Gisborne letters on retiring farmland, vivid coral and gun laws

A fifth mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in the past eight years was declared in April 2024, affecting 74% of the more than 1000 reefs surveyed over its 2000km length - but Iain Boyle was lucky enough to visit an area where the coral was plentiful and vivid.

Hope for the climate cause welcome

I have sorely missed Gwynne Dyer’s columns since the Gisborne Herald’s recent changes. Fortunately, his popular and thoughtful works can easily be found elsewhere.

In his recent column “Technology our best hope to avoid catastrophic warming”, Gwynne said one global-scale solution for the accelerating loss of biodiversity – which “can only be achieved by returning at least half the land human beings have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state” - had appeared almost miraculously . . .

“It’s called ‘precision fermentation’: put the right microbe in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours. Drain the resultant soup off, dry it, and you have 65% edible protein, fats or carbohydrates.

“Half the world’s farmland is used to feed our domestic animals. We could feed them this instead and re-wild most of that land.”

The first factory opened near Helsinki this year. The downside was that new technologies typically took 15 to 30 years to roll out at scale.

Because of this, Gwynne said we would still need other measures like solar radiation management - reflecting sunlight back into space.

Gwynne wrote: “Forty-five years ago James Lovelock, the scientist who realised all the Earth’s natural systems are connected and named the ensemble ‘Gaia’ (now renamed Earth System Science in the universities) saw this all coming. He knew we would be too slow in cutting our emissions because that’s how human beings are.

“He foresaw that we would have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves, and predicted we would become ‘planetary maintenance engineers’.

“I interviewed him one last time for my new book on climate change, eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103. ‘Are we there yet, Jim?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said, but he wasn’t in despair. We have the tools to get through this if we use them wisely.”

I welcome Gwynne Dyer’s hope for the cause. Yet I remain resolute - we must all make it easier for life by reducing our use of fossil fuels and going easier on the planet.

Bob Hughes

Coral vivid and plentiful

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to travel to northeast Queensland. The family insisted we do a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef. I was less enthused as we’ve been told for years there is little to see there any more.

Expecting a sea devoid of life and colour with white-washed coral (of what remained), I was stunned by what I saw. Not only was the sea teaming with colourful fish, but the coral was plentiful and vivid. I was reliably told by locals that the coral had been undergoing a “teenage growth spurt” in recent times.

What a fantastic surprise, and I guess it is a lesson we should not always believe what we read or are told.

Iain Boyle

If Act has its way . . .

Re: Gun statistics painting very grim picture for Americans (July 16 editorial).

If Act has its way, the AR-15 will soon be legally available in New Zealand.

The AR-15 was used by the Trump shooter and, along with other similar weapons, was used in half of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history: the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting; the 2017 Las Vegas shooting; the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting; the 2018 Parkland school shooting; and the 2022 Robb school shooting. A modified AR-15 was used in the Christchurch massacre.

This weapon could soon be available for purchase in New Zealand.

Ian Findlay

Trickledown in deed

Re: Purpose of Trust Tairāwhiti.

The sale of the network should make the use of funds to support electricity reticulation - one stated purpose in the Trust Tairāwhiti deed - obsolete. In my mind, electricity reticulation should have been part of the network’s operational policy.

The other purpose of the trust, to foster business interests likely to encourage or sustain economic growth within the district, leads me to believe that the group titled as beneficiaries of the trust represents only a small percentage of our population. The trickledown effect has long since been discounted as a method of redistribution of funds, of which this appears to rely upon.

PJ Reed

Driving in Gisborne, 2024

Keep one eye on the traffic, your extremities on the controls.

Keep the other eye upon the road, to avoid pesky potholes.

They patch some up, as they appear, those cone and high-vis souls.

But oh no, they open up again, just like “Whack A Moles”.

It’s those evil motor vehicles, that starts the pothole’s seedings.

Sometimes, I think holes are alive, with surreptitious breedings.

And if you stuff a tyre, or maybe yet a wheel?

You now have multi options, now’s not the time to squeal.

It’s time to go to Grey Street and it’s high-tech traffic maze.

Bring your trainers and your bike and have your fitness levels raise.

A day or two of walking, cycling, will probably suffice.

You can flex your mental muscles too, in figuring out the price.

Now once you’ve quietly marvelled, at what your rates have wrought.

You can ponder on priorities, in the planning of transport.

Ron Taylor