Beach litter

I regularly walk and pick up litter on Tahuna Beach areas of Nelson, and there are always bits of plastic trash, and some of this would be from ocean industry.

Today, there is a phenomenal amount of partially degraded plastic film that has come in on the tide and extensively littered the beach.

I judge this as massive by the pervasive area that I have seen uniformly showing these similarly degraded plastic films.

I have picked up a volume of this, but from the age and extent of it, the source would have had to have been a very large ocean dumping/spill of plastic film.

I amconcerned that this is the beginning of a current of litter, that ocean life will have been heavily impacted, and that our beach has extensive litter even deep in the sand now.

It is very concerning to me, that this is not simple litter episode, but an industrial scale release of marine garbage.

Pcontamination and vandalism are among many things that can go grievously wrong in a public housing property, but now there is a new and terrible threat: an elderly Chinese woman, Xia Han, who has a vegetable garden.

You have to keep an eye on new immigrants like Xia because they get up to all kinds of foreign mischief. Syrian refugee Khaled Al Jouja is another example. He offended people in Lower Hutt so badly that in October they pulled out 1000 plants he’d cultivated on his public housing section, and trashed whatever else remained while they were at it.

His aim in developing the section was to feed the local community, but Al Jouja offended it instead. Like Xia, he failed to understand the traditional, unwritten rules of public housing tenancy. You never improve the property. You leave it in worse shape than you found it. And you never grow food on it. If you grow your own food you’re in danger of looking self-reliant, or stuck up and too good for your neighbours. In Syria or China it might be praiseworthy, but we’ve learned better.

To be fair, I guess people feel no attachment to homes they can be kicked out of when their kids grow up and leave, or they get a better paying job. In which case, why bother even with silverbeet, which grows anywhere with the slightest encouragement. You have to beg it not to.

Xia’s husband developed the Auckland vegetable garden 12 years ago in a small outside area, and since he died she has kept it up. It is an ingenious arrangement of bamboo poles that she brings out and sets up in spring, and takes down when her harvest is over.

A TVNZ news report last Saturday didn’t dwell on her different crops, but it looked like cucumbers were growing overhead (she is a small woman) and a range of other vegetables were thriving. This would be a great help when living on a benefit, especially as Xia can’t walk far, so her garden is her interest and pleasure.

She has been told to take down