Philippa Stevenson: Grim future reflected in a dying lake

I know I'm not alone in worrying, as I get older, about what sort of world I'm leaving for my descendants.

Barring cataclysm, I'll probably take that short step to my grave from a life of comfort.

I am unlikely to know a world without the convenience of my fossil fuel-guzzling car. I'll have a good roof over my head, heating at the touch of a switch and food in such abundance that obesity will remain more of a concern than starvation.

But I'm haunted by the thought of my grandchildren or their children living in some Mad Max-type world where every man, woman and child fights daily for a skerrick of dwindling shelter, energy and food.

Such nightmares might suggest the power of Hollywood but they also reflect the bombardment of environmental bad news that seems to veer from prospects of global warming to another ice age.

I don't know whether my offspring's offspring will fry or freeze but either way things don't look comfortable.

Neither am I comfortable with the idea that scientists have got a handle on what has happened or what will happen. Nor have I much faith in so-called public servants to make timely decisions should their advisers reach a consensus on what needs to be done.

I've reached this level of cynicism after years of being dewy-eyed about the ability of scientists to uncover the intricacies of what makes the place tick, and harbouring the belief that the powers-that-be - duly informed by the clever scientists - were there to do the right thing.

As far as I can make, out no one knows enough to make more than a rough guestimate of what affects what and what remedial action, if any, could make a difference.

That's not a reason to do nothing but it's surely a reason to be honest about what we know, what we don't and what we can, realistically, achieve.

It's a reason to take a much longer-term view. Longer than the average human life, which seems the most common but most inadequate span used for much thinking and planning.

If the planet has come to this pretty pass after 4600 million years then three-score-years-and-ten seems a bit on the short side for making far-reaching decisions.

This was brought home to me by a local example: Cambridge's much put-upon Lake Te Ko Utu, a 5.3ha body of water set in a 17.6ha park on the town's church corner on State Highway 1.

Before European settlement, Maori treasured it and used it as a source of eels, koura and fresh water. European settlers, too, valued the lake; swimming in it and erecting a bathing house and changing rooms. But in 1882 town commissioners made a fatal error. Instead of draining the town's run-off into the nearby Karapiro Stream or Waikato River, they piped it into the lake.

Over the next decade stocking the lake with golden carp and American catfish and planting thousands of shrubs compounded the bad decision.

A historian writing in the Cambridge Edition this week detailed, year by year from the 19th century to the 21st, the cruelties visited upon the lake, which in 1864 was described as a "reedy lake" that was home to large numbers of wild duck.

Not a decade has past since without some new plan for clearing, dredging, planting, flooding, draining, or filling in some area of the lake.

The latest is for the Waipa District Council to spend $600,000 on such measures as filtering stormwater feeding the lake, removing weeds, rebuilding walkways and building a retaining wall.

Given the vast changes over 123 years to the lake's natural, sustainable state I suggested to Cambridge Community Board chairman Rob Feisst that the council could only deliver stopgap measures on the way to oblivion.

He didn't agree but it seemed more about my choice of words. "Part of the council move is to stop further deterioration," he said. "They are trying to maintain it as long as they can."

And then what?

More than 60 Cambridge residents made submissions on the council's plan last month and Feisst said the community regarded the lake as "a gem, very special and a well-kept secret."

It's sad to say, but regardless of how much the present generation of Cambridge people is prepared to fork out I'll wager the lake won't be considered something special by my grandchildren's children.

More than likely it will be another former gem condemned by short-term thinking.