Mahurangi magazine
Dedicated to climate-action mobilisation, curiosity, democracy, and the Mahurangi
Last habitable landmass must lead covid–climate mobilisation
Last habitable landmass to emerge, and to be inhabited, Aotearoa, should now play to its strengths by demonstrating life after zero-carbon, and covid-19. New Zealanders have never been backward about being world-beating, whether sailing black-hulled America’s Cup yachts or…
read more
covid-19 climate and bird-flu-strength-pandemic clarion call
Spain, officially, has had not quite 0.5% of its population infected by covid-19, about a third of the rate the maligned country experienced during the 1918 Pandemic. But 10% of those undeserving more than 230 000 people have died, and its economy is in its worst…
read more
Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example
As the epitome of physical distancing, Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the global project to survive the covid-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic global heating. In respect to climate, after petulantly insisting cop26 must proceed, on 1 April it was finally postponed…
read more
Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation
Having wasted two months of preparation time, the challenge for civilisation now is to break its determined habit of wasting every crisis in its entirety. Aside from abiding by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s succinct advice to act as though one had covid-19, and stay strictly…
read more
Sweet Te Muri crossing consensus
In its 33-year story, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail has seen some meaningful milestones. Last Thursday’s is one such significant trail marker. Circa 1987, Auckland Regional Parks management had decided where a bridge was to cross Te Muri Stream; it was to run smack…
read more
Octavius Browne, second brother to visit Gordon
William Browne’s son Octavius Browne was born on 2 November 1809. Charles Browne says “the place of his birth and the date of his baptism is not known, but we have been told that just before he left Courtlands on the journey to Scotland in the course of which he died, he…
read more
Planning Mahurangi Regatta 2021 at the town hall
Revival of the Mahurangi Regatta was the direct result of 1970s Mahurangi River restoration efforts. Two years of determined advocacy for a more far-sighted solution to tidehead town’s sewage woes had comprehensively convinced the regional water authority…
read more
Mahurangi Regatta 2020 results combined list to come
Results are ordered alphabetically by division, then by handicap place within each division. However, for those desiring an overall picture of the day’s racing, a combined-fleet list ordered by elapsed time will, in time, be appended below the division placings…
read more
Regatta 2020 lost, found and thanked
Effusive thanks have been lavishing the organisers, sponsors, and volunteers from even before Saturday’s Mahurangi Regatta began, but also in its immediate aftermath: ”Thanks mate. Such an awesome event—huge congrats to everyone involved…
read more
Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet
That government of the people, by the people, for the people, has perished from the earth, has placed all earth’s creatures in existential peril. All too foreseeably, the half-billion creatures and counting destroyed by wildfire this globally-heated Australian summer will later…
read more
Octavius’s brother, Gordon Davis Browne
Gordon Davis Browne was born in early 1805, and baptised at St Mary’s Lambeth on 22 March that year. The explanation for his given name of Gordon is not known. Charles Gordon Browne (who was born in January 1845, and whose own second name was obviously a…
read more
Compulsory voting cart before smarter-democracy horse
Big business would be the biggest loser, was a Labour-led government to legislate to prosecute non-voters. Currently, unlike Australians, New Zealanders are legally allowed to abstain from voting. But with global voter turnout in determined decline, New Zealand’s lack…
read more
Aotearoa might best advance stv by enhancing mmp
Aotearoa is not just the world’s first full democracy because it was first to enfranchise women. Thanks to New Zealand’s geographic isolation and late colonisation, a partnership approach was attempted from the get-go, with greater and lesser success. One uniquely…
read more
Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy
Epically ironically, salvaging a survivable climate and a free society possibly now depends upon a one plutocrat deposing another plutocrat, turned dictator. Far preferably, Republican Party senators would suspend self-interest for the survival and dignity of their once…
read more
Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets
It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…
read more
Sunday Sunset Boulevard town-hall matinee idyll
In a former life, J Barry Ferguson, amongst many things, was “the garden curator of Greenacre Park on 51st Street Manhattan, a private ‘vest-pocket’ park, open to everyone and owned by the Rockefeller Greenacre Foundation.” Having been florist and event organiser to New York’s…
read more
stv bicentennial morphs into march-stealing breakfast
Unless it is Christmas, and it’s on the 25th, there is not good time in December to hold an event. Having said that, Mahurangi Action is in the sublimely salubrious company of the Birmingham Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement in having…
read more
Buffalo off spar station misses festival but makes history
Pictorially, at least, hmss Buffalo and Gordon Davis Browne’s spar station will make a fashionably late arrival to Auckland Heritage Festival 2019, which concludes at the end of Labour Weekend. Given that Browne’s Mahurangi spar station was the first European…
read more
stv-elect first Mayor of Mahurangi
Vote early and often to elect the first mayor of Mahurangi. Of course, only the latest vote an individual casts will count. Because somebody votes early, they shouldn’t later be penalised when some late-breaking information causes them to revise their preferences…
read more
Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote
It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…
read more
Nominate someone as 2020 Mayor of Mahurangi
Mayors, to be legitimate, need to be elected by preference voting—known as stv in Aotearoa, and as rcv in the United States, where Barry resided until retiring to his country of birth. The need for a useful demonstration of stv to appropriately mark…
read more
stv-electing first Mayor of Mahurangi
Some dots can take longer to connect. And the more obvious the dot, the longer it seems to take for it to be connected. Since the announcement of the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, the Mahurangi Magazine has…
read more
stv bicentennial extraordinary town-hall talk
Ideally, the bicentennial of stv should be held where the Birmingham Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement held the world’s first election with it. But even if that ultimate location was the epicentre of a global celebration, two other, antipodean, countries…
read more
Crude reminder of royally half-cocked commission
First-past-the-post, 200 years after the first single transferable vote election, deserves to be a very distant memory. But, thanks to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance stvsingle-transferable-vote-ignoramuses, the region is about to elect its fourth mayor with the…
read more
Bay where no ships has been 60 years with no name
It was almost certainly a good thing, that 60 years ago the name of the Auckland region’s first European settlement slid unnoticed into the next bay north. Had the bay been known by a descriptive name, such as Spar Station Cove, or by any name…
read more
hmss Buffalo arrives at Mr Browne’s establishment
His putative youngest brother was Charles Dickens’ friend and illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, aka Phiz. Putative, because Hablot was in fact the nephew of the founder of the Auckland region’s first European settlement, George Davis Browne…
read more
Fourth Thursdays 3rd time lucky after 20 June
The clash wasn’t discovered until after 20 June was locked in for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Taking Shapely town-hall talk. Having cheerfully ceded their second-Wednesdays slot to bpw Warkworth, the town-hall talks have found…
read more
Mahurangi Coastal Trail taking shapely
Most of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is already in use, and has been for decades. This, thanks to the entire coastline from Waiwera to the Mahurangi Harbour becoming regional park between 1965 and 1973. Within that time, built by park staff…
read more
ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
read more
On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
read more
Ceding second-Wednesdays for fourth-Thursdays
As of midnight last Monday, dredging the town basin and river downstream became the most urgent Mahurangi project. Up until that deadline, feedback on the structure plan that will shape development of Mahurangi’s tidehead town for…
read more
Strikingly unfit for fossil-fuel-free future
Anthropogenic climate disruption is not just another issue. It is the issue that will bedevil generation after generation for at least hundreds of years. Just how hard and how fast global warming will impact cannot be accurately quantified, given that…
read more
Seriously steeling the green network backbone
Whether the green network proposed in the Draft Warkworth Structure Plan is fit-for-purpose for this week’s climate-striking school students, for their next 30 years, must be the question. And given that streets, once surveyed, tend to endure, the…
read more