Advice

Advice

An old saying close to my heart is, ‘In this world there are sayers and there are doers.’ The further back I go in my life, practical people are the who doing the doing, while others yak on and come up with all sorts of flowery, even wild ideas. During my old forestry days, every now and then we would have young fellas, straight out of university, come on site full of bright ideas they wanted us to try… usually at expense, but always those things had already been tried and rejected. We used to joke about having to break-in these new foresters, and after they see the light, they’d turn out ok. Another quirk was when I was told before starting my assignment in Africa, that the women of the country did all the work and men sat around all day planning and actually did little. To the casual observer that may be so, but it wasn’t the case, the elderly men certainly sat around planning, but those criticising, and  is generally the trend in today’s world, is if people can get away with sitting on their arse yapping, they will.

I’m not into the air-fairy ideas that have come to the fore from on high over the last few decades, which is why I’m not at all keen on what’s emerging from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, they too are all arse-sitters. Among many things, coming down from them are rules about water, our drinking water; meanwhile it’s noticeable they aren’t doing much to help rural Africans with water! Here’s what I’ve seen about the rural water where I’ve lived for sixty-odd years. Despite what you might hear about climate change over the past sixty years I’ve monitored the rainfall in our area. We have averaged twenty-one inches of rain per annum, except during the 1960-66 severe drought. For household water we had tank water collected from house roofs… yes, in those day, our roofs were painted with lead-based paint and rats and birds drowned in the tank, dust from the roof washed into the tank when it rained. We had to clean the tank from time to time and always had to be economical with the water because of the low rainfall; buying in water was possible, but it was expensive. Livestock water was from dewponds or creeks, which is why we carefully managed livestock number.

The generally in the larger towns didn’t care about the problems of rural people… but notably, the townies who temporarily worked on the forest during the winter months, took our water home with them. Our community decided to build our own water scheme by taking out a loan for materials and each property supplied eighty hours labour. We were able to use the forest D6 bulldozer… a bit of a rort because it was actual government property, but none of the big noises knew and what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them. It was used mainly to pull in the pipe and to excavate the site of the reservoirs. Each property was entitled to four hundred gallons a day for household use and livestock water, we paid an annual rate to keep the scheme going… and we chlorinated the water.

And then the ‘bigger is better’ crowd came in where the county council amalgamated with the town council to become a district council and the district council elbowed its way in to run our water scheme. So, from practical people running the county, the airy-fairies had taken over and costs began to rise… and they wanted to put more chemicals in the water. Consultants then told the council that our water supply was substandard and recommended piping water from the mighty river thirty miles to the north, so that was done at more cost. Five years later consultants say that the district council’s water scheme no longer meets United Nations standards but the cost would be too expensive for a mere council, so the government should take over the management of water and the government wanted to bring in another layer of management, the indigenous people who believe that spirits guide water.  It turns out though that the spirits can be bought off with enough money. They also believe waters of catchments can’t be mixed, so water from one river can’t go into another, which is what the district council had us do. Right now, the future of our water looks… complicated, expensive and unknown.

During my tree nursery days, we used to sell tree seedlings to a forest outfit which was run as a aboard, a subsidiary of the local county council also tuned into a district council. The forest was established 120 years ago on a wide, flat alluvial plain that had been difficult bring under the agricultural practices of the day. The forest basically provided shelter from the sometimes-powerful northwesterly winds, fuelwood for the community, fenceposts, and timber from a sawmill that they later built. Our nursery had been selling seedings to the board for at least fifty years, and suddenly they stopped ordering. Of course, we thought that our seedlings might have been below specifications, so we called on them, but there was nothing wrong with our product.

There had been a transition from sheep farming to dairying throughout the country, (which could be made into another uninteresting essay).  Anyway, the board/council’s accountant advised that as far as land value was concerned, it was economically sensible to remove the forest and convert the land into farmland, which I’ll come back to. So, to remain their investment in forestry, they bought some gorse-covered hill country near the bigger city. As far as economics go, forestry on flat land is always advantageous because flat country is far easier to harvest and gorse control is about the most expensive of weeds to convert into forestry. Anyway, the board had to apply for resource consent before they could turn a sod… this is mainly environmental and largely depends on the attitudes of the authorities, so consent was denied… city bureaucrats aren’t keen on radiata pine forests, so it wasn’t a surprise. Because consent wasn’t approved, it cost ten million dollars to fight the authority’s decision; but they lost again. So, no trees have been planted, and to date there have been two fires through the area because of a fuel buildup. On fires…back to my forestry, before the drought of 1960 to 1966, there had been huge buildup of fuel, yet during and after the drought, we had no wildfires. I know enough about fire to with confidence say that fires seldom start naturally. I’ve seen one start by a bulldozer grouser plate creating a spark on a rock and another by a spark from the exhaust of a Champion two stroke grader, so they can easily start accidentally but too many fires these days have malicious undertones… maybe by people with an agenda.

The alluvial plain the board’s forest had sat upon was built up by mountain erosion and river action, so was very stoney and couldn’t support dairying-style grass growth the way it was. Heavy machines were brought in capable of grinding the stumps, burying the stones and lifting the silt-fines… the machine could process two hectares a day, but it was hugely expensive! And then the farmland had to be fenced and wells had to be established for irrigation. We became involved to plan and supply shelter trees, and the dairying infrastructure had to be established, so the whole process wouldn’t have been cheap. The farms were then sold off and the cows were brought in.

The dust has settled on all of this and with hindsight, while I didn’t agree with the change from sheep to dairying in the first place for reasons of ‘my-style’ of environment matters, the changes arrived, and as a result, effluent has seeped into the groundwater which justifies my stance. In the fullness of time cows are now frowned upon for their emissions by the climate change stirrers… which is a dubious theory at best. However, if the forest had continued as it had been for a hundred years, today they would be making a fortune out of the carbon credits… which again is a dubious theory but is happening and likely to continue, and that’s as well as their forestry business.

 So, when someone comes up with new theories, maybe backed up by ‘the science’, or economics, it’s any wonder I’m just a tad dubious. And for someone used to practicality and logic, the way our leaders have been performing of late makes me shake my head in wonder. Just today, some of my peers are also wondering. The Covid pandemic has left our already fragile economy in an even poorer state, which rightly has a new government cutting back on frivolous expenditure. Those among us with just a tad of common sense are asking who and why some government official thought it appropriate to approve four million dollars to a person with ‘indigenous’ links, who is playing recorded whale song to kauri trees. Kauri trees are an iconic species and they are suffering from kauri dieback, a fungal disease, and the whale song is hoped to cure them. I’ve no problem with people pursuing their own spiritual belief systems, but not at the taxpayer’s expense, especially when there’s no way such a project can be called, ‘traditional or scientific’.

 We need to be wary of from whom we take our advice.