The cusp of a brighter future
David Slack predicts 2050 will be a pest-free year played out to a chorus of kokako song.
My friend and yours, Te Radar, took to Twitter this week when he heard about the predator-free programme. ‘‘Good luck,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I can’t even get rid of the rat in my compost bin’’.
You grow up on a farm, you see plenty. Rats in the hayshed, rats in the implement shed, rats sitting on top of the potatoes in the sack in the garden shed when you put your hand in. I never found a rat I could like.
Predator-free by 2050! How good would it be? Not a possum, not a ferret, not a rat, from Ahipara to Fiordland.
And you know that smoking weed will be legal by then. Man, the dawn chorus will blow your mind.
There was a time when I believed every word Maggie Barry said. ‘‘Use this for aphids’’, she’d say, and that’s what I’d do. ‘‘Plant it somewhere dry,’’ she’d say, ‘‘it doesn’t like its feet wet’’. Done.
But Maggie the minister knows politics is the art of the possible. I’ve held a glass of pinot noir listening to her talk about the arts. Nobody claps properly at those things because if you do you slosh pinot noir everywhere but the way they gently pat their hands when she talks, you can tell they like what they’re hearing.
She tells us how much she loves books, and arts, and a favourite anecdote, and we all go away happy. But then the budget comes around and you find that Bill English took one look at her arts ideas and well, it was like there was a rat in the spuds.
But now the minister has a new and exciting idea that could take away some Green votes and she’s talking about becoming the biggest killer the country’s ever seen. Crusher goes bush, kind of thing. She
There was a time when I believed every word Maggie Barry said.
took it all too far but, boy, could she slay a Tahr.
The money for her program is relatively modest, and they’re inviting the private sector to pitch in. Maybe. But after a million from Fonterra and a few mill from the BNZ and a million from McDonald’s, who else is there? Steve’s Tyre Shop? The Sushi place at the bottom of Lambton Quay?
You probably need billions to do this properly. An Otago professor told me he sees three options: poison, sterilise, or use genetic modification, and really, GM sounds the most exciting option.
Essentially, you mess with their genes so that your possums or your ferrets or your rats breed more and more males, and ultimately it’s all dudes and no hot lady action and the rats die out and nobody sheds a tear. What a magnificent metaphor in the age of Trump.
They’ve done it with mosquitos. A decade from now, who’s to say they won’t have developed the science enough to take on the forest predators?
Some of that science research work could be happening here, if we cared to put, oh, let’s say a billion or two into it. With what? How about next year’s election tax cuts?
Sounds like a government job to me, the same way we built tens of thousands of state houses and the Ministry of Works carted vast piles of the country around in Euclids to make hydro dams. But if the private sector wants in, by all means.
‘‘But David...’’, I see you writing to me, or possibly ‘‘Slack, you moron, the world’s going to hell in handcart, what the hell’s the point?’’
I will reply to you: Europe after the bubonic plague. Yes, one in three people died, but then there came a flowering of culture and commerce such as the world has never known. Let us look ahead to brighter days, notwithstanding the gathering gloom of 2016.
I can now go one of two ways with this argument: we encourage more rats to bring on a plague and wipe out a third of us or we go high tech and scientific and breed every last pest out of our forests. Bag number two, please.
I see nothing but beauty in 2050. Dairy farms covered in regenerating bush, every little town a thriving science research centre of some kind. Auckland full of affordable terrace houses. Everyone gliding about on their solar powered e-bikes. Everywhere you walk, the sound of kokako.
If Maggie can make that happen, she’s got my vote until I’m 90.