The head of the Department Conservation (DOC) Al Morrison shoots from the hip and hits his target each time:
New Zealand is going "backwards" and its approach to the environment needs to change, he said in a speech at Canterbury's Lincoln University last night.
"The status quo is not an option".
Our "clean and green and 100 percent pure" image was not due to any deliberate effort, but as we had relatively little time and few people to mark the land "we are as guilty as any part of depleting and degrading our natural capital".
Morrison probably fired over the heads of many of those responsible for the destruction he describes with this 'philosophical' strop-up:
""Nature's systems are finite and we are using them to a point that there is a supply and demand problem. And we are exacerbating the problem by mismanaging and destroying the ecosystems that we rely on to supply those critical services."
I had no trouble at all with what he said and share his view.
