Your View: Reader's letters

Time to save planet

Very few people will heed Professor Guy McPherson's warning that a total collapse of our environment is in the making and that we humans, with the aid of our many machines, are the cause of it.

Global warming is the direct result of our squandering of fossil fuels, which is raising the temperature of air and oceans.

There is a danger point and we are getting closer to it every day. All around the North Pole are frozen nodules of methane about to melt and turn into gas worse than CO2, which will make global warming unstoppable.

The science is well established, but many people don't like bad news and prefer to bury their heads in the sand.

We are not sure how much methane is stored around the North Pole but this is where environmentalists like Professor McPherson come in, with a wider overview than the mere climate people.

We also need to see the many people with mega-technical appetites move to world CO2-belching mega-cities and understand the poverty that results when parents have more than two children.

Is this doomsday stuff? The greatest 20th century thinker, Lewis Mumford, finished his book The Myth of the Machine (1967) with these words: "The real prophets of doom ... are those who go with plans for accelerated technological progress ... But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically ... as soon as we choose to walk out."

NICK PYLE
Whanganui

Farm fly glue?

Our Whanganui District Council has been boosted by the electionof self-proclaimed extremely intelligent and business-savvy newcomers.

Since they have finally accepted a solution of the inherited wastewater problem, I ask that they turn their exceptional skills to an invasion which no other council has ever bothered to address previously. What is she rabbiting on about, you might well ask?

Flies. Ban the flies. Who among you loves flies as they spit all over your ceilings, lightshades and walls, constantly strolling their dirty little tootsies over your clean surfaces?

Or do you prefer to fill your living areas with poisonous chemicals for your families to breathe in, along with the flies.

Ban them from our borough, I plead. Legislate, make them illegal aliens, build a wall, place a bounty on their heads - dead or alive.

Perhaps council could encourage a new business enterprise for some entrepreneurial type to farm the flies for their spit which has amazing stickability and anti-gravitational properties.

Fly glue would surely surpass the adhesiveness of elephant glue.

This is an opportunity for our council to act and protect each and every ratepayer against these invaders.

Who will join me in a march to "Forbid the Flies" ... ?

DENISE LOCKETT
Whanganui

Maori withdrawal

We have seen, in recent times, a Brexit in which Britain withdraws from Europe, and I think that we are seeing at Waitangi a "Mexit" , a withdrawal of Maori from New Zealand.

Every year the Treaty of Waitangi is celebrated, not as the basis of one nation but of Maori grizzling. This year the Prime Minister is forbidden to speak.

In Potonga's view: "Maori incorporations and Treaty settlements are just more of the same old colonial practices and assimilation and social engineering."

That seems to mean that Maori are not interested in the big, wide world but want to retreat into the bush and keep the pre-1840 way of life. It was that attitude that created the Land Wars.

What about embracing the big, wide, exciting new world? You grow in every way when you gain competence in everyday living tasks, adopt a worthy and practical set of values, hold rational beliefs and behave in an appropriate, rational and responsible manner.

TOM PITTAMS
Whanganui