Chicanepictures.com
Are we serious?
Sarah Roberts (pictured) told us her rural community’s experiences of the negative impact of fracking operations in Taranaki this week. Farmers and neighbours signed the innocuous-looking ‘‘affected party approval’’ documents at the oil and gas companies’ request.
They didn’t realise it triggered open season - drilling derricks went up, drilling vibrations and underground explosions started, heavy vehicles trucked up and down their roads. With wells in production, night became day by the light of the gas flare, acrid hydrocarbons wafted across the paddocks.
To cap it all off, ‘‘land farming’’ started - spreading of oil-polluted drilling mud across pasture that seeps into the soils and waterways.
Yes, I drive a car, and ‘‘benefit’’ from the use of petroleum products in my daily life. No, that doesn’t mean I can’t advocate for a better way forward. Current oil depletion means global all liquids supply is projected to start contracting from around 2020 (IEA WEO 2016 Figure 3.16) and could decline by upwards of 50 per cent by 2035 (HSBC analysts, 2016). Divest your pension funds from oil investments, and into the renewable energy sector or towards building resilient, localised economies.
For environmental and resource depletion reasons, we don’t have any choice but to wean ourselves off oil. Or, is our message to future generations ‘‘please forgive us, we were rolling drunk on petroleum’’? Nathan Surendran Invercargill
Keep it simple
On reading Letters to the Editor ( The Southland Times , July 15), I would like to add my 100 per cent agreement to the comments made by the correspondent, Margaret Dynes of Winton.
I am not from any ‘‘art background’’ but view Anderson Park as an important part of Southland history and it was in this area of interest that I was fortunate enough to be employed for a short period of time as a ‘‘visitor host/assistant’’. In this position I was directly involved with, and relating with the visiting public.
What an asset the home and grounds are and, equally, how frustrating to witness the continuing saga of profound lofty opinions as to its fate.
Southland, get on with it ... a subsidiary gallery keeping it simple and let the building speak! Forget making money and satisfy the simple fact - it is a fine residence that attracts attention simply by its presence and the generosity of its original owners. David Cook
Invercargill
He got something right
Gary McEwan’s scattergun letter of ignorant prejudice ( The Southland Times, July 13) got something right. I didn’t spend my youth backpacking about Southeast Asia; I was too busy paying for my education and having been raised for part of my childhood by my grandmother who eked out a living milking three cows. I thought if I could not afford a house better than one with an outside dunny and squares of torn newspaper for toilet paper, I would build one myself.
Last year I tripped to Taiwan to visit the place where my son had worked on his post-doctoral engineering degree, see his in-laws, where my ancestors are supposed to have originated, and Vietnam.
If you want an antidote to the nightly diet of whingeing woe that New Zealand TV news is, Vietnam is the place. The Vietnamese have figured that the goal of social equity is achieved from the pursuit of liberty.
I loved Hanoi. The place was a combination of co-operation and commercial industry that occupied the very pavements.
I am sure the authorities rounded up and shot the fellow for wasting paint on pedestrian crossings. You get to hear the hopes and dreams of young people because they want to practise their English. Their belief in self-destiny gelled with my own.
I see their education system is already trashing ours. And if their ‘‘communist’’ rulers continue to keep socialism, with its dumb pursuit of liberty destroying equity, at bay they will continue their upward trajectory to prosperity. Mervyn Cave Manapouri