant (Materials Recovery Facility) (video)
• Adam and Eve sort recycling (video)
• Are you recycling right? (video)

Find out all about recycling  and the 4R’s Reduce Reuse Recycle and Rebuy in these resources:

• Many Answers: recycling entry
• EEK! Our Earth – What a Waste.
• Recycling Children’s Books

Eco-pests

Learn about what pests visit your school or park by making a tracking tunnel and chew cards. Find out how you can remove them from your school and community from Predator Free New Zealand. 

• Making a tracking tunnel activity notes from Science Learning Hub
• Are there rats in your garden? (pdf)

Become a weedbuster by cleaning up a local beach piece of bush or participate in the restoration of a local stream. Take a look at what to plant streamside in this handy booklet on what to plant produced by Christchurch City Council.

More information

• Science Learning Hub has great information and ideas on how to be an Eco-Champion and the importance of conservation and biodiversity.
• Many Answers Conservation (New Zealand)
• Environmental Books for Children
• Explore environmental topics with National Geographic KiDs

Does your school already do a lot? Then share what you have done by making a poster, infographic, display or video.

Tell us what you are doing for National Primary Science Week. We’d love to hear.

Earth Day, Every Day for Canterbury Kids

Love the Earth? So do we! Earth Day is celebrated globally on 22 April each year and Christchurch City Libraries is kicking off an Earth Smart programme for kids this April school holidays as part of the Christchurch City Council’s commitment to sustainability and climate change initiatives. The following initiatives, programmes and resources are a great introduction to ‘environmental literacy’ for our tamariki, the future guardians of the Earth.

Earth Smart – school holiday programmes 

A school holiday programme with an emphasis on sustainability and recycling. Children explore environmental issues with a focus on connecting to the planet around them using books, interactive activities, digital media and craft.

• Thursday 19th April 10:30-12:00 at New Brighton Library (bookings required)
• Thursday 26th April 10:30-12:00 at Upper Riccarton Library bookings required)

If you miss these sessions, look out for more later in the year.

Eco-conscious Books and Resources for Kids

Borrowing from the library is the ultimate in recycling – check out these eco-friendly reads!

Environmental Picture Books 
These picture books and narrative non-fiction books contain valuable messages about the environment, pollution, recycling, the importance of trees, water as a resource, sustainability and saving the Earth. These environmentally-friendly themed resources include eBooks and apps and New Zealand content.

Non-Fiction Environmental Children’s Books
A selection of non-fiction informational text and how-to guides for kids on related topics around recycling, climate changing, caring for the earth, sustainability, composting and water resources. Includes craft activities.

Every little bit helps… What can you do in Canterbury?

Join the Kiwi Conservation Club for kids and participate in activities with the local branch in Canterbury.

Recycle Right!

Watch two Christchurch kids show us how to ‘recycle right’ !

When you toss your plastic bottles and containers into the recycling bin, are you unintentionally doing more harm than good? Christchurch people are great at recycling but a few common mistakes are causing issues at the city’s recycling plant. See how to make it easier for council to recycle.

Note sure which bin something goes in? You can download the Christchurch City Libraries Wheels Bin App to check, for iOS and Android devices.

Car share with Christchurch City Council’s electric Yoogo cars

Prime Minister Jacinda Arden and Lianne Dalziel recently launched the Christchurch City Council’s co-shared fleet of electric cars operated by Yoogo. The public can sign up to borrow these cars too!

Water: Alok Jha – WORD Christchurch

How often do you think about water? Every now and again when you suspect the hot water cylinder might not manage another dishwasher load? Occasionally when you note how much a bottle of it costs at the dairy?

Alok Jha (image supplied)

Journalist (and ITV science correspondent) Alok Jha suggests that we should all be paying a bit more attention to this miraculous and yet thoroughly prosaic substance. After all our planet is “a blob of water with a few dry patches”. It’s one of the most important things on our planet and all life relies on it. Worth more than a passing thought, once in a while, surely?

In order to turn us to his way of thinking he provides us with an background on the science of water. Had any of us considered, for instance, how the water on our planet actually got here?

I’m someone who considers herself to have a good imagination but I’d honestly never wondered this. Water just is. I think I’d assumed it had always just been here, but water is actually younger than our planet.

It started in space in clouds of dust and gas from stars that have gone supernova. This is where our oxygen comes from. The hydrogen part of the equation originates with the Big Bang. Some molecules bash together with some grains of cosmic detritus and then some more and some more and if you follow that chain of events long enough you end up with chunks of ice – asteroids and comets that about 4 billion years ago bombarded our planet (only for about 500 million years – just a passing storm) and resulted in all the surface water we have on planet Earth. So next time you take a dip in the ocean or drink a glass of water, consider that that stuff used to be hurtling, frozen, through space.

Jha also pointed out some really interesting qualities that water has. Firstly that in solid form it floats on its liquid form. Hence icebergs. Most substances don’t behave this way. Usually the solid form is more dense and sinks. This is actually crucially important for life on Earth because if ice didn’t float then during an ice age all life would get killed off instead of some of it living on underneath the frozen surface where some liquid water remains.

The other important thing about water is surface tension. Water is sticky and loves sticking to itself too and this surface tension allows for certain biological processes, like a plant’s ability to, against the force of gravity, draw water upwards through very thin tubes, or the way our capillaries can transport our mostly watery blood around our bodies.

All these things we take for granted, most certainly at our peril.

Jha was at pains to point out that the quantity of water on our planet isn’t the issue. It’s essentially a closed system. The same amount of water moves through us, around the earth, into the atmosphere and so on. Rather it’s the quality at issue. Water that’s of the type that can sustain us is rather less common and becoming less so.

Polluting water is easy, unpolluting it? Well, that doesn’t happen much.

Jha’s talk involved things as varied as –

• Cute photos of antarctic penguins and seals (cynical manipulation via cute animal appeal openly admitted to)
• Official confirmation that drinking your own urine is “a bad idea”
• A stomach churning illustration of why Jha was so seasick on his Antarctic voyage (see the horizon line in the photo below)

Alok Jha illustrates how seasickness happens, Flickr File Reference: 2016-08-26-IMG_2477

But the main idea was that the only way for us to take better care of our water resources is for a larger number of us to actually be more aware of them, of how much water we use and how vital it is for our survival. For us to all just stop taking it for granted.

More WORD Christchurch

• WORD Christchurch website
• Our WORD Christchurch 2016 overview
• Our posts about WORD Christchurch 2016

 

To tree or not to tree – Arbor Day 5 June

Have you ever wondered what librarians do on their day off? Well sometimes, we like to go to bookshops. Crazy, I know, we’re around books at work every day – what do we want with books on our day off? I guess sometimes its nice to browse from the other side of the stacks — a bit like Hermione taking Muggle Studies to look at things from the wizarding point of view.

So the other day, when Mr K and I went into town to look at the newly re-opened Bridge of Remembrance, I couldn’t resist popping into the new Scorpio Books. The first book that caught my eye was Tidy by Emily Gravett. The wonderful peek-a-boo cover lured my into the forest (just like the lamppost lures Lucy into Narnia) where I met a badger named Pete who likes everything neat. This is a delightfully funny story about what happens when neatness is taken to the extreme. I loved the expressions on the animals’ faces, and their growing panic as Pete’s desperate attempts to keep the forest tidy start to go horribly wrong. I also love the way Gravett subtly introduces a conservation message. It’s definitely one of my latest favourite picture books.

Another latest favourite is As An Oak Tree Grows by G. Brian Karas. I took this one home to read to the Young Lad, because it’s by the same author as The Village Garage – which is one of his favourites – and he enjoyed it even more than I expected. This simple story starts with a young Native American boy planting an acorn, and continues on through the years as the tree grows and the world changes around it. The Young Lad really enjoyed the story, and was fascinated by the facts about oak trees in the back of the book. He also thoroughly enjoyed the activity sheet and poster, and especially enjoyed poring over the illustrations to see what he could find. No matter what I said to the contrary, he insisted that the tall ships in the harbour were pirate ships! Even when I pointed out that they had white sails, not black ones or red-and-white stripes like pirate ships should have, and that they didn’t have any Jolly Roger flags, he was quite sure they were pirates. Even so, the book prompted lots of discussion about history, types of transportation, and Progress, as well as trees.

After telling you about such tree-y additions to my Favourite Picture Books list, it seems only right to let you know about the Arbor Day events that are on this weekend.

• Port Hills Reserve Volunteer Day Saturday 4 June 1-3pm at Dry Bush. Meet at the Huntsbury Track entrance on Summit Rd
• Charlesworth Reserve Volunteer Day Sunday 5 June 2-4pm at Charlesworth Reserve. Meet at the Charlesworth Wetland Carpark, Charlesworth Street, Brookhaven.

For more information, read about Arbor Day on the CCC website.

As it happens, 5 June is World Environment Day as well as Arbor Day, so in honour of the occasion, I’ve put together a booklist of kids books about trees and the environment.

Maybe I’ll even join in myself and plant a tree on my day off!

Saving Kermie

September  8- 15 is Frog Week. It is a time to focus on the fortunes of frogs (pepeketua) who are important indicators of the health of our environment.

Professor Phil Bishop will be speaking in the Sydenham Room of South Library on Tuesday 10 September at 9.30am. Professor Bishop is a professor at the University of Otago and is leading the global frog conservation initiative in his position as co-chair of the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group. He will present a talk about saving frogs in New Zealand and overseas, accompanied with a box of live frogs!

I’m guessing these won’t include an Archey’s frog which is a New Zealand native species under extreme threat. Archey’s frog is ranked as the most important amphibian in the world under the Zoological Society of London’s Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) programme.

Our libraries have some great resources if you are interested in frogs.

A river runs through it

‘Eventide’:photo of an 1888 John Gibb painting of the river at Burwood. Original owned by the Parochial District of Burwood

Having spent most of my Christchurch life living east of the Square and close to the Avon River, I’m pretty passionate about the delights of those riverside suburbs like Richmond, Avonside, Dallington and out to New Brighton. The river has always been a source of beauty, fun, exercise and general place defining for my family. So I was pretty chuffed to see the folks at the Avon-Otakaro Network are organising a Spring River festival. I’d encourage people all over Christchurch to get in behind this. Take a trip across town and get involved in the programme.

Yes the roads are shocking (just go slowly) and you’ll see some pretty depressing sights, but the folks over the East side need your support. Check out local shops and spend some money there and visit three of our coolest  libraries – Parklands, Aranui and New Brighton. You can still walk and cycle along the river in many places, the beach is still the beach and the river, the Estuary and Travis Wetland still teem with birdlife. There is also The Breeze Walking Festival  from 29 September to 7 October which offers 22 walks for all fitness levels.

Eastern Christchurch and the river has always attracted interesting characters, like Professor Bickerton, and has been a happy hunting ground for local historians. Our own Richard Greenaway has explored the eastern suburbs in depth. A good example is his Requiem for a watering hole: The Bower Hotel. Another fascinating source of local history is Tim Baker from Aranui and you can’t go past Bruce Ansley’s Gods and little fishes for capturing the flavour of New Brighton.

Chandran Nair talks about Consumptionomics

It’s now a few weeks since we returned from the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and some of the sessions and speakers are still floating in and out of my rather erratic brain.  Chandran Nair’s session on Consumptionomics is one of the ‘stickiest’ ones …

Chandran Nair is a brave man.  He is very upfront about a few things: he is NOT an author, NOT a writer, NOT an economist, and he strenuously denies it when people suggest he might have a “greenies” interest in the environment. And when we don’t even get through the Chair’s introduction to the Michael King Memorial Lecture without a Shouty Man’s heckling from the balcony, he is serene and forthright about how very unpopular his message is.

To really understand the message, as with many non-fiction speakers, you need to read the book, and I thoroughly recommend finding it and doing just this.  In the meantime, however, here’s my attempt to summarise what will probably (for me at least) turn out to be 2012’s most unsettling and thought-provoking Festival session.  (So don’t go shooting the messenger!)

In essence, these are the main points:

• The current narrative of economics is from the West, and as such is heavily weighted towards Western ways of thinking – individualistic, consumer-driven, reliant on democratic models.
• Most of us have a “pedigree of denial”, and dwell within “a climate of lying and denying” (purposeful or not)
• The 2008-2009 crisis was the trigger: Asians were told that they were the new environmental and consumeristic ‘bad guys’ and that the responsible thing for them to do was to spend their way up and out of the crisis, but ALSO to use fewer resources while doing so – this is actually not possible.
• We are seeing the dying pangs of the US and EU as global superpowers, leading to the rise of Asia as world leaders
• BUT the painting of the 21st century as the “Asian century” is bad because it leads Asians to think that it is now “their turn” to have “all the things”, to “win at consumerism”, to have lots of stuff.
• For Nair himself, the challenge of coming from Asia means that his message had to get more and more extreme in order to be heard, and he also decided that he’d never have a big audience anyway, so it didn’t matter …
• His message is actually quite simple, if controversial: Bling is Out, and Less is More; Asia must reject the Western model (which promotes relentless consumerism, voodoo economics, and the constant ‘buy 1 get 1 free’ mantra); we need fewer human rights.  (You can see why his message might be seen as a little confrontational …)
• The only way for this to work is to follow traditional Asian societal models – Asians cannot live like Westerners.  They must embrace the “restrain and restrict” message of societies like Singapore, and (even more contentious a suggestion) China.

This slightly dizzying summary in no way illustrates the nature or ‘feel’ of the session, with its already-mentioned Shouty Dude, myriad of business suits interspersed with a fair sprinkling of more alternative-looking types, and a really very challenging message, but will hopefully inspire those with a socially- or economically-enquiring mind to explore further!

It’s all about stuff: Paul Gilding, the global economy, and the end of shopping

Paul Gilding’s session this afternoon on climate crisis and the global economy was by turns challenging, terrifying, depressing and invigorating, and certainly was a test of my speed-writing skills.  I have seven pages of closely written notes to condense into 300 words, so forgive me if I skim!

Chair Grant Redvers introduced him, and then Paul leaped straight in with the statement, “The earth is full”.  This was a rhetorical statement, he said, but is also literally true in terms of physics, chemistry and biology.  He utilised a ‘low-tech powerpoint presentation’ (aka: waving his hands around in a meaningful manner) to illustrate his point that the world economy is currently one and a half times bigger than the actual world, and that our ongoing focus on a growth economy is making this imbalance even greater.   By 2050, at current rates of growth, the problem will grow from 1.5 times capacity, to between 4 and 5 times.  This, he said, simply can’t happen – we literally cannot sustain those levels of growth.

Basically, we are currently living on a ‘credit card system’, both environmentally and economically:  living beyond our means, and borrowing from the future.  And not only have we max-ed out our own credit cards, we have done the same for our kids’ credit cards, and are now working on our grandkids’.

In further depressing news, he said that it was already too late to prevent long-term damage to the environment, but that we needed to acknowledge this and grieve, then get over it and get on with saving civilisation.

However, he said: All is not lost.  Using a brilliant analogy with England’s World War II experience, he stated his belief that we can and will get through, and shamelessly appropriated Churchill’s words by saying that when the crisis point actually arrives, we will do not what is best, but what is necessary.

There was a heap more along these lines, all riveting, and all challenging, and surprisingly positive somehow, and really there is no way I can do any of this message justice here, so I’m going to stop here, and just say, go find the book and read it, then come and find me and we can talk about it all at length!

Humble bookmark saves money, planet

Handy little things, bookmarks. Always popular.  You may think that all they do is save your place in a book – but the NZ Ecoexpo bookmark can help you do your bit to save the planet with two-for-one adult entry into this weekend’s event.

So get to a library before the weekend to get your bookmark – supplies will be limited. You can visit our sustainable living pages to help find some great reading too.

Along with all the stands and exhibitors at the Christchurch Convention Centre, there’s also a selection of films – including the visually stunning, totally non-verbal  Baraka.