Guardians or Looters?

I know We agree 2 billion is a safe number. Lets borrow some tools from America and China (might be easier getting them from Russia) to reduce the population to that. Hang on destroying the land at the same time is counter productive The above can not and is never ever intended as a viable solution. The world though will supply its own population controls as it chooses in the form of insect plagues incurable diseases super storms and the odd meteorite etc. One day soon our life of excess will be over and we will have only the choices adjust or be gone.

@geeves: aye indeed. @Philipw: "That's may be true to some extent, but it's too easy to be cynical. I think most of us just feel powerless and don't quite know what to do." I think you are acquainted with a better group of people than I am. Recycling initiatives I have established have in the past been sabotaged on a daily basis. I have learned to be very subtle and gentle to avoid alienating others with my initiatives e.g. if I fish a milk bottle out of the rubbish bin, I have to make sure that no one sees me doing this or they will think my recycling action is somehow a critique of what they did rather than simply ensuring the bottle goes into the recycle bin etc. etc. I don't see the workmates who swan off to Melbourne on a $99 ticket regularly to watch a show and shop being in the quandary you describe. It is too easy to be cynical indeed. I am now at the stage where I don't give a rat's arse about the future of the human race. We will get what we deserve and as far as the other species go the best outcome for them. However, I'll do my little bit and try to confine my damage to 5,000 tonnes of carbon/year which is about average for a NZer. For example I just found out that Naturalea and Puhoi are ultimately owned by 2 Asian firms who are big on Palm Oil production so their products are permanently off the shopping list. Fonterra has invested in Palm Oil processing too so that's Symbio and Piako out of bounds as well.

a good place to start is to not get sucked into advertising. usually showing people who are happy because they have the latest materialistic things... dont get sucked into fashion, its about forcing you to buy more regularly than you need to, you dont need friends who are going to judge you because of what you do or don't own and wear... business has a long way to go. there was an article recently about kathmandu cutting up a lot of their gear because they claimed it was defective. I doubt that, they were doing it at a clearance centre, i've been there and it's usually over stocked they get gear in weekly, theres no excuse for destroying gear with minor defects, theres no shortage of people who could use those items who can't afford them. young adults struggling to afford outdoor gear. manufactured goods will be more expensive in the future as the resources to make them dwindle esp if the population increases. recycling will then become more fashionable, there will be more a conflict with business which makes money from wasting resources by getting people to change what they have more regularly and those thinking about the environment.. look at cycling and how more emphasis is placed on cycleways now where there used to be so much less emphasis...

It's easy to know what to do, but harder to do it. Your last post on avoiding advertising, not liking materialistic things and not paying attention to fashion are good points. But you also review tramping products for a website. Which is promoting updated, new, fashionable, materialistic possessions and casting a light on them that makes them desirable and making the possessions they own less desirable. Now I'm not trying to throw stones. But I am as passionate as everyone else here. But the real hard thing is not knowing what to do. But implementing it in our own lives. Sometimes we might think we aren't part of the machine, but we are as much as the next guy. It is almost impossible to not be part of it, we are born and bred into it. Has anyone seen alone in the wilderness, the dick proenneke story. Man now there is a guy who practiced what he preached.

@Honora: "I'll do my little bit and try to confine my damage to 5,000 tonnes of carbon/year which is about average for a NZer." Where did you get that number from? It seems awfully high. Do you mean 5,000 kg? A few years back, Claire Browning checked out several calculators and came up with numbers between 2 and 10 tonnes per year, but then pointed out that NZ's average per capita was apparently 17 tonnes per year.... having taken into account NZ's total emissions and divided by population. Apparently the global average (in 2009) was 5 tonnes per person per year. http://pundit.co.nz/content/carbon-footprint-whats-your-size

One thing all those calculators miss is that food is carbon neutral. This is the food itself not the production or transport of it. As an example I will pick on beef. Beef contains carbon and when we eat it a good potion is released as co2 etc but where did that carbon come from? It came from grass. Where did the grass get its carbon? The atmosphere ie where you just expelled all all that beef fumes. Take that out and even take out all organic carbon emissions and you will get a clearer picture. (ok a lot of carbon goes in as co2 and comes back out as ch4 which has a higher rating as a greenhouse gas so an allowance is required) In the meantime I can stop using supeermarket bags but they are about 10% of the plastic packaging that comes frome the supermarket at most. What do we do about polystyrene meat trays lavishly wraped in shrink wrap bread and cereal bags cardboard boxes that have been waxed so they cant be recycled and all the advertising that advertises yesterdays specials ? Go out the back in the supermarket and you realise how futile avoiding bags is. Each pallet of food is wrapped in nearly a kilogram of shrink wrap. At least some effort has gone into making shopping bags recyclable and biodegradable. Shrink wrap is pvc and no one wants it

@Gaiters, I'd never heard of Dick Proenneke before, but I've just watched some excerpts on You Tube. What a remarkable character, what a life! I can't help but think that western society doesn't produce individuals like that anymore. Not that they aren't around, but the era and mentality of making do, recycling, reusing etc is gone. One area that has always bugged me is construction waste (especially in Chch with the rebuild). The amount of usable ply, timber, roofing iron etc that is dumped is astonishing! Quantity surveyors argue that it's all built into the cost, but that's not the point. My retired builder dad visited a site I was subbing on many years ago and made the comment that years ago all the timber off-cuts would go back to the builders yard and the apprentice would turn them into boxing pegs. Nowadays most apprentices would consider that violated their human rights ;) I've made 2 dog kennels, a chicken shed and several garden boxes from stuff I've 'recovered' from site skips over the years. It's all about time, and nobody seems to have any anymore. The great beauty of tramping is that our perception of time seems to extend and our efforts become more valuable and rewarding....until we get back into civilization, and time just seems to be consumed somehow.

I LOVE the Alone in the wilderness/Dick Proenneke videos... We need to use more building materials that STORE carbon rather than those which release it into the atmosphere (eg concrete).

@ Gaiters I'd never heard of Dick Proenneke either and found the videos fascinating. All the more so when you consider the equipment he was using. Of course we have our own Robert Long at Gorge River. I played a small part in that story. His cousin John is an old school friend of mine and I'd literally just come back from a SI trip, dropped by my mates place and found Robert visiting. He'd grown up in Australia and I'd never met him before. We got to talking a bit and at one point he was asking ... in a very general way ... about the more remote places in the SI. In a flash of inspiration I jogged back to our home a few hundred metres away. On my bedroom wall I had a complete floor to ceiling pinup of the entire SI in the old NZMS 260 Series ( 1 inch to 5 mile I think) ... plucked off the Cascade map, took it back along the road and showed it to Robert. When I pointed out that the Cascade was probably the largest and last un-bridged river left in New Zealand his interest sparked up. Well that would have been 1975 and there remained a gap on my wall for years after that. Amazingly when I did visit Gorge River in 2001 Robert still had the same map and finally got around to returning it :-)

Glad to share with you guys. He is an amazing guy. Though I think guys like Dick are rare no matter what generation or period in time. His life seems to have been a long preparation into becoming what he did. I have his book and it's a great read. His craftsmanship is unbelievable. I was a builder for most of my life and I can't get over how skilled he was. That he lived there four twenty odd years and could do one hundred chin ups at 75, man. Speaking of building, I agree strider, it is an incredibly wasteful industry. I too have dog kennels made from salvaged scrap from worksites. I think old bean sprout owes you a bit of coin Philip he's made a fair bit out of his story haha.