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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Roaring out to sea

It's wasted, says Nathan Guy. Water, roaring out to sea, wasted!

What a dangerous clown. What foolish thinking. That's the Nats. Rivers are un-exploited resources that could be turned into milk.
Water storage means irrigation which means dairying which means intensification which means greater pressure on the environment.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I heard Nathan Guy last week say that last summer was a water storage problem not a water supply problem (not exact quote cos I'm on non smart phone and can't get mp3 to check). That there wasn't a water supply problem would be news to most people! Irrigation is no use on hill country or for forests and, as you point out Robert, there is already too much pollution washing off farmland into rivers now. When Fed Farmers released their water policy before the last election Bruce Wills said that water reaching the sea was wasted. It wasn't in the written document, but he said it at the launch in Wellington railway station and radio NZ recorded it. These guys claim that they are the down to earth, practical people who (unlike everyone else) understand the 'real' world, yet they see nothing wrong with the rivers running dry. So much for the health of our waterways and estuaries. They just don't seem capable of looking at the wider picture.

robertguyton said...

Their heads, corokia, are in a strange anti-biotic space and there seems to be nothing that can be said to them that will change that. All that can be done is to take action, protest their plans, challenge their statements, seek public approval for your side of the argument. They have been active in dissembling their message that 'water storage is vital to our future' and that droughts are the biggest threat to agriculture. This needs to be challenged repeatedly, in my view. The question that vexes them the most seems to be, "won't your plans lead to intensification?". They seem to want to avoid that line of questioning, so that's the one to take. Newspaper editors might be interested in this interchange between industrial farmers and 'ordinary New Zealanders'.

Armchair Critic said...

An American colleague told me of the pleasant surprise he got when looking at water allocations for NZ rivers and seeing that 5% of the flow was allocated. He initially thought it was 5% not allocated (i.e. 95% allocated to agriculture) because that's what he was used to seeing.
Mr Guy is reflecting the import of American ideas about water into our culture. We should be asking him how those ideas are applicable NZ, and how they make it a better place, not just for some of us but for all of us.

Armchair Critic said...

It all ends up out at sea anyway. Mr Guy is suggesting it should be stored, using government subsidies, so it can carry more pollution away out to sea.