Why is 1080 an issue

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Weeds in national parks along sewer lines, energy transmission lines. My concern is that weeds occur along all land that has been disturbed in otherwise pristine bushland areas. These are …. What does net zero greenhouse gas emissions actually mean?

Under the Paris climate change agreement the majority of countries have made pledges to get their greenhouse gas emissions down …. Being able to understand and evaluate scientific evidence helps students make informed decisions about social, scientific and political issues. Wicked problems also offer opportunities for literacy and numeracy development. Use the following Hub articles to learn more about Here are some examples:.

This article provides some guidance for using a wicked problem as a starter for classroom inquiry. Conserving native birds — introduction looks at the issues surrounding our native birds. The New Zealand Government has a vision of becoming predator-free by The Connected article Bringing back the birdsong profiles the Kids Restore the Kepler project to bring birdsong back to the Kepler Track.

The Connected article Fake facts looks at misinformation, malinformation and disinformation in the online media landscape. It also suggests strategies for evaluating whether information is based on facts and whether it is worth sharing.

The Department of Conservation website has a set of resources, including an article about fake news. Bush Bay Action is a trapping-only operation in the Opua Forest. Read why wide-scale trapping is not feasible practical over large areas. What changed? He talked to Herald science reporter Jamie Morton. What made you want to write this book?

Was there any particular event that triggered it? There was no defining trigger point, but I'd been writing about pest control off and on for 15 years, and it became ever-more frustrating that the same old myths and misinformation about just kept on orbiting the national conversation.

They're all so easily debunked, but it's like whack-a-mole - no sooner is one countered with the facts, than they trot out another one. I got a strong sense that there were lots of people out there who were rightly concerned about , but with so much propaganda about, they weren't sure who or what to believe.

So I decided to hold each myth up to the scientific evidence in turn, to offer a kind of reference point they might feel like they could trust.

As a science writer, what have been your own interactions with the topic? In , I think it was, I travelled round the North Island for the Department of Conservation, gathering up the experiences of community groups engaged in pest control. They told me about their successes and failures - it's important to remember that back then, there were none of these fantastic self-resetting traps, so trapping was very laborious, and painfully inefficient - each trap could only go off once, then it sat there redundant until someone came along to reset it.

So it was a hard grind for ordinary volunteers - one rat plague and all their great work was undone. They talked about the benefits of getting regular drops, just to zero the pests and give themselves - and the birds - a breeding season in peace. In , I travelled the country conducting what turned out to be a sort of oral history, listening to older farmers talking about the truly dreadful days, back in the 70s and 80s, when bovine TB was practically epidemic.

Some got emotional just recalling the memory of herds they'd struggled and borrowed for to build up from scratch, only to see them test positive and get carted off for slaughter. This was before we truly understood the role of possums and ferrets as vectors of the disease, so the worst part for these guys was not knowing what to do about it.

Can you tell us a bit about how you gathered the information for your book, and where the journey took you? Well, like most science writing, a lot of it was reading - reams and reams of research papers, theses, conference proceedings, powerpoints, datasets - there are 30 pages of references in the back.

Because so many opponents refused to speak with me, I had to get a handle on their views instead by following anti Facebook pages, so there were long evenings doing that. In between times, I'd hit the road. I went to the Coromandel to witness a operation for myself. I spent a few days afterwards combing the bush looking for all the death and destruction - the slaughter of native birds etc - that activists insist happens after every drop.