Brian Rudman: Keep taking the pill, Waikato water won't do it

The Greens can be a contrary lot. One of their core faiths has always been the redeeming qualities of recycling - plastic, paper, glass, bodily wastes. According to the Green good book, the road to Earth's salvation is paved with bricks of the aforementioned.

And setting a shining example is co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, who proudly composts her own sewage, then dines on the plump veges that flourish on her reprocessed goodness.

Why then, you might ask, is she - and her off-offsider, Nandor Tanczos - joining in the latest scaremongering about recycling Waikato River water for use in the Auckland water supply. Surely using this water is a wonderful example of a large community practising the message the Greens have long preached.

The only difference between the two methods of recycling as far as I can see is that the scientific processes being used in the water reprocessing are much less hit and miss than what goes on in Fitzsimons' Coromandel manure heap.

Still, this is the same politician who believes you can rid the country of possums by spraying them with the ground-up bits and pieces of some of their unfortunate in-laws.

Fitzsimons argues that Auckland doesn't need to increase its water supply. She also worries about overseas reports that river water, used further upstream for water and sewage disposal, carries female hormones from the urine of contraceptive pill users.

On the need for more water, Fitzsimons is just plain wrong. Unless, that is, we Aucklanders are happy to uglify the environment with backyard roof tanks, and to agree to ration our usage during periods of drought.

She obviously wasn't around during the drought of 1994 when Aucklanders bayed for the blood of politicians who hadn't prepared for such an eventuality. In one of those rare instances of regional unity, local politicians were subsequently unanimous in the need to build better safeguards into the supply system.

Every local creek and pond and underground aquifer was surveyed and it soon became apparent that the only option, to cover both population growth and future droughts, was the mighty Waikato River.

This wasn't a secret or underhand decision as some now imply. The consultation process was long and involved. And the decision, when made, was uncontroversial.

The other Green concern is that the female hormone oestrogen from birth control pills could get into the water supply and play havoc with your and my and the kids' systems. John Gaston, the consultant on the new Waikato treatment plant, says that if any oestrogen is in the Waikato River intake - and research has so far not found any - the carbon filters in the treatment plant will remove them, along with other similar "endocrine disruptors".

Gaston spent 20 years with the California Department of Health, five of those as chief engineer. He was also chairman of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's national drinking water advisory council. Probably no organisation in the world has spent more time and money investigating water quality issues than USEPA.

I must say that if I had to choose between the word of Gaston, who says the water will be safe and will come from the most sophisticated water plant in the Southern Hemisphere, and the fears of the Greens and the Water Pressure Group's Penny Bright, who will be stirring things up at a public meeting tonight, it's a no contest.

Unless it's all part of a dastardly plot to poison us all - to say nothing of the Australians as well, where Gaston is also advising on several plants - why would he lie?

Certainly we should all be concerned about the impact of manmade chemicals on the health of humans, and indeed every other living organism on the planet. The EPA has identified and is ploughing its way through 87,000 potentially dangerous chemicals loose in the environment.

Up to 500 chemicals could be in our bodies in measurable amounts that were not there 40 years ago.

These come from the materials used to build the new-fangled products of modern living - things like aeroplanes, cars, buildings, electrical wiring, food additives and shampoos.

Some scientists are proposing that many of these chemicals are mimicking oestrogen, disrupting the glands and hormones of humans and wildlife.

In 1992, a study by Elisabeth Carlsen proposed that the sperm count of healthy males in the industrialised world had declined by 50 per cent in the past 50 years. Subsequent studies have challenged this theory.

But even in Auckland there seems to be support for it. Dr John Peek, scientific director at Fertility Associates, says that between 1987 and 1993 the average sperm concentration among donors at his clinic dropped from some 130 million sperm a millilitre of ejaculate to about 70 million. He hasn't analysed subsequent data but estimates the decline has evened out.

The point of all this is that this decline began years ago, while we have all been drinking water from the so-called pristine supply lakes of the Hunua and Waitakere forest catchments. These are the sources the Greens are holding up as the healthy alternative.

Common sense surely suggests that wherever these nasties are coming from, our scientifically processed water supply - both the existing and the new source - are probably the last places to start looking.