The southern pooswater blues

For very good reason indeed, people are shunning oncefavoured recreational cavorting spots in Southland rivers.

Stomach flu, urinary tract infections, neonatal meningitis for heaven’s sake, are among the cocktail of consequences they might now be risking by plunging or tipping themselves into rivers where E coli levels become alarmingly risky.

Putting aside the sheer environmental concerns – but gently, because we’ll need to pick them up again soon enough – this is increasingly becoming a major cultural disappointment.

Yes, we still have our coast and the lakes remain in good nick. But Southland is a flood plain. These rivers are arteries whose contribution to our wellbeing has in some measure always included recreational fun.

Lost capacity to lark about in them is, in itself, no minor thing.

Generations of Southlanders have disported themselves in so many of the areas where it now becomes foolhardy to frolic – never moreso, it seems, than in summer holiday conditions.

The Aparima River at Thornbury, the Oreti at Winton Bridge and Wallacetown, the Waikaia at Waikaia, the Mataura at Riversdale and Gore, the Waiau at Tuatapere, all of them now assailed by faecal contaminants.

It’s not that they were previously pristine but you didn’t hazard gutwrenching distress.

Environment Southland is working to identify sources of contamination. You’d struggle to imagine a more basic requirement of its role, though the task of doing so, for reasons of complexity or resourcing, appears to have been beyond council.

For many people the finger of suspicion isn’t so much pointed at the dairy boom as inserted shoulder-deep into it.

Measures have already been undertaken to address the degradation of our waterways, to an extent that farmers are feeling picked on.

November’s Environment Aotearoa report however, had much to say about the impact of farming on freshwater quality and the Land and Water Forum last year recommended all plains and lowland-dwelling dairy cattle and pigs be excluded from waterways by 2017, and beef cattle and deer by 2025.

Intensified farming is absolutely part of the problem but, as reproachful farmers keep reminding us, by no stretch of the imagination all of it.

Human contributions will also be a factor here, as will the ploppings of water fowl, with weather also factoring into problematic periods.

Hopefully, the ES work will help us better determine which areas need more attention than they’re getting.