Grassroots action

The Waituna lagoon is threatened with destruction due to the effects of development of the surrounding peat-lands over the years. Accusations are flying from all quarters toward the dairy industry, farmers in general and Environment Southland who is charged with managing those developments. To say that the regional council has become galvanised by the situation with the wetland would be an understatement. The Waituna Landcare Group, a force of locals who have worked for years on the various challenges of the fragile area, have a plan and it was presented to the Council on Wednesday. They'd like to trial a new system of drain management. Doesn't sound very sexy Gerry, but it's a graceful proposal in my view. They'd like to alter the constructed drain to give fish shelter and protection from the diggers that clean the drains and they'd like to change the manner in which that cleaning is done, by 'sectioning' the scooping-out regime and leaving un-cleared segments in weed and grass to serve as sediment traps to catch the material stirred up and released by the diggers bucket. This 'fine tuning' looks to me to be exactly the kind of thing that's needed and I commend the Landcare group for their work - in fact I did, as you can read in the Southland Times report from the meeting.
As an aside, I took great pleasure in reading the proposal as it appeared in our Consents Committee document, because of the descriptions and words the group used. I like words, especially those that are evocative and couldn't help but enjoy reading this paragraph:

"We want to explore methods of improving drain structure for fish habitat. We propose digging 'alcoves'' into the sides of drain channels, filling these with two alternative 'snag' structures(fish 'condos' and bog-wood snags)"

I'd like to make some of those myself and install them in my own creek.