David and I were in agreement that there we must change the standards for freshwater to be genuinely swimmable. We agree that we need a price on the commercial use of water, urgently.
In the wake of the debacle that is the National Government’s new ‘water quality’ policy how about we look at what should be done.
First up, change the government. It’s blatantly obvious that not only will National never do the right thing, but they are in fact taking the piss. So it’s worth voting on the left on water alone. Best case scenario is a strong Labour/Green coalition government with enough Green MPs to bring about real change in policy. I hope both parties campaign hard on water over the next 7 months.
We can see Labour and the Greens have some initial overlap already. This from Green MP Catherine Delahunty,
David and I were in agreement that there we must change the standards for freshwater to be genuinely swimmable. We agree that we need a price on the commercial use of water, urgently.
Great to see an intentional indication of where the two parties already agree. The Greens naturally enough have a stronger stance,
… we have to abandon a corporate agriculture that is trashing our waterways and that Fonterra, the Government, Councils and the irrigation companies do not have a mandate from the people of this country for business as usual. The Regional Councils are developing complex long-term plans to mitigate the pollution of freshwater but unless they help change the system the diffuse pollution of rivers and lakes will continue.
That’s a range of cutting edge solutions on saving our water that are still doable for the mainstream. For two mainstream political parties I think it’s worthy and worthwhile supporting as a starting point.
And it’s not enough. It’s still adapting around a fundamentally unsustainable death cult that says the growth economy is what sustains us, instead of seeing the economy as something that arises from and is utterly dependent upon the natural world. National are hell bent on maximum extraction before collapse. The mainstream culture is still trying to balance having rivers to swim in but let’s do the least amount in order to have that, because, the economy. Note that Delahunty uses the word mitigate in reference to Regional Council long term plans. That means limit the damage we are going to keep doing or that we can’t control under the current and intended systems we have. The Greens are taking a bold stand to do better than that, and we need change within the culture (that’s us) to support them.
A while back I put up a post about water and cultural values, which I will quote the last part of below. If we truly want to get this right then we have to make the decision to value water in its own right, not just as a resource for us to manage. We will also have to make the choice to prioritise water over money. Water is life. This is the fight that’s coming down hard and fast on the planet as whole, it’s what’s been happening at Standing Rock, it’s why people are risking prison to resist. We have to make the connections between the growth economy, capitalism, bottled water, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the looming water wars, drought, climate change, climate change wars, industrial dairying, disease, species extinction, ecological collapse, and our deep desire to be able to swim in our own goddam rivers, and know that they are all the same thing and that it just has to stop. Water is both the front line and the rallying cry.
I don’t expect Labour or the Greens to push this more than they are, because their job is bring government policy into being that the mainstream can align with. But there is no reason that we cannot lead the way from outside of parliament.
From the post on Water and Cultural Values,
There is something very wrong with this picture. It’s the cultural values that see water primarily as a resource to be managed, whether that’s for commerce or recreation. Waterways have no intrinsic value. Water is there for our use and if we manage it right then all will be well, as if we have ever been smart enough to know how to manage it right. But a culture that doesn’t expect to drink from the rivers will also not look after them to a standard that supports the ecosystem that the water itself is dependent on. Water is life not just because we need to drink it, but because everything we have depends on the environment we live in being healthy and sustaining itself over time. The Standard commentor Roy Cartland,
Wade-able, swimmable, drinkable: these are all standards lower than what most fish can survive at. Just because an adult human can drink it, does not mean an ecosystem can survive in it. We need higher standards than any party is promoting.
(I got all that and more from Mike Joy’s lecture.)
Let’s look at a different set of values. The Māori Party alone say fresh water should be safe to drink, swim in, and gather kai from. In their policy on water they frame it as a taonga.
Water – Te Mana o Te Wai
The Māori Party established Te Mana o Te Wai – the health and well-being of our water – as a driving policy for freshwater management. The three elements of Te Mana o Te Wai are:
te hauora o te wai – the health and mauri (quality and vitality) of water
te hauora o taiao – the health and mauri of the environment and
te hauora o te tangata – the health and mauri of the people.
The Māori Party want to “ensure that Te Mana o Te Wai remains as the overarching objective for freshwater management”.
Leaving aside issues of the Māori Party’s dilemma in supporting National (please, not in this conversation*), what would it look like if NZ decided that the mana of the water was the guiding principle not just for all decisions but for the very relationship we have with water itself?
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* seriously, no gratuitous Māori Party-bashing. If you think you can make an argument about the Māori Party’s usefulness in this debate make sure you back it up from their policy and actual voting record and relate your comment back to the post, but really I’d much prefer it if people took the post seriously and looked at the cultural values being expressed. Generic comments about the Māori Party as National Party stooges will be shifted and likely result in a ban on the basis of derailment.
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