CEREL Public Event: Reinventing Paradise
13 September 2017
Reinventing Paradise
A public lecture by Rod Oram
Hosted by the Centre for Environmental, Resources and Energy Law (CEREL)
The Resource Management Act was a great breakthrough 26 years ago. It gave us a legal and regulatory framework for attempting to balance economic development against our impact on the environment. But it has only slowed rather than arrested the damage we’re doing to our ecosystem. So far all the amendments to it have made it far more complicated and barely more effective. Meanwhile, our relationship with the environment continues to deteriorate. The time for tweaking is long over. We need to work out how to shift radically from rules to reason, and from an economic to an ecosystem relationship with our life-support system.
Rod Oram
Rod Oram has 40 years’ experience as an international business journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe and North America, including the Financial Times of London.
He contributes weekly to Nine to Noon, newsroom.co.nz and Newstalk ZB. He is a frequent public speaker on deep sustainability, business, economics, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, in both NZ and global contexts. For more than a decade, Rod has been helping fast-growing New Zealand companies through his involvement with The ICEHOUSE, the entrepreneurship centre at the University of Auckland’s Business School.
Penguin published his book on the New Zealand economy in 2007, Reinventing Paradise. He was also named the Landcorp Agricultural Communicator of the Year for 2009.
In 2010, Rod was the winner in the individual category in the Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards. Rod was a founding trustee and the second chairman of Akina Foundation, which helps social enterprises develop their business models in areas of sustainability. He remains actively involved with the foundation and the ventures it supports.
Rod is an adjunct professor at AUT; and Bridget Williams Books has published his latest book, Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, details at bwb.co.nz/books/three-cities
Rod is in the inaugural cohort of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. This bold programme brings together innovators and investors from here and abroad to help foster global change from Aotearoa-New Zealand.