Critics could suggest better options for redress

IT seems the right of the political spectrum are increasingly incensed about the rebalancing of Te Tiriti’s partnership arrangements.

Many are saying it is wrong to enact ‘‘racebased’’ legislative structures and I guess in an ideal world this would be the case.

Maybe not surprisingly, the industriallevel racists, the United States, have equivalents.

Jon Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode on environmental racism spawned other media articles about it.

The United States has had explicit legislation forbidding African Americans from various (white) metropolitan regions, and also did the same for environmentally polluting industries.

Biden seems keen to redress this but “the conservativemajority supreme court is likely to strike down an explicitly racebased policy”. Hmmm? Sounds familiar.

Oliver’s succinct analysis of it was that the United States is ‘‘in a … backwards situation. When any solutions to this problem have to be raceblind, despite the fact that the causes of it are so demonstrably not.’’

Perhaps those criticising the current creative solutions to rebalance our vital statistics could suggest better (or any) alternatives. Peter Small

Dunedin

Whakatipu

THE recent publicity about the correct spelling of Wakatipu led me to consult the ancient official survey map of the region which hangs in our living room.

The map is dated 1888 and is amazingly detailed considering survey work carried out in such harsh terrain prior to publishing.

The surveying must have taken years to complete.

Taking account of how precise surveyors are by their very profession, one would have thought they would have been equally diligent in getting all the Maori namings and spelling correct.

Considering the written Maori language was only developed from around 1820, and no doubt taking many years to develop in detail, the question has to be asked how such an error could have been made by those professionals to have omitted the ‘‘h’’? Graeme Thompson

Wanaka

Sealevel rise

THERE appear to be mathematical errors in the article on sealevel rise

(ODT 4.5.22).

Sealevel rise, not land subsidence, at Nugget Point by the end of the century will be around 70cm above presentday level according to one Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenario (another scenario suggests it could be over 1m).

At the same time subsidence at 2.08mm per year will amount to 16cm.

According to my calculations this will bring the previously estimated endofcentury sealevel height forward by around 14 years. Steve Moynihan

Cromwell

Ravensdown

ALTHOUGH Jan Parker’s question with respect to Ravensdown (ODT, 6.5.22) about “. . . what is etching the window glass in the area, and not just in the immediate vicinity of the works” may simply be rhetorical, for the clarification of readers who may not be sure, the fluoride in the smoke stacks of fertiliser manufacturers, in the form of hydrofluoric acid, has this ability. The level of atmospheric fluoride emission is usually minimised by a wetscrubbing process and the fluoride sent to the harbour to be diluted in the sea, which usually has a fluoride level of about 1.3 ppm, but sometimes, as occurred recently, hiccups occur. Bruce Spittle

Dunedin