Dry Weather Penalties

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 447, 16 January 1948, Page 5

Dry Weather Penalties

S we write this article there has been no rain in most parts of New Zealand for more than a month. Big areas of bush and grass lie exposed to the match of the first passing fool, and only other fools are not anxious. But drought brings other anxieties as well as the fear of fire, and brings them more rapidly in normally wet areas than in the normally dry. They would be only. mildly amused in Australia to be told that we are drying up in New Zealand, but.in fact we can dry very quickly and very dangerously, as every farmer and _ fruit-grower knows, and eyery householder whose economy is tied to electric light and power and to a public supply of water. We have spent a hundred years destroying most of nature’s checks on the rapid loss of water, and it will require another hundred years, in so steep and windy’a country, to restore. those checks. In the meantime we shall live dangerously. But it is not necessary to live untidily as well. It is just disgraceful that every sea-beach handy to a New Zealand city, every frequently used area of bush, every picnic ground, and nearly every public park should be littered at this time of year with paper-bags, icecream cartons, cigarette packets, and sometimes even with discarded food. How unnecessary it all is appears at once in most of our motor-camps, where a_ tradition has been established in 10 years against untidiness and filth, and no visitor thinks of breaking it. Litter not only adds to fire risks and encourages disease. It breeds mental and moral slovenliness without any compensation at all.