PLANNED EROSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 24

PLANNED EROSION

LOST LAND

N a thousand years, if New Zealand is still above water, school-children (who will talk science then instead of football and films) will argue about the Kanieri and Totara Flat corru-

gations as we do about the Moeraki boulders. Since

— vec most of them wiil not be able to read what is now called English, they will not know that thei ancestors in the first half of the 20th Century lay awake at night brooding over the loss of soil by wind and rain and by day deliberately dredged it away into the sea. The long curving ridges they will detect between 42 degrees and 43 degrees South and 170 degrees and 172 degrees East they will probably attribute to rhythmical earth movements, glacial action, or periodic floods and droughts. They may even search for a lost civilisation, and with all the confidence of their continuing ignorance discover.-buried homes and. terraced gardens. Absurder things have been done in the name of science in our own day, and since the human race, however

it changes its language and its tools, is not likely in so short a time to increase its capacity to think, there is very little chance that it will be capable ia » thousand years of reconstructing its pas! with accuracy. Foolish though it will still be, it will be ng more expert ir folly than fools usually are, and no more likely to light on our'present dredging folly than a man working on atom bombs is to light on the true story of the Siberian meteorite. Some such nonsense as this passed through my mind as I loitered in Kanieri, drove along the Ahaura Flats, and approached Ikamatua. I was not shocked by what I saw, since I am a native of the gold belt of Otago, and have lived through three wars. Nor should I have been enraged, since a man in his sixties can’t afford a brain storm every time he blunders into a booby trap for his complacency. It would have been better to remember for what a short time the human race has been human anywhere, and how amazing it is that in its first mad hour in New Zealand it has done so little damage that time will not repair. I can, and do

remember things like those sometimes, but I did not try to remember them on Totara Flat where hundreds of acres of the very best . land in Westland are being systematically destroyed. It would be an outrage if Westland were as wide asit is long, and all gooc soil. But it is a.thin strip of sour and swampy soil, with small areas of high fertility here and there. I saw nothing anywhere _ as good as those flats on the way to Ikamatua, and in a few_ years there may be nothing of them left. There will

be nothing if their life depends on the amount of gold they hide?

WHOSE — FAULT?

ba a! ~" DON’T feel like blaming the mining companies, who, no doubt, bought the land at a fair price. Eleven pounds an acre I was told was paid for one

block, and although it is to-day worth more than twice that amount for farm-

ing alone, eleven pounds must have seemed a fair price when the deal was

made or it would not have been accepted. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Nor is it reasonable to blame the government that allowed dredging to begin or later governments for allowing it to continue. Governments give effect to public opinion or disappear. If they grant privileges or issue licences it is for purposes for which the majority approve. Before they revoke an authority they believe that public support for it has already been lost. There has been no clear enough signal yet that the West Coast has turned against dredging. There has been a half-hearted demand all over the Dominion that mining should not be allowed to destroy good land. It has been half-hearted as a demand, more than half ignored as a legal requirement. Land is being destroyed every day, and nowhere that I know of is the damage being restored. Lack of labour and lack of plant, careless legislation and public indifference, the demand for gold, "the stimulation of dead settlements by a new flow of money-all these have combined to protect the dredges at the expense of the soil, and to explain why it is that there is not even an attempt made to put farming land back into farming condition once the gold has been taken out. It is humbug to blame the government. The culprits are all those electors whose silence supports the crime. For it is of course not our land. Land is a

trust whoever at the moment occupies it. It can’t be increased, but it can be destroyed, and if we do destroy it we are brigands and thieves, I don’t feel clean enough to blame anybody for the damage already done. But if the destruction continues I should not like to be on record as one of the country’s rulers when posterity gets the bill, * * *

THIS MEANS You

LITTLE way round the shore of Lake Kanieri I came on a notice to vandals that.ran something like this: Don’t think that the damage you see here was caused by goats or deer. It was caused by donkeys who had no more sense than to mutilate the growing bush. The damage was not very severe-half-a-dozen saplings barked and broken on the very edge of the water. I con-

cluded that the lake had watchful guardians, and longed at

te once to help them But I should like to be sure that their method is good. Direct talk, I am afraid, is like direct action-good at the right time and right place, but then not often possible. A vandal caught in the act might be influenced by a sufficiently scathing reproof; but a young fool contemplating a notice like that, in company with two or three

other young fools, since they are seldom solitary, would be more likely to add to his list, and to mix some profanity with it. I certainly saw no. sign as I walked .on that this had happened, though the original offence was months old, and I may be wrong in supposing that it is likely to happen. But there is not much evidence that slanging people reforms them unless they are reasonably reformable to begin with. I don’t know the cure for vandalism. We must, I think, resist the impulse to make the punishment fit the difficulty of conviction (like the punishment for sheep-stealing);. but it might be worth trying to make the punishment fit the crime. If the destroyer of trees had to give up football for a few week-ends and ‘work at forestry, and the mutilator of monuments had to report every Friday night for street-cleaning-in both cases unde: rigorous discipline — it is possible that they would end with a little respect for public property.. Perfectionists, of course, tell us that reform must begin in the school and at home, but that is just a lazy evasion. The problem is to know what to do with those who have not been made safe in school and homewhat to do with them in a country that on the physical side stimulates the desire for sensation and on the spiritual side thwarts and starves it. (To be Continued.)