Saturday, March 30, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Free speech has big cost

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There were a lot of us pretty annoyed last week when we read the piece Mike Joy and David Larsen wrote for the New York Times.
Reading Time: 3 minutes

It is a paper that now prints only half a million papers, down from a million a few years ago, but with online growth has more than four million readers. Those readers are influential, wealthy and our customers.

Joy and Larsen wrote about how the tourism industry uses the fictional land of Middle Earth and the 100% Pure, Clean and Green tags to sell this country then put the case how filthy we are and blamed the dairy industry.

It is all very well highlighting problems and forcing changes here onshore but to make a decent attempt at sabotaging not only the tourism sector but also our primary exports is nothing more than economic sabotage and treasonous.

Capital punishment was abolished for treason only in 1989. However, there is still life imprisonment for this heinous crime. And don’t try the freedom of speech argument on me.

I’d be interested to know if they sold this story. If they did, the term 40 pieces of silver comes to mind.

However, I imagine the environmentally conscious reader of this piece will be far more worried about United States President Donald Trump’s climate change denial or the devastation of the Amazon forests by fires.

Joy and Larsen wrote “The contamination of Canterbury’s freshwater easily ranks among the worst environmental disasters in New Zealand history.”

There is no doubt dairy’s impact on Canterbury’s freshwater has not been good. Environmental activists like Joy have swung the spotlight and debate to these problems and the sector is moving to mitigate and improve its performance.

It can’t happen overnight but it is happening and we will see improvements.

They didn’t mention the massive riparian plantings, reducing fertiliser use or the reduction in 260,000 dairy cows.

But to tell 4m readers this easily ranks among the worst environmental disasters in NZ history is hysterical and arrant nonsense.

It is thought nearly all of what we call NZ sank beneath the sea 25m years ago. That’s not bad as environmental disasters go.

Taupo erupted 1800 years ago and was the most violent eruption on earth in the last 5m years. It destroyed the entire central North Island.

But perhaps Joy and Larsen meant to write human-induced environmental disasters.

The pollen record clearly shows that within 100 years of Maori arriving massive fires swept through the whole country. They reduced the original forest cover from 80% to 15%. Southern NZ turned into a largely grassed expanse. What is cherished by environmental activists like the McKenzie Country is but a recent human construct.

But these fires, rat introduction and hunting led to the extinction of 23 species of bird including the moa, swans, ducks, eagles, ravens and owls.

The arrival of Europeans saw vast swathes of forests like the kauri, rimu and kahikatea clear-felled for domestic and export timber. Swamps were drained and English grasses introduced throughout the country.

Another 30 species became extinct and many more are hanging on for dear life.

Not recent enough for Joy and Larsen?

In 1920 just 200,000 people called Auckland home. By 1950 it was 300,000 and in 2017 it’s 1.65m or 34% of all New Zealanders. Aging sewerage and storm water systems are pouring their filth into the Hauraki Gulf, making Auckland’s streams some of the most polluted in the country.

Just last week it was revealed that the plastic and micro-plastic that sloughs off Auckland into the Gulf is choking the life out of the creatures that call it home.

Larsen lives in Auckland and shares in this unmitigated environmental disaster but doesn’t write about that in the foreign press.

They wrote about the polluted Canterbury Rivers but didn’t mention the Avon, the most polluted and the one with no rural runoff, just city.

Joy and Larsen, if you want positive change, as we all do, why highlight an issue to 4m readers who will have forgotten about you and your cause by now and completely alienate the very audience you need to address and get alongside?

Us.

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