Bruce Bisset: Turning blind eye to 'progress'

It's always amazed me how blithely New Zealanders accept or turn a blind eye to being poisoned, as if there's some subconscious need to add serpents to our paradisiacal environment to balance the boon of it.

Doubtless it's part of our cultural inferiority complex; we can't believe we deserve a land that is more-or-less perfect, so we knowingly or inadvertently work to spoil it.

Our list of crimes against both nature and nurture is long and frighteningly under-recognised: from sheep-dips to tanalised wood to 2,4-D to fibreglass batts to polyurethane to asbestos to, yes, fluoride in our water. And many more.

For a century we've built poison homes to live in, on land we poison indiscriminately, while eating food containing as many poisons as we can wash down with poisoned drink. And then we wonder where all the cancers and asthma and immune system and circulatory diseases come from.

Not to mention mental disorders resulting from toxic effects on the brain.

Of course we're not alone in this; the majority of the globe practices chemical witchcraft as if it's the preferred racial suicide choice.

But Kiwis seem to do it with a blind will and an insouciance that almost beggars belief, continuing to liberally employ deadly substances for decades after they're proven lethal.

And whereas large swathes of the planet need some encouragement to make the land produce a bounty, here we have no such excuse: our abundance of natural resources does not require artificial aid to gift us a living.

So why do we do it? Ostensibly, in pursuit of "progress".

Take the emerging crisis with nitrate concentrations in our soil and water. As a result, primarily, of the use of nitrogenous fertilisers and corollary intensification of farming (read, lots more animal excreta and siltation runoff).

Now, nitrates may seem relatively benign, but large doses are not - particularly for babies.

It's the need for more water than is otherwise available that has thrown light on this problem; the desire to "stretch" the land beyond its natural sustainable capacity in order to produce more profit.

But the drive for water storage and irrigation in Canterbury, Nelson, and Hawke's Bay - to name three current large-scale schemes - has caused scientists to examine both the likely future effects and the "baseline" status quo. And, surprise!, all three areas already have a nitrate problem.

A significant number of wells on the Canterbury and Waimea Plains have been identified as containing nitrate concentrations at or above safe drinking level. The data for Hawke's Bay is (to date) sketchy in comparison, but trending the same.

With more dairying and intensive cropping, it will be only a matter of time before town supplies are affected - at which point expensive solutions will be needed to try to maintain tap-water quality.

Is this "progress"? Not in my book.

Of course Federated Farmers have been quick to jump all over the "distorted" and "hysterical" data, citing such imperious chestnuts as "the right to farm" in defence of beating the land they mismanage to death.

The next generation won't thank them for that imbecilic attitude; but nor, likely, will much of this one if the worst-case scenarios prove correct.

But do we care? Given this problem has been quietly accumulating under our "100% Pure" noses for a century, and given our usual nonchalance toward anything chemical, then no.

I may choose to pollute my body, but at least I aim to improve the Earth around me, not despoil it. If, as a nation, we think we're doing that, we're very much mistaken.

That's the right of it.