Garth George: What next for our troubled waters

Let's get one thing straight: No one owns our water. It was here long before Maori ever arrived on these shores and will be there long after all of us are gone from this world, some of us to a new heaven and a new Earth.

That 15 per cent of our population can hold the nation to ransom over ownership of a resource without which life cannot exist is nothing short of blackmail or, as some have labelled it, brownmail. And as for designating the Whanganui River as a "person", whatever will Maori and their sympathisers come up with next?

However, the one thing this extraordinary controversy has done is to focus attention on water. And what we should all do - Maori, Pakeha, and everyone else - is take a much closer look at the state of this life-giving and life-sustaining resource. Because all is not well with it. In fact, very little is well with it.

Since my childhood and youth spent at the bottom of the South Island, rivers and lakes have been important and much-loved features of my environment and 35-odd years in the wilderness of metropolitan Auckland did nothing to dim their appeal. Nowadays, I get a glimpse of Lake Rotorua every time I glance out the windows in our dining room and have dozens of other lakes and their inflowing streams close at hand. Most of them suffer the deleterious effects of intensive agriculture and its run-off, yet others are relatively unsullied.

Lake Okataina, for instance, on fine days is as near to an environmental paradise as you'll find anywhere on Earth and every time I go there I find myself praising God yet again for the wonder and beauty of his creation.

Then there's the sea, whose shores are one place I'm always happy to be. I can sit and watch the ocean for hours. Days spent at Mt Maunganui and weeks at Ohope are features of any year. Yet the state of our seas and waterways has been of only passing interest to me since I still get pure water at the turn of a tap and was under the impression that much was being done to reduce pollution inflows to our lakes, rivers and oceans to rectify the damage already done.

Not so. According to the Green Party, which has banged on about water quality year in and year out since it entered Parliament, half of our monitored rivers are unsafe for swimming, one-third of our lakes are unhealthy, and two-thirds of our freshwater fish are at risk. Our freshwaters face increased pollution from agriculture, horticulture and sewerage, and increased demand from irrigation, industry and urban use.

Some years ago, at the party's annual meeting, co-leader Russel Norman put it this way: "Our rivers are quite literally so full of crap that they are dangerous to human health," and, giving examples, "our beaches are dangerous for swimming because of the faecal bacteria flushed out of our rivers and into the sea".

Well, I should have known better, anyway, since I am well aware of the smoke-and-mirrors antics of governments, whose leaders make a big fuss, call lots of meetings, make lots of promises and spend millions on advertising while bugger all gets done at the river or lakeside.

Dr Norman painted a sinister, but only too believable, picture of governments held to ransom by industry and business with vested interests in the use of water, and, surprisingly, numbered among them Landcare, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and even the Department of Conservation.

These are the things we should all be raising hell about, not who owns the stuff. It might even be an idea to give Maori stewardship all of it. At least they seem to care.

- garth.george@hotmail.com