Rachel Stewart
Moral implications seem a bridge too far in decisions on management of key resource
For an educated man, Nick Smith sure knows how to disappoint. Since his latest debacle over proposed new water quality standards, I’ve been inundated by folks asking me to help them make sense of them. Questions like “Is he right, or are the greenies right? Does all that planting and fencing actually stop water pollution? I’m confused? Please help.”
I feel like an agony aunt. A freshwater agony aunt.
Now, I could get technical but I’ll resist. Suffice it to say, yes, the greenies are right. But more to the point, the freshwater scientists are right.
My advice? Simple. Listen to the independent freshwater scientists.
Others are talking up Smith’s proposed new water rules, while the rest of us — out here in a place we like to call “sanity land” — are doing the exact opposite.
The science is already in, and has been for a decade or more. Intensive dairy farming is responsible for the vast majority of freshwater pollution in this country.
Whatever it is that the dairy industry says it’s doing or spending to mitigate the problem, it’s not working. Our waterways continue to degrade in front of our eyes.
The degradation curve corresponds perfectly with the nation’s steady increase in cow numbers. There are graphs that, in near perfect visual correlation, bear this out.
I could go on. However, you can find screeds of technical data anywhere you care to look — if you are so moved. If unmoved, and still insisting that all is well in our water world, it might be time to talk to you about the ethics of freshwater. Yes, the ethics. Remember those? The importance of water is undeniable, yet the ethics of water are conspicuously absent from discussions around its governance and management.
I imagine that if the moral implications of water policies and practices were to be used as a guiding principle by decision makers, it would be somewhat inconvenient.
I mean, how to justify the immorality of essentially ignoring the “polluter pays” principle by making ratepayers and taxpayers pick up the tab for dairy pollution?
How to explain away the deep public betrayal by the Department of Conservation using the courts to force through, at the Government’s behest, a conservation area land swap, for the sole purpose of building a dam for the further intensification of dairy farming?
Or to make sense of a regional council which refuses to follow its own plan on nitrogen leaching limits, meaning their ratepayers pick up the legal tab for their intransigence?
Horizons (Manawatu/Whanganui) have already been told to comply by the environment court but have studiously ignored that directive — meaning NGOs have again been forced to act. No convenient ratepayers to pay their legal fees. Anything wrong with this scenario?
I’d ask: In what way was the sacking of ECan councillors back in 2010, and replacing them with unelected, Government-appointed commissioners who did their bidding on water allocation and irrigation issues, democratic or decent?
Even hundreds of public complaints of stock standing in Canterbury waterways last year did not distract them from their goal. Why prosecute when you can do nothing, right? Maybe it’s because it’s easier and cheaper (and morally bankrupt).
How about some regional councils — charged with looking after our freshwater resources — being top heavy with dairy farmers? One has a chairman who repeatedly declares that all is well with the waterways. It’s not. I could give such examples until the cows come home. These are just the tip of the milkberg. I’ll leave you with this.
The state of our waterways, and dairying’s role in it, is getting perilously close to being like the “climate change” debate. There is no debate.
The science is in. The ethics are out.