Mike Joy was recently interviewed on Sentient Seas – a website presenting interviews, podcasts, and essays on a range of topics aimed to inspire the change needed for a better future.
The interview discusses some of the ecological situations New Zealand is faced with, the lack of environmental management by councils and the Government, farming options for the future, and real changes needed to overcome the many ecological crises that are currently occurring.
Listen to the interview on Sentient Seas.
Extract from Sentient Seas: “Episode 5 of the Sentient Seas podcast series is an interview conducted with the New Zealand ecologist and author Dr Mike Joy. For some brief background New Zealand currently has some serious problems with water pollution in rivers and lakes, particularly nitrate and phosphate leaching and effluent runoff, as well as other ecological problems like biodiversity loss. Mike Joy’s work is at the forefront of understanding the depth of these problems and in understanding what new pathways could help address them. Our conversation includes discussion on: ecologists cataloguing biodiversity decline, flawed legal tools in protecting landscapes, changes in land use in agriculture, the lack of awareness of cumulative effects, problems of intensification and nitrate pollution, fossil fuel linkages/calorific deficits and the challenges to future food production, the current opportunity for diversification, the outdated precepts of non-ecological economics i.e. GDP, ecosystem services assessments, integration/worldview and cosmology, and that humans and their systemic harnessing of the natural world now actually make our species the ecology of the planet.”
Freshwater for life 