EROSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 5

EROSION

Sir,-It is good that you should call attention to the question of erosion and its complement reafforestation. On a long view it is perhaps the most important question of domestic policy, or rather statesmanship. For on our will to take it in hand depends the whole future of New Zealand: whether we shall remain a fertile and prosperous country, or an impoverished variant of the Dustbowl. We have inherited a fertile coun- + try. What have we done with it in 100 | years? We have destroyed nine-tenths of | the forest, and are destroying what is :

left a hundred times as fast as it can be replaced, There is no scientific control of lumbering. Anyone with sufficient pull can get a licence to cut any part of the bush, however disastrous the effects may be. "An aristocracy plants trees: a democracy cuts them down." Unfortunately there are no votes to be got out of it, Three-year Parliaments don’t produce 30, 50, or 100-year long-term Policies,

The timber famine of the future is bad enough, but the erosion that follows unrestricted exploitation of the bush is worse. The last big flood caused almost incredible erosion on the East Coast. We are bound to have big floods again and again, and each succeeding flood will do more damage than the last. All our best lands are valley silts and it is first these that suffer most. Eskdale was the latest sample. Coupled with the economic is the aesthetic side of the question. Are we going to allow our beautiful scenery to be ruined by a selfish determination to get present luxury and comfort-even at the expense of our descendants? We have only to see what has happened at Taupo to understand how a narrow and uncultured procedure can do irreparable harm, The blasting away of all the island, rocks and rapids between Taupo and Huka was a piece of brutal vandalism, very costly and quite useless for the purpose it was intended for. And now we are promised further mutilations at Huka and Aratiatia. I am old-fashioned enough to think that the Government ought to consider itself trustee for the unborn generations as well as the present. So far we have

been fraudulent trustees, wasting the capital to satisfy our immediate greed.K. E. CROMPTON, M.B. (Havelock North).

Sir,-In an article "Sleepers Awake" (Listener, July 20), dealing with soil erosion in New Zealand, the author’s statements regarding Region III. are inaccurate, In the first place the Esk Valley and the Te Ngaru Valley are six miles apart and not one and the same as the author suggests; neither is the Tangoio school a new structure "out on the silted flat," but a building reconditioned after the earthquake and standing on high ground, none of which was touched by flood waters. The derelict chimney stacks are not the result of the flood, but of the earthquake, which rendered the dwellings uninhabitable and so were pulled down. I agree with the author that the general appearance of the Te Ngaru Valley is one of decrepitude, but only because it is farmed by natives, who take no interest in their land when so much can be earned so easily elsewhere. The silting of the Esk and the Ngaru Valleys was due to the shattering of the hillsides by the 1931 earthquake. This is proved by the severe flood of 1924, when 17 inches of rain fell in under four hours and yet no silting occurred. WAIPAHIHI (Tangoio).