Let's get one thing straight: No one owns our water. It was here long before Maori ever arrived on these shores and will be there long after all of us are gone from this world, some of us to a new heaven and a new Earth.
That 15 per cent of our population can hold the nation to ransom over ownership of a resource without which life cannot exist is nothing short of blackmail or, as some have labelled it, brownmail. And as for designating the Whanganui River as a "person", whatever will Maori and their sympathisers come up with next?
However, the one thing this extraordinary controversy has done is to focus attention on water. And what we should all do - Maori, Pakeha, and everyone else - is take a much closer look at the state of this life-giving and life-sustaining resource. Because all is not well with it. In fact, very little is well with it.
Since my childhood and youth spent at the bottom of the South Island, rivers and lakes have been important and much-loved features of my environment and 35-odd years in the wilderness of metropolitan Auckland did nothing to dim their appeal. Nowadays, I get a glimpse of Lake Rotorua every time I glance out the windows in our dining room and have dozens of other lakes and their inflowing streams close at hand. Most of them suffer the deleterious effects of intensive agriculture and its run-off, yet others are relatively unsullied.
Lake Okataina, for instance, on fine days is as near to an environmental paradise as you'll find anywhere on Earth and every time I go there I find myself praising God yet again for the wonder and beauty of his creation.