Ruining nature will ruin us

THE WHANGANUI RIVER: Water is our lifeblood.PHOTO/FILE

Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au,

I am the river, the river is me.

No matter where you come from, this wonderful and insightful statement about the Whanganui is not just true about our relationship with the river but also about our relationship with our environment.

The Whanganui River is a good metaphor for this relationship, as Dame Anne Salmond said at the Rutherford lecture a week ago; water is our lifeblood. Without it we are drained and poisoned and we are sick. Its quality is affected by what goes in, pollution and wastes and what water is taken out.

What goes into the Whanganui is mostly silt, a major contributor being the Ohura River. Compare this to rivers like the Manawatu, which suffers from city waste and farm runoff. What is taken from the Whanganui is different to many South Island rivers, which are used extensively for irrigation. The Whanganui is different in that the major extraction is from the headwaters and is diverted for hydroelectric generation.

While our attitude to the environment is mostly exploitative, the environment could soon not be able to keep up with our demands for critical environmental services, such as clean water.

The silly thing is, we have the ability to solve these problems.

Better management of our fisheries so less is wasted, like not using 2-4kg of fish to produce 1kg of farmed salmon.

Also, the orange roughie is not only under threat from over-fishing and habitat damaged by trawling but also by the proposal for phosphate recovery from the same Chatham Rise fishery area.

When it comes to finite resources such as oil, phosphate and fish, why haven't we taken on board what we know about their limits and actually done what scientists have been telling us for ages? The message they have been giving us is that governments need to understand the limits to growth and the importance of working within the limits of planetary resources.

It has been estimated that today humans use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. It doesn't take an Einstein to understand this is unsustainable when we are getting five years behind every 10 years in our resources bank account. Even an economist should understand that using our environmental capital at such a rate would lead to bankruptcy.

I have noted this before, but for some reason economists cannot see that their continuous growth mantra is fatally flawed in that it must be exponential, that it is doubling its demands about every 15 years.

What we do to our environment, we do to ourselves.

I am the river, the river is me.

-John Milnes is a lover of this planet, our awa in all its moods, my family and future generations, and also a past Green Party candidate for Whanganui and a trustee for Sustainable Whanganui.