Your views: Readers' letters

PRESSURE POINT: The problem culvert on Airport Rd where flooding has increased.PHOTO/FILE

Go, Charlie

"Councillor to fight for flood-prone residents" (Chronicle, May 13) got me sitting up and taking notice. Well done, Charlie!

Charlie Anderson is 100 per cent right and needs to be congratulated and supported.

Sadly, he is experiencing the same problems I had on the regional council; common sense came second when some engineers got involved in things.

It got worse when the engineers got a couple of elected members in their camp.

In most cases elected members didn't want to question then oppose these people who "knew it all".

Some regional councillors thought they also "knew it all" and later did not want to admit they got it wrong. Thankfully, they are no longer on the council. Fortunately, in the case of the regional council, we now seem to have a qualified river engineer who listens to the community and sees the big picture. Climate change and increased river levels will not be restricted by concrete walls like they had in Edgecumbe or mounds of dirt on the side of the river. The pure power of this increased water flow in many countries has changed the game forever.

I was involved when the culverts beside State Highway 3 could not carry the increased water from Marybank and Kaitoke and flooded our southern entry to the city, plus flooded a couple of houses. Transit cleaned up the copious weed and rubbish, lifted one side of the drain by a metre and lifted the road level. Problem solved? Nope, it certainly removed the flooding from State Highway 3 but pushed the water into paddocks adjoining Airport Rd.

With increased housing along Airport Rd/Wikitoria Rd, flooding has increased.

This increased water level can't flow under the substandard Airport Rd culvert and make its way downhill to the river. It needs an open-span bridge or far bigger pipes.

Horizons' reports say this culvert is under capacity and should be upgraded. On the river side of Airport/Wikitoria roads there is a natural flood plain, currently farm land.

Stick to your guns, Charlie, and you will be proved right by using "common sense".

BOB WALKER
St John's Hill

Apology

I would like to apologise to regional council staff for comments made by my husband Fred in Tuesday's Chronicle.

It is one thing to criticise government policies and management procedures but quite another to have a go at staff. These days staff in Government departments have little ability to question the wishes of management, who in turn are responding to intense political pressure from Government.

It has been especially difficult for environmental agencies to carry out work under this National-led Government, as there has been great pressure to sacrifice environmental protection goals in favour of economic development.

There are plenty of examples of lack of oversight, especially with regard to water management standards.

Years of budget cutting have also led to fragmentation and competition amongst agencies who should be co-operating in pursuit of wider conservation goals.

Hopefully, the election of a new government with more enlightened views will help to rebalance effective environmental outcomes with economic activity.

DEB FREDERIKSE
Whanganui

'Flaws' rebutted

In his letter (May 1), David Gash purports to provide "good reasons why evolution fails" -- but they are not. They are opinions with no supporting empirical evidence and no cited scientific sources.

This is the long-established practice of the "intelligent design" (ID) community. But tested in high-level courts in US and Europe, they have been seriously defeated.

In December 2005, in Dover, Pennsylvania, Judge Jones ruled that "intelligent design arguments ... were nothing more than religion dressed up as science". (online as Case No 04cv2688)

I have been revisiting The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution by Sean S Carroll, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have focused on Mr Gash's examples: Impossibility of species evolution from earlier different forms; insufficiency of time for mutations to effect random change, and the evolution of the eye.

This last, a supposed example of irreducible complexity, has been a "chestnut" of ID, and is reduced to nonsense by failure to recognise the variety of eyes (some 40-plus) and recent research findings of "eye toolkit" genes that span a wide variety of species and long periods of time.

Dr Michael Behe, spokesman for the intelligent design case above, was castigated by Judge Jones and further embarrassed when, within a year of claiming there were "no transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales to their land dwelling Mesonychid ancestors", three transitional species were identified.

In every instance, Prof. Carroll provides scientific, research-based rebuttal of Mr Gash's claims.

Turning to the pressure on school boards to have intelligent design taught as an "alternative theory", he recounts that in Wisconsin in 2004, such a situation brought written dissent from scientists, teachers and 188 pastors of Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist -- and finally more than 10,000 clergy across the US.

In part their letter read: "We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or treat it as "as one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and to transmit such ignorance to our children." (Abridged)

RUSS HAY
Whanganui