September

Although Spring officially started September 1, the weather has still been mostly cool, windy and rainy, with some very pleasant days interspersed. As you can see, we are encouraged to use wind energy around the house. I have planted some peas and we had another nice hike up to the Botanical Gardens to look at the tulips – no photos however, as we forgot the camera that day. It has, however, been another month with lots of learning.

You may remember that in June I wrote about going to an alternative currency workshop in the nearby town of Carterton. Since then I have gone to a couple of meetings in Wellington trying to revitalize their local trading network, but it hasn’t gotten very far yet. So Living Economies sponsored a similar workshop in Wellington at the end of August, and it looks like we might finally have a consistent working group here for what is now called Wellington Independent Trading System (WITS). We are still dealing with some of the basics, like a philosophy statement, but one of the new people has offered to be a membership coordinator, because there is still a group of traders left over from the previous incarnation of the group. I am really interested in seeing this take form and begin to work, because I think people working together outside the regular money system is really necessary, but I am actually not particularly interested in getting involved with trading myself. Partly, I am leaving soon, and partly I don’t really have anything I want to sell or buy.

I have been educating myself more about money by reading various books. The funniest one, if you like the author, is Making Money, by Terry Pratchett, whose stories are based in a fantasy world. But it is a good exposition about paper money versus a gold standard. We visited the Reserve Bank Museum in Wellington, which had an example of a really interesting machine called a MONIAC, invented by a NZ economist working at the London School of Economics in 1946. The MOnetary National Income Analogue Computer is a visual demonstration of the way money flows through the economy by using water flowing through clear pipes in and out of various tanks representing households, business, government, etc. You can change the flow by raising taxes or increasing savings or whatever and observe the effects on the system. It seems to me to be a concept which is ripe to be converted into a computer model, but as far as I can tell, no one has done so yet. A similar machine is featured in Terry Pratchett’s book. The Museum also has a replica of a giant moa. If they hadn’t already been hunted to extinction by the Maori, it would certainly make camping in NZ a different experience!

Another area for activism I rediscovered is vegetarianism. I went to a lecture about diet and climate change which rekindled my enthusiasm. Certainly the ecological effects of meat eating on water, land use and poverty were some of the reasons why I stopped eating meat forty years ago, but this lecture also linked it to carbon emissions. One of the quickest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to eat less meat and dairy. Meat eating uses about twice the carbon as a vegetarian diet, but being vegan cuts your use to about a quarter of that of vegetarians. So I am trying to reduce the amount of milk, cheese and butter I use. It is hard, so I sympathize with meat eaters who are cutting back. There has been a lot of debate in NZ about their carbon goals to take to the Copenhagen conference in December. Part of their problem is that a lot of their emissions come from their dairy and meat cattle, and no one knows how to reduce that yet. Agriculture is also one of the key constituencies of the new government.

Peace activities have also suddenly started happening this week; maybe it is because it is Spring. This week I went to a lecture about the Genuine Progress Index by Canadian Ron Coleman. The GPI is an alternative to the Gross National Product, whose inventor even said it (GNP) should not be used to measure the health of economies because it makes no distinction between positive and negative economic activity. The GPI also looks at net income, so it is not necessarily a good thing if farming income is increasing, if farming expenses are increasing faster. The GPI also takes into account the value of natural resources, so if you are depleting your fishery stock, that is a negative. If you are building your forest reserves, that is a positive. I feel that this is peace related because anything that helps you improve the human condition will promote peace.

Next, we went to a lecture about the Global Peace Index by Kevin Clements, Director of the newly formed National Peace and Conflict Studies Centre and a Quaker. Recently developed in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit, it has been ranking 141 states on levels of internal and external peacefulness for the last 3 years. This year New Zealand ended up number one. Somewhat to my surprise, the USA is actually in the middle. He also pointed out that none of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council are in the top fifth, and Russia ranks quite low.

Today there is a forum on nuclear disarmament and tomorrow there is a peace march in honor of Ghandi’s birthday. It is one of the beginning steps for a World March For Peace And Nonviolence which will travel around the world over the next ninety days, ending in South America. We will be helping carry some Quaker banners. One of them looks like an antique from the days of demonstrating for a nuclear free NZ.