NZ's green status getting murky

breakfast news comment
NZ's green status getting murky
Our clean, green image is likely to be tarnished by an environmental report today which is expected to record failings in the key areas of climate change and water quality. Increasing threats to endangered species - including the kiwi - will also be highlighted in the State of the Environment report, which at 450 pages took 18 months to complete. The Environment Ministry report is only the second of its kind and comes more than a decade after the first in 1997. Greens co-leader Russel Norman said he expected the report would give a damning appraisal in areas such as water quality and greenhouse gas emissions, which have risen 25 per cent above 1990 levels.

We like to think of ourselves as clean and green, but we are not, the reality is most NZers don’t care until it starts hurting their pocket. Which of course is exactly what will start to happen, as Dairy Farmers choke our waterways with cow shit, as SUV ownership clogs our motorways and as we drain all our water for the agriculture industry we will start to lose our tourism attraction. It seems we do this a lot in NZ, a country with incredible abundance, Maori did it with the Moa, Europeans did it with Whales and Seals, more recently it is our plummeting fish stocks, we in NZ continue a long tradition of shitting in our own nests, except this time the consequences are magnified many times over because of global warming, if we can’t learn the lessons of history, we deserve our fate.