Pooled efforts needed to fix waterways
My view January 2008: ‘‘Let’s stop for a swim.’’ We’d reached Murchison on a stiflingly hot trip from Christchurch.
The sun beat through the car’s windows, the air conditioner was struggling and the lure of cool river water was irresistible.
Husband Steve remembered a swimming hole under the bridge near where the Mangles and Buller Rivers merge. We pulled into the picnic area and found the track down to the calm, deep pool Steve remembered. But the water was murky. Streaky lumps of greenish foam and islands of brown debris circled lazily in the current.
Just down stream at the base of a small cascade the Mangles poured a dirty stain into the Buller’s roiling green waters.
Last week we spent some time with family on Auckland’s North Shore. Keen to get some exercise, despite the dodgy weather, we decided to explore the tracks and bush reserves on the Beach Haven coast. There was plenty of bird song and shelter from intermittent showers on the edge of the muddy, mangrove infested tidal creeks.
Steps led down to a few shingly beaches. Dinghies, some usable and some abandoned and rotten, were pulled up under the overhanging pohutakawa, kanuka and flax.
As we walked, we agreed it was a playground ripe for kids’ adventures – imagine building rafts and poling about in the mangroves at high tide or fishing from a dinghy in the middle of the creek: what fun.
Except that you wouldn’t let your children anywhere near the water. Dotted along the track were notices advising Aucklanders not to consume shellfish or fish from these waters or swim in them because of potential contamination.
These were not recent notices either – they were faded, mildewed boards, tilting drunkenly on their unsteady posts. It seems that the inner Waitemata has been polluted for some time.
Lately, concerns about the state of New Zealand’s waterways have grown exponentially. When rivers, estuaries and lakes are unsafe to swim in or unfishable or when they grow the kind of algae that can kill your dog, people start to take notice and feel justifiably worried.
Water is shaping up to be a big issue in the coming election. The main political parties have finally realised that they need convincing policies that will produce real improvements to New Zealand’s many and various damaged waterways.
It seems obvious that users should pay for the water they use and that the cost of keeping our waterways clean must be built into the economies of the various industries and urban areas that use it.
It’s no use industries or ratepayers railing against this principle. Clean waterways are not optional if we want to hold fast to our dearest values and, indeed, continue to cash in on our ‘‘clean, green’’ reputation.
Some argue that water is a replenishable natural resource, available to everyone and that noone should pay for it. This argument has long lost its validity.
Dairy, one of New Zealand’s biggest industries, bases its profits on heavy water use and, as a result, some dairying regions’ waterways are being seriously degraded.
While water itself might be ‘‘free’’, the consequences of its careless use are not.
The dairy industry is beginning to clean up its act, but far too slowly.
A similar argument can be made about urban degradation of water. The numbers of closed beaches after a few days’ rain clearly reveal the weaknesses of city water management.
And, while our water resources are constantly renewed in volume by courtesy of Mother Nature, it’s become obvious that the ways we use her gift can reduce its quality surprisingly quickly.
There is a limit to the amount of heavy metals or nitrate contamination water resources can take before our waterways start to become, at the very least, expensive liabilities.
Of course, it’s complicated. A good example of the complexity of water issues is the state of Canterbury’s Lake Ellesmere.
Although Selwyn District dairy farmers are currently contributing to the lake’s problems, the main cause of its decline stems from the Wahine Storm back in 1968.
All Ellesmere’s naturally occurring macrophytes, the weeds that kept its water healthy, were ripped out in the storm and subsequently, algal growth has dominated. Can Ellesmere be brought back to health? Only at enormous cost, and, according to Environment Canterbury, recovery will require the loss of Selwyn’s dairy industry.
A rule of life that has always proved true is that, in the end, you always pay for what you take. We’ve taken too much from our precious water resource and now it’s time to pay.
Political leaders must develop a cross-party accord on water – the issue is too urgent and too important to play politics with. Tough decisions will have to be made and stuck to.
And what about the Mangles River swimming hole in 2017? The TDC, reporting in 2015 on the health of its region’s rivers stated that the Mangles was ‘‘healthy’’ in all measured categories, at least at their chosen sampling sites.
I’m looking forward to checking that swimming hole in person sometime in the near future.