The Bay of Plenty Times welcomes letters and comments from readers. Below you can read the letters we have published in your newspaper today.
TODAY'S LETTERS:
Why do these people seem so negative?
Why is this group of people led by Basil Graeme, and pretending to represent the view of Forest and Bird, so negative in their outlook?
Why didn't they make a photo of the healthy clean sand flats of the Waikaraka Estuary where the mangroves were removed years earlier?
If they had done so, they could have told the people of Tauranga how removing the mangroves increases the flow of the tide.
This then washes away the anaerobic mud, which was there before among those mangroves, so creating conditions in which natural processes can now take place.
Niwa was involved in this work and fully approved it.
Give it a few more years and everybody will be thankful that EBOP had the courage to do something about this problem. If only this group would spend their time on the stinking sea lettuce problem!
HANS ZUUR Avenues
Climate change
Recent events - floods in Australia, spring droughts in Northland and Waikato, record blizzards across North America and Western Europe, confirm that climate change (formerly known as global warming) is real.
Also confirmed at the Climate Change Conference in Cancun is a reluctance of the world's largest emitters - China, India and the US - to voluntarily shoot themselves in the head.
We need to move forward to mitigating against, rather than preventing rising, CO2 levels.
We could take a lead from our English forebears' Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred the Unready and have our airports closed with snow - or we could invest my 4c/1 carbon tax in water storage/irrigation, all-weather infrastructure rather than buying ETS credits from closed-down Ukrainian factories.
ROSS W OGLE Tauranga
Know your neighbour
With regard to the front page (December 27) and the ransacking, burglary, and arson of a property in Papamoa, while it is deplorable, let it be a lesson to neighbours to be neighbourly.
We should know our neighbours at least, not to be in each other's pockets but, should one be away, then at least one of the others takes a wander around their property at different times.
If for nothing else, so it looks as if somebody is around.
Regrettably in this modern age, lots of this has gone out with common sense's demise.
And make no mistake, the crooks are thoroughly aware of it.
R McGUINNESS Cherrywood
Teachers do great job
I have never met a teacher who does not work at least half of their school holidays, if not more.
The teachers I know also regularly end up doing work in the evenings and the weekends - and then there are the overnight school trips - all part of the job!
My children's teachers, and family members and friends who teach, are incredibly dedicated and hard working.
I am very happy to think that teachers might sometimes get to have more than six weeks of actual holidays a year after four terms in the classroom, the evenings of parent teacher interviews, planning and marking, school productions, turning up to support weekend sports ... the list goes on.
I would love to teach but it's a hugely demanding job, and so undervalued.
Teachers have an enormous impact on our children's development - social, emotional, educational - and I am extremely grateful to those who have made such a difference to my children's lives.
SHARON BOYD Wellington
TEXT VIEWS
* Re McLarens Falls - let the idiots jump. If they're that damn stupid why bother trying to stop them? No great loss.
* If r p wood (Bay of Plenty Times, December 30) thinks pakeha are racist what about maori only rugby teams maori surf contest maori only sport awards just to name a few lets have a pakeha rugby team so we can be racist like u r p wood - get real is the maori party race based or what white-e
* I think police should stop doing over boy racers and stop having this power trip. We are all young once. S roach
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