delivered today, Valentines Day, in the sunny summery Manawatu by Forest & Bird at a locally organised Valentine for the Earth concert and speeches event. Text may be freely used by any and all to harden up the effectiveness of our advocacy messages for cleaner rivers in New Zealand. For those of you time poor or without scroll down - the take home message is
"The river heals when we flow forward, stronger, together."
BEGINS
Today, Sunday, Valentines Day, we each have our own reasons for being here - our own hopes, dreams and cares for this unhealthy river. In distilling this diversity of thought into a single drop, a focus on a better tomorrow emerges as the unifying force gathering us together.
For myself, I believe we are here because our river deserves better than it gets. As individuals and together, we have a right to expect a healthy river as part of a modern and civilised society, and to expect that our healthy river exists in the context of the cities, towns, villages, industries and agricultures that have settled beside and around it.
So here today we strive toward a better future for our river. A future healthy for our children and future generations. A future healthy for our fish. A future where our lakes and rivers are not closed by pollution and toxins. A future of abundant whitebait and birdlife. A future celebrating our civic authorities fostering our river’s health. A future of co-existing sustainable agricultures and healthy rivers.
So how do you create this better future? How do we, together, create it? It is actually very easy. All it takes is people, time, focus, and ink.
That really is all it takes to create a better future! Central to this is your commitment to help better decisions be made in this community and in this country.
We are on a path to environmental sustainability – including healthy rivers. The total solution has many faces: it will be headlines, decisions, stories, donations, friends invited, green collar jobs and technology, reports, hugs, submissions, marches, letters, smiles, prayers to every god, poems, hopes shared and victories celebrated.
It will be bright ideas. It will be supporters supporting. Writers writing. Doers doing. Leaders leading. Painters painting. Philanthropists philanthropising. Thinkers thinking. Activists activating. And singers singing.
Today’s most important single action will happen right between your ears – the decision you make for a firm and sustained commitment on your part to healthy rivers as a cause you will work for.
The energy and passion of that commitment is real –how you harness it for the greatest good defines the opportunity.
In the interest of tangible solutions I ask that you focus on working together, and on working over sustained periods of time.
I firmly believe that for each of you the best way forward today, now, is to decide and to commit to working for the health of our river in the company of friends and peers within established groups and networks.
The benefits of groups are manifold: timely support, better information, camaraderie and friendship, training and resources, ideas, buzz, excitement, satisfaction! It certainly beats tearing off on your own tangent and burning yourself out. Think of water - and compare the fate on an ephemeral isolated drop versus the power of a surging rapid – both are water – it is the form they take that determines their power and effect – and the power comes in togetherness and momentum.
This community has an elegant sufficiency of groups and teams - what they need is greater strength and resources within and around them– to build their united voices from a trickle to a torrent. By strength and resources I mean your commitment. I mean your time. I mean your financial support. And I mean your ideas. All are vital for a healthier river.
If you are already in groups or networks, whether they be social, spiritual, sport, or business – please commit today to harnessing that group’s potential to be part of the solution and help clean up your river. Commit also to connecting with a local environmental group while doing so.
If you are not connected in any group or network in this community, but do care about your river’s health, consider three environmental groups that stumped up the hard cash and volunteer resources to help today happen.
Contact the Environment Network Manawatu – your local clearinghouse for environment information. Contact the City Environmental Trust – they currently have an active submission under the Resource Management Act helping the European owners of Tui Brewery decrease their sustained, significant and unwarranted pollution of your river, pollution dumped in your back yard while fattening their bottom line in Europe. That's called exploitation and its high time it stopped.
A third contact, Forest & Bird Manawatu, is here today with their children’s nature education team and their Healthy Rivers advocates team – stop by and enjoy their fantastic native fish and freshwater displays. Forest & Bird advocates are currently active with a submission under the Resource Management Act helping Feilding live up to its bold claim of being New Zealand’s most beautiful town, by ensuring they improve and deliver on their mayor’s aspiration to reduce the fouling of your river with their grossly under-treated municipal sewage waste.
Forest & Bird recently visited the source of the Manawatu River, in the Eastern Ruahine Ranges, and brought water from that bubbling stream here today and into this Square. Water from the very source, where you can cross the Manawatu River in a single bound, to beside you within this space, the civic centre of this river’s watershed – all for you to see, touch and experience. Have a look at it in the red glazed ceramic pot – I’m told if you look inside you’ll see a sure solution to healthier rivers.
Your networks and these environmental groups, are all in place and in some cases already getting traction – they simply need greater resources – resources in the form of you and your passion and commitment for a cleaner river. With that we will move forward faster together, and the river will heal faster.
Does the river need letters written? Yes. Songs sung? Of Course. Submissions crafted? Definitely. Votes for the Environment? Absolutely.
Some of these elements are simple, others complex. Having seen legal applications to permit pollution in this river, and the millions of dollars backing them, I’m of the firm opinion that the time to stand firm is now. The time to demand better of our leaders is now.
The key to success in this campaign is a strong focus and time. We need you to make healthy rivers your top civic priority not for an afternoon, not for a month, not even for a year – but make healthy rivers a focus for this decade and keep at it! One step, one success, one knock back, and another success at a time we will succeed - the future for the health of our Manawatu River catchment is positive and bright – together we will create it!
Solutions Are Simple: Think. Dream. Talk. Contact. Work.Together. Stay Positive. Dream Some More. Read. Recruit. Focus on solutions. Write. Train. Network. Re-energise. Review. And Celebrate.
We share a vision that this decade is the point in history when the health of our river improves dramatically. That our agriculture becomes increasingly compatible with a healthy river. That the internationally and locally controlled industries settled in our region show restraint in their pollution. That our civic structures invest in healthy rivers by improved systems of inflow management coupled with superior wastewater treatments.
Like a river gathering volume and force as it flows from the mountains to the sea, in bends and in straights, in still deep pools and through pulsing rapids, this vision will be realised by you and you and you – by all of us together, and our commitment to that better future. The solution is here for the making. With your support this community will achieve a healthy river.
The river heals when we flow forward, stronger, together.
ENDS