John Milnes: Water - Tale of good and bad

ONCE upon a time ...

As all good fairy stories begin before drifting into times past, often when things were all great, when there was plenty for everyone, the sky was blue, the seas full of fish, and clear rivers that were safe to drink. Wait a minute, that wasn't a few hundred years ago - I'm not that old - but as recently as the 1970s you could not only safely swim in rivers and streams, you could actually drink from (most) of them, safely, without fear of waking up the next day with the runs and making sure there was a bowl handy.

These days the government says that "good" quality water in a stream, river, or lake is now defined as safe if you can wade in it, not swim, let alone drink - just safe enough to get your feet wet.

To me, this seems like changing the rules to avoid having to make any effort to reverse this shameful degradation of our waterways. This seems like a somewhat strange, even sick joke. Perhaps the sickest part of this sad fairy tale is that instead of acknowledging that the government has found it too difficult to have swimmable or drinkable standards for our waterways they will just say that an acceptable standard is wadeable. I have yet to hear any freshwater biologist say that wadeable is satisfactory for any of the wide variety of our indigenous species.

An indication of the mindset of the regulators and the government was at the consultation about fresh water recently held in Whanganui. When I arrived at the venue I was asked "Fresh water?" to which I replied, "Yes, please!" The invitee seemed taken aback that I might have been there to actually see fresh water as anything other than salt water.

Fresh water of the drinkable kind, not the wadeable kind, is getting to be in very high demand and the council of Ashburton is the latest being tempted by the promised returns from selling 10ha of land with a water right. If the water is to be sold in bottles, even if in Aotearoa, it brings up the other issue of the huge quantity of plastic that goes into packaging water. For the consented water, a total of 4888cu m per day, that means also 155 tonnes of plastic 1-litre bottles per day. That is more than one litre for every person in the country.

Whichever way you look at it, it is extremely wasteful of resources: water, plastic, and transport. It becomes harder to see how this is beneficial to anyone except the bottling company.

It also highlights the fact that many big users of water don't pay for what they use, but it is becoming obvious there is not enough water for current, let alone future, demands.

Fresh water management needs to ensure that waterways are progressing towards an ideal of swimmable and drinkable. If that means that water use and pollution have to be paid for by users, then these funds would go towards cleaning up our past thoughtless use and wastage of our heritage.

Then we can swim happily ever after.

-John Milnes is concerned about our profligate use of our planet's resources and procrastination about solving the problem.