Opportunity knocks

Like all crisis this pandemic has thrown open the door to so many new opportunities we would be remiss not to take action for change, given the environmental challenges facing the entire world right now.

Food and water, both are going to be critically in shortage. We have millions of tons of fresh water pouring off hillsides and into the South island sounds every year.

World population has gone from around three billion to around seven billion in just my lifetime.

When are we going to hear meaningful population crisis conversation?

I don’t have to enumerate the problems. We all know what they are. So where do we start?

Let’s take protection from pandemic as a starting point. We know we need more housing. There is no reason we should not create new settlements all over the country. There are numerous highly fertile pockets of land at present doing very little but growing more meat, a highly inefficient purpose compared to what it could produce with diversification. And we do not need long drawn out bureaucratically controlled procedure to build our homes. Iwi, Pa¯keha¯ me nga iwi Ma¯ori both signed the Treaty which says our taonga are protected for our use. Our homes and land are taonga. We can build our own with qualified oversight.

We all know of alternative sources of power, not a problem. This country was opened up with basic metal roads.We can do that again and the most valuable people in safeguarding the earth may be gardeners?

C Thomas

Napier