Bruce Bisset: Still standing up for the planet

Seems to me it's easy for anniversaries to slip by unremarked, especially if you're male.
Weddings, funerals, birthdays; we blokes aren't good at keeping the right dates in mind.
Almost missed a significant one myself this month. Five years: that's how long I've been penning these columns for HB Today, for the benefit of all its readers. At least, benefit is the intent!
Goodness! Five years, eh? In which time I've been called everything from disgusting to legendary, and written pieces on anything from economics to philosophy.
But my main focus, as regular readers will know, concerns what I regard as the number one crisis of our times: the state of planet Earth's environment.
Now, in raising any subject my task is both to inform and provoke, the better to elevate an issue in public debate. If sometimes I get up people's noses, tough; that's the job, and I won't shirk from it just because some folk don't like to hear a different view.
For example, people think I'm hard on farmers, and maybe that's true - but only because most farmers simply don't get it. That the way they farm - the "traditional" clear-felled mono-crop plus chemicals pasture uber alles - is unsustainable.
Moreover I get tired of farming "rights" groups presuming to usurp precious resources - water being the most contentious - purely on the excuse of making money. Ah, hello! How disconnected from the land is that?
I can be pretty terse with councils, too, and for much the same reasons; they neither plan nor enforce well enough to ensure a sustainable future. Proper land management should be the number one priority, for without the land we are nothing.
But "proactive" and "council" rarely share the same breath.
That said, things have improved - marginally. With the exception of Napier City, which doesn't seem to care about the condition of the land it sits on, all the Bay's local bodies have upped their practices and are, slowly, creeping toward a holistic model of resource management.
But they still kowtow to interest groups at the expense of every other citizen far too often - and I include government departments in that bag, especially the Ministry of Health. Fluoridation, immunisation, agrichemical drift, effluent disposal and runoff: four examples of MoH bias, either too strict or too lax, which catch local councils staring dumbly like possums at headlights.
As if they never heard of the precautionary principle. Or an individual's right to self-determination. Evidently they consider the position of councillor negates the ability to think for one's self.
So much so that the only body charged with oversight of the environment (the regional council) appears now to believe it can do away with itself and everything will be fine. Why else subscribe to Hastings' Mayor Yule's amalgamation drive? Don't get me started!
What's most disappointing is that while what small positive steps there have been have been taken primarily because of environmental lobbyists, those gains have not translated into public support for said lobbyists.
We have the same old cosy knitting circles dropping a few stitches and picking up a few pearls, but without any clear support for the "greenies" working to effect such design change.
It's the same nationally - and internationally, too. The more evidence there is for the need for radical action, the more intransigent (or at best merely tinkering) the incumbents become. And even with a wave of popular support rising for environmental issues, with rare exceptions that isn't being translated into pro-environment votes.
Almost as if the world's population is caught up in doomsday belief: the secret acknowledgement that things are too far gone for anything to be done to stop the end, so let's just sit tight, keep the ship steady, and quietly await our fate.
Pish! Tosh! say I. Are we grown so soft - so decadent - that we give up without a fight? Not on my watch! So I'll plug on, bringing you news and views on as wide a range of issues as I think deserve scrutiny, and trust I canvas them well enough that whether or not you agree you at least exercise your grey matter - maybe enough to take one small step for change.
Even when we need to run, we must still take care to learn to walk. That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.