The Governments oil salesman Simon Bridges just can’t catch a break these days. Whether it’s having to admit that he’d never even heard of NZ’s largest forest park (Victoria FP) which he’d just opened up to drillers or getting stick for allowing oil exploration in the home of the last 55 Maui’s dolphins on earth, it seems like everyone’s on his back.

Now it’s all happening again for poor Simon as he has to defend the Government spending the very “modest” sum of $240,000 of taxpayers' money on wining and dining 11 oil executives for four days in 2011 - on top of the nearly $50 million a year in subsidies and tax breaks for the oil industry.

The government is clearly fully supportive of pulling out all the stops in the bid to impress here, even though the bill for food and drinks alone came...

The chicken or the egg? John or George? Could Jurassic Park actually, really happen?! Certain classic debates are enormously divisive.

Thankfully though we can now put one that has long plagued humanity to bed as we bring you the definitive list of the top '8 Fictional Sea Creatures Who Have Flirted with Disaster'. Here we go...

8. Willy

Imprisoned for a crime he didn't committ, this orca was the subject of an assassination attempt before he was busted out of sea prison by a small child, all set to a theme tune by Michael Jackson - and it was a smash hit. Things were different in the 90s...

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7. Jaws

When it comes to animals with a bad reputation, you don’t have to look much further than our sharky pals. Before Shark Week made a celebrity out of every Great White going, Steven Spielberg...

With Texan cowboy, deep sea drillers Anadarko you have to expect a few leaks here and there - they were one of the companies behind the largest ever oil spill at sea after all.

The news this morning from their operation off Otago was a bit out of the ordinary though – there’s word of a leak... and people all around the country are crossing their fingers, hoping for confirmation?!

That's because this was not the oil-gushing-everywhere kind of leak. This time, someone on the inside has spilled the beans on Anadarko's failure to find oil off Otago.

The leaked information points to the well in the Canterbury Basin being empty. If this is the case, it'll be the second time this summer that Anadarko's drill ship, the Noble Bob Douglas, has come up with nothing after they failed to find anyth...

A lot has changed in the more than 40 years since Greenpeace started out in Vancouver. From a small group of people with a driving passion for the environment, we've grown into a worldwide movement.

Working in 'digital campaigns' as I do - a job which couldn't even have been conceived of when that first Greenpeace crew set out to protest US nuclear testing in 1971 - it's easy sometimes to feel like we're operating in a completely different world now. Not today.

As I joined the group of staff from the Greenpeace office heading down to Princes Wharf in Auckland to see off the SV Friendship, SV Shearwater and the Greenpeace sponsored SV Vega as they joined the Oil Free Seas Flotilla, the sense of history was palpable. The connection to that first Greenpeace sailing and all those that have ha... Read more >

“It is...about capitalism, greed, and the moral depths that people will sink to when the opportunity of accruing immense wealth is put before them”

Liz Bury, ‘Why you should read The Luminaries’, The Guardian

This month one of the most important literary awards in the world, the Man Booker Prize, was awarded to a New Zealander. Eleanor Catton became the youngest winner ever of the Booker Prize with her novel ‘The Luminaries’, set in New Zealand's goldfields in 1866.

While Catton now joins an illustrious list of previous winners such as Margaret Atwood, William Golding and Salman Rushdie, New Zealand is facing into another historic period of greed in the face of environmental destruction as a new frontier of extraction is opened up. Read more >

Deep-sea exploratory oil drilling activities will ...