Trickle, Trickle

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 317, 20 July 1945, Page 5

Trickle, Trickle

T is as easy to be extravagant about a book as about a man, and just as dangerous. But we are prepared to take a risk with the book on erosion noticed on pages 6, 7, 8. Although it is not the first New Zealand book on the subject, or the second, it is so much more important than any other that our grandchildren may easily date their victory over erosion from its first appearance. Alternatively posterity may point to it as a warning which, if it had been regarded, might have saved New Zealand from another century of drift. For it is not merely a caution the author gives us: it is a loud shout of alarm. When allowance has been made for his emotional excitement, for overemphasis by the camera, and for all the things he says, or suggests, that he has not been long enough at work to prove, there remains a plainly horrifying picture of ignorance, carelessness, and waste. It is true that his photographs, diagrams, and maps show the things that are wrong and not the things that are right. If all the land-slips and gutters in this book were concentrated in a single area they might fill as much space as one fair-sized sheep run; and it is necessary to remember that to keep the ,picture as a whole in focus. But it is necessary to remember also that. the illustrations cover the whole area from Southland to East Cape and from Tauranga to North Cape; that the text is even more alarming than the illustrations if read with imagination; and that there is the clearest evidence everywhere of a dangerous acceleration of the rate of destruction during the last 30 or 40 years. It is a pity that the author, whose purpose is to arouse public interest, writes so often in language that the public will not understand. His answer would perhaps be that the language of salvation has never been easy.