There is a saying in Taranaki. If you can’t see the mountain, its probably raining. If you can, its going to rain. Dairy country. Milking cows requires a phemonenal amount of water. To milk cows in the dry and porous soils of the Mackenzie requires the continual extraction of water from the waterways and lakes. The nitrates from these operations wind up back in those waterways, polluting them. The MacKenzie farm now comes with a consent for 15,000 cows.

Under advice from Motu and the PCE the farming community found a straw to clutch on – that if cow numbers did not increase, nor, eventually, would the quantity of methane emissions. If cow numbers did not increase.

While its clear enough that this is the last thing that should be happening here and now there seems to be little in the law to prevent it. The resource management act, designed to protect environments, has no provision for the environments greatest threat and has, in any case, be progressively eroded as the business growth agenda of the last 9 years progressed. The water wars are starting now and I can’t imagine how they will end.

In Africa 9 of the 13 of the oldest baobab trees died in the last decade. They were between 1100 and 2500 years old. The ancient cedars of Lebanon, also many centuries old, are dying now. Irrigation systems systems suck the environments around them dry, right when the coming changes already threaten to take them to the brink.

Listening to rain used to be soothing. Not any more. We’ve broken the very bounds of rain and now it is drifting away from our understadning.

I first discovered the works of James K Baxter at the school library. In that environment he prised open a crack through which the light could arrive. It was in the damp fields around Hiruharama that he quoted this old saying.

He roimata ua, he roimata tangata.

They sky sheds tears in sympathy with the grief of people. Into all of this, right here and now, let me introduce to you the unbreakable Rosemary Penwarden.

02:00 Activism - the Greenpeace/Anadarko case

03:00 Dairy Farming - turning into a factory

05:30 Interesting to see who opposes this

08:30 Negotiating with the police

12:05 Alone in the police cells

13:15 The 316 tattoo

14:20 The inconcievable change

15:30 The grandkids

16:30 Why isn't everyone involved in this?

17:00 Talking with the family about climate change

17:50 Water Crisis

19:30 Don't drink the tap water while pregnant

20:40 A grandmother's rage

21:30 Ashburton people getting sick from the tap water

22:40 The toxicity that builds up in a place

23:45 Moving on to coal - the connection with milk

24:00 Locked up inside an irrigation pipe

24:50 All of Fonterra's South Island factories burn coal

28:00 Energy and water expended to create and export milk powder

28:30 How milk powder is used in China - the system at war with the planet

30:10 Our debt to the future

31:00 Can we look back and laugh at the nineties?

32:25 What do the people on the right think about this

33:25 Finding the things that activate people

34:00 People in gaslands starting to see the change in people too

35:25 Starting the nudge the nose of the juggernaught

35:50 No hope for the world we grew up in. Hope for the return of fairness

36:40 The group in the garage: EVs, e-bikes, welding and weaving

37:40 Mecury energy EV

38:30 Battery storage systems

38:45 When we get together and face it we feel better

39:40 Teaching the grandchildren practical skills