The Green Room
Below is a link to a rather joy-less piece by Senior lecturer in the Environmental Science/Ecology Group at Massey University, Mike Joy. As well as hitting you up with a bunch of sobering figures, he carefully explains why we're failing nature on all different levels from national to regional government. Have a read!
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10721337
Sad. But while we continue to pour poisons over our 'clean green land', what can we expect?
Clean green NZ is a bit of a myth. Has been for many years.
I think we have lost our clean green image NOT because of poison used for pest control but because of our skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions killing and smuggling protected wildlife like geckos and kereru and polluting our rivers with effluent. How come no one else ever says we have lost our CG image because of these crimes against nature!
Oh they are saying it alright, even overseas. Look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c3yFiNk_Ufw
Dr Mike Joy on TV7 last night - totally blasts the Yale water quality report out of the water (that's the report John Key keeps trumpeting that shows NZ's water quality is second only to Iceland's) - unbelievably shoddy methodology, no science in sight. Key, I'd stop quoting this if I were you - it's a very bad look
I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend high in the mountains of Kahurangi National Park exploring the Diamond Lakes including Lake Sylvester and Iron Lake. There is an easy 2 hour walk up to the lakes from the Cobb hydro storage lake. It winds up through red, silver and mountain beech forests. At the top, the stunted beech gives way to rolling red tussock grasslands and above these there is the most diverse array of alpine plant species nestled into tussock grassland, scree and rocky bluffs.
Native plants include everything from vegetable sheep (Raoulia rubra), special scree plants, buttercups, special Dracophyllums and a great array of hebes and mountain daisies many of which occur only in NW Nelson. One very special plant here is the amazing giant daisy, Celmisia traversii, that is naturally found in NW Nelson and Fiordland but not in between!
In 2002, DOC built a lovely hut, Sylvester Hut, in a warm sheltered edge of the beech forest with magnificnet views across Kahurangi. It is delight to stay in and a credit to the hut designers, builders and maintainers.
A community volunteer group, Friends of Cobb, run a pest control programme that mainly involves stoat trapping in parts of the Cobb Valley and along part of the track to Sylvester Hut. I met 4 of the group when they were off to service their traps. Most are Forest and Bird Golden Bay Branch members.They made it very clear that the core to the Cobb Valley successful pest control programme is regular 1080 operations by DOC across the whole valley and surrounding mountains. The stoat trapping by volunteers is only to maintain some pressure on stoats and rats in between the 1080 operations that will be repeated every 3-5 years.
We discovered that Weka are abundant throughout the valley. The friends of Cobb group advised me that following the 1080 pest work, Great Spotted Kiwi have now re-established themselves in the Upper Cobb and whio/blue duck are also common. We heard continuous chatter of yellow crowned parakeet as we walked for about an hour uphill through red and silver beech forest. Rifleman were everywhere.
I post these observations in this "dying myth " thread because while we may despair about some aspects of NZ's natural environment, we should also not ignore that very real progress is being made in other special areas to safeguard the plants and animals that make this country special.
We need to celebrate these successes and give credit to everyone responsible including all the conservation minded people, Forest and Bird and local MP Nick Smith who campaigned successfully for Kahurangi to become a National Park.
Did anyone else see the Clean Green NZ item on Campbell Live tonight. By heavens our PM is way way out of touch with reality but hey he's a politican what do you expect.
As for the Dairy Co CEO/Spin doctor it is obvious what his plan of attack is going to be - spend years more finding out what is killing Waitune and blame everyone else!
Those '11%' serious non compliance dairy farmers (and those are only the serious ones) should be shot with a ball of their own s*#t. We know it is the dairy farmers but no one in authority wants to do anything about it! Gutless dollar driven people.
I saw the TV Three feature and was also shocked but not surprised. This is what happens when dairy cow numbers are increased 9 fold from 50,000 dairy cows in Soutland 10 years ago to 450,000+ cows today.
The BBC interview with John Key highlights just how out of touch the PM is with what is going on in the real world.
Sadly it also highlights how useless Regional Councils, in this case the Southland Regional Council, have been at stopping the destruction of wetlands and the conversion of farmland all around the waterways that flow across the Southland Plains and into the Waituna Lagoon. Consequently their actions (or lack of action!) have condemned the Waituna Wetland of International Importance to a very uncertain future.
Over the last 10 years, the Southland Regional Council has simply failed to act to stop massive scale dairy conversion right across the sheep and beef land and wetlands that surrounded this Ramsar "Protected" wetland. In one stream called Muddy Creek that flows straight into the lagoon they consented to clearance of natural vegetation right up to the stream. The cows wallow in the mud and all this polluted muck goes straight into the "protected" lagoon.
Because of the gutless Regional Council---which was largely the gutless Councillors who at that time were mostly farmers themselves--failling to act and prohibit the dairy development, the only option open to DOC, Fish and Game, iwi and those who wanted to save the wetland was to try to purchase the areas that had to be protected to provide a buffer around the Lagoon. The Nature Heritage Fund (NHF) supported a number of the DOC protection applications to it to save Waituna wetlands. Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were spent by the NHF permanently protecting a number of the undeveloped areas around Waituna over the last 10 years.
The NHF was not, however, prepared to be blackmailed into buying the areas to protect alongside the streams that were being developed by the dairy farmers. First because it was the Regional Council's legal responsibility to protect those streams and their margins. Second because the blackmailing farmers would simply use any funds raised from NHF revenue to press ahead with equally destructive dairy conversions nearby. Thirdly because the NHF has very little money to try to protect key areas across the whole of NZ and Southland has had far more than its fair share of total NHF funding.
The staff of the Southland Regional Council have generally shown that they were prepared to try to do the right thing and use their legal powers to protect the waterways. Their Councillors failed to back them up. The new Chair of only 6 months who is much more enlightened has inherited a tragic mess that will cost tens of millions to rectify.
Readers should be aware that the Dairy NZ CEO kept on implying that dairy shed effluent is the main problem.
Point source pollution such as from dairy shed run off can be managed at a cost and this has to be done and the farmers have to comply with the rules on this or be prosecuted. Much more difficult to solve is run off from the farmers application of huge quantities of Nitrogen and Phosphate fertiliser to develop the paddocks and the run off of this into the streams. The waterway pollution is also from the cows urine and faeces running straight into the waterways. This comes from cows grazing right alongside the waterways and from water flowing directly from paddocks into the streams where there is no buffer of natural vegetation.
What has exacerbated the problem this year is a very wet summer-autumn in Soutland. As seen on the TV3 programme, many paddocks are totally waterlogged. This water logging-pugging issue has always been known about in Southland and was one of the main reasons why dairying historically did not expand on the Southland Plains.
However modern dairy farmers here thought that they could defeat nature! How wrong they are. The taxpayer will no doubt end up with the bill to try to clean up this mess.
Good to see this issue being scrutinised on the mainstream media
http://www.3news.co.nz/100-percent-pure-NZ/tabid/367/articleID/212786/Default.aspx
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