“Our Councils would today be facing an extra bill of about $50,000 a month or $600,000 a year if we had decided to stick with diesel buses”. The service has no risk from fuel shortages, is reducing the region’s emissions, PM10 + nitrous oxide + is also quieter. www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK26...

Schools being asked how many staff are walking distance from school + if nearby schools can car pool to a central spot and walk. Tell me you're never left your Ivory tower without telling me 🤦 #NZPol

Fleshy tree orchid (Drymoanthus adversus). 🌏 One of the few plant species doing better in Wellington Region than it is nationally.

My annual holy Easter video of a tūī filling his face with feijoas

NZ invested heavily in infra before selling it off and these companies gave $10bn+ in dividends whilst investing the bare minimum.. Sigh

The environment would like a word.

After 4yr of hard work to compare empirical species range positions' shifts from the #BioShifts DB against predictions from niche-based models trained on climate & tailored to methodological attributes of each species & study, we found species shift ahead of models' predictions! 🦋 shorturl.at/vOmCw

An entire industry written article that never mentions how most of the profits over the last 30 years went to shareholders, rather than being invested back into the network. Like water infrastructure, this is a self-made problem. newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/01/y...

The sustained rate of change as the space between the recent individual weeks' dots is a testament to the size of the clusterfuck and our vulnerability to it.

Cities grow and evolve, as they should. It's crazy to expect that land use decisions get made decades or generations before and that current citizens can't decide on how they want to best utulise public spaces.

Fancy a permanent lectureship in ecology at a great little uni in Aotearoa New Zealand? We have TWO roles available as part of our Joint Institute programme with Huazhong Agriculture University in Wuhan, China; 16 weeks teaching there, the rest at LU. careers.lincoln.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

There's a lot of doom and gloom in the world, but positive environmental stories abound. You just have to look for them. Here’s a beautiful story of the chestnut mining bee being discovered in New York after a gap of 119 years. Amazing. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Here’s NZ Parliamentary Environment Commissioner & ex- National minister trying to warn the NZ govt their idea of merging environment with urban spatial planning is a disaster for rural communities & environment - I could not agree more - disestablishing Environment is terrible youtu.be/OMv6-kZTuGs

110,000 more bus trips than Wellingtonians took in March 2025. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/wellingto...

I love stories like this. Just pure career insanity. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

I maintain that "This chatbot can make mistakes; check outputs before using" = "please recycle this container and keep our environment clean"

Ballbag ACT MP upset the Government is passing laws with truncated select committees and not following due process. Remind you of anything?

📣New article by MIZ PAS scientists @martamaziarz.bsky.social, @trigos-peral.bsky.social & M. Witek shows a diverse, dynamic and distinctive macroarthropod community in bird nests on forest floor. 🔗https://tinyurl.com/bdhcsv9d 💰@ncn.gov.pl @respublications.bsky.social #ornithology #Bialowieza #Forest

Articles on HPAI are always welcome but unfortunately the headline question isn't quite answered. The answer is: not very prepared. We are doing what we can at a local level but MPI seems completely under-resourced, largely leaving us as non-biosecurity experts to figure it out for ourselves.

I really hope this can work www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

Ecological research needs more "baseline" studies (if we can call them that now climate change is already well-underway). These will be seen as not having "enduring public value". Add this to the proposed cut to environmental research and it's game over for conservation and biodiversity. 😢

Excluded domains in the Environmental Sustainability and Resilience Pillar include "Ecological research with limited national relevance, eg investigations into environmental phenomena (such as natural sounds or processes) that do not deliver enduring public value for New Zealand." Absolute nonsense!

This report is terrible for the environment. NZ massively under-monitors environmental change and this is an issue in a changing climate because we will miss impacts of climate and other global change processes until it's too late to do anything about them. www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/repor...

Worth a read www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-adv...

it's difficult to overstate how dramatically the scientific climate has changed in new zealand in the last 3-4 years I've previously referred publicly to our science policy as 'batshit' and to our prime minister as 'an idiot' for overseeing it this report is solid evidence for that word choice

Listen to experts

Nice article on the current challenges of peer review. Hope some brilliant minds figure out a way forward that preserves critical scientific judgement. 🧪

🚨 New on Salvo 🚨 Ecologist's harsh Chilean black metal is a tribute to the melting glaciers of Patagonia. "Many black metal bands talk about nature but very few about its disappearance..." Read our interview here: salvo.ghost.io/chile-ecolog...

One odd thing that's happened as a result of the dawn of the internet monoculture age is that the nostalgia we are served is specifically from an American POV, and does not gel with the memories non-Americans actually have. But if you're too young to remember, you may not realise this is the case.

A real difference you can make in your community is to check if your local Council is an accredited living wage employer. If not, lobby your Councillors. www.livingwage.org.nz/accredited_e...

the first report on Australia's teen social media ban is a red flashing light: - 7/10~ parents with kids on social media pre-ban say they're still on it - cyberbullying/image-based abuse reports are unchanged - using facial scans on youngest users deemed a "poor practice" www.crikey.com.au/20...

An overview of how governments around the world are responding to the largest supply disruption in history. New Zealand's entry is mostly blank, but at least it doesn't feel like the Covid response right? 🙄 #iran #nzpol www.iea.org/data-and-sta...

🚨 BREAKING: The European Commission has urged people to work from home, drive and fly less, and for EU countries to urgently roll out renewables, as it warned of a prolonged energy crisis as a result of the conflict in the Gulf. Full story: www.politico.eu/article/euro...

Relevant to Aotearoa New Zealand. #NZpol

💯

Sovereign Citizen Duncan Garner doesn't recognise your illegal laws.

Watch how hard Legasea, "a non profit organisation dedicated to restoring the abundance, biodiversity and health of New Zealand's marine environment" fights against this. Very happy to put the boot in until recreational fishers are impacted, then it's mask off.

A fundamentally misplaced 'hope'. Why do we keep promulgating this utter nonsense that we can 'save' reefs by coral gardening? Restoration cannot be scaled up globally to save reefs from loss and degradation doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This fossil fuel crisis will likely result in an 'unjust' transition without proper strategy, vision, policy, and action from government... meaning those with less resources to deal with things will be hurt, while those more well off will reap the benefits of kicking fossil fuels

Have you noticed that the government are more concerned with not looking like Labour handling a crisis than handling the crisis? #nzpol

Hands free government

It's a miracle anytime trains are running in the weekend. Bad news for Easter...

Gorse is a terrible nursery crop.

I wish they’d moved their arse rather than dragged their heels on cycleways all over the city in Auckland. 30,000 extra cycling trips in two weeks as Christchurch ditches cars for fuel crisis #nzpol www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

We should fund science

we talked with ed in this episode about how openai has not committed to any deals and that it would ultimately be revealed and collapse. i believed was true i didn’t think it would materialize less than 3 days later!

“Once rare, 7-year car loans are fast becoming the norm. They’re often the only way buyers can afford new rides, with average sale prices surging 28% in 5 years to approach $50k.” Designed-in car dependency, surging car AND gas prices, longer loan periods with more interest. Sound like “freedom?”

I have never paid more than $4000 for a car. I’ve just not been able to. I am aware of all the benefits that come from spending more up front. I have just never been able to afford that outlay. I am not unusual in this. EVs are a great concept but just a theory for many of us.

Birds steer clear of brightly-coloured monarch caterpillars because swan plants are really, really toxic. Wear gloves when you handle them.

Quite a few. Karaka in Hawaii, bittercress, Acaena , and willowherb in the UK. There’s a published list of plants somewhere. I’ll see if I can find it. Flatworms too, in Ireland i think.