Our Changing World for Thursday 26 June 2008
On This Programme
A project to restore habitat around the Wellington coast for the threatened little blue penguin kicked off over the weekend with a community planting and beach clean up. Dacia Herbulock talked to the volunteers and heard about plans for the world's smallest penguin in the southern-most capital.
This penguin was killed crossing the road in 1952, and now serves an educational role at public events.
Places for Penguins first community restoration day at Tarakena Bay on the Miramar Peninsula.
Invertebrates are not the most glamorous representatives of the animal world, but they have been described as the "little things that run the world". Veronika Meduna finds out about some unusual insects in a discussion with entomologist Stephen Pawson, who was one of the authors contributing to a landmark volume covering the natural history of Canterbury. The book provides a comprehensive update on the knowledge of Canterbury's flora, fauna and environment.
The Natural History of Canterbury, edited by Michael Winterbourn, George Knox, Colin Burrows and Islay Marsden, is published by Canterbury University Press.
Living to 90 and beyond no longer seems exceptional. New Zealand-born biochemist Jilly Evans (pictured right) is returning home next month to discuss the process of ageing at the International Science Festival in Dunedin, where she will talk about key medicines and how genetics and our environment interact to expand our life span. She also tells Veronika Meduna that there is a clear limit to how old people can grow.
Jilly Evans is one of the keynote speakers at the New Zealand International Science Festival in Dunedin next month.
Canada is home to a vast untamed wilderness and its human population is committed to preserving the land and its wealth of thriving wildlife. But does Canada deserve a clean and green reputation? James Tansey is professor of business ethics at the University of British Columbia and founder of Offsetters Climate Friendly Society. In the first of a series of programmes recorded in Canada, Amelia Nurse talks to Professor Tansey about Canada's not-so-pretty environmental record and asks where it stands with carbon emissions, the Kyoto Protocol and the Alberta tar sands.
