Who owns it, how it got so paru (unclean) and who should foot the bill to clean it up is the hot election issue sitting alongside immigration, incarceration, homelessness, housing and health.
While we won't get the answers for who is to blame, sooner rather than later, we will have the science to back up what many of us already know.
If I had my time again, I would have liked to explore the career opportunity of becoming a toxicologist or environmental scientist.
My daughter keeps hearing me banging on about her hopefully taking this career path, as she enters her first year at secondary school. Slowly she is starting to get my message that unless we clean up our waterways, our whenua and our harbour, her generation and those to follow, will only have bottled water and buggered land as an option.
It is a question of balance, like life itself.
The balance between maximum yield using fertilisers and agrichemicals, and minimising long-term effects on our whenua (land) and waterways - without tipping into a toxic deficit.
Have we reached that tipping point? Every piece of scientific data I have read clearly warns us we are already there and it should be an election issue around who owns the water and who are kaitiaki ki te whenua (looking after the land).
What does it matter about jobs, language, inmates and immigration if our land and our waterways are pirau (poisoned) and unfit to live on?
My main concern is a process known as nitrification, whereby water bodies such as lakes, rivers and estuaries receive excess nutrients via too much fertiliser and too many cows who dump too much mimi and tiko (urine and faeces) on our whenua, setting off a cascade of environmental changes.
Where have all the copper-based and hormonal sprays gone over the past 20 years? Did the spray fairies carry them away?
Are they still in the soil and leaching into our aquifers and waterways? Only scientific testing can tell us the answer.
With a toxicity or shelf life of decades - 65 years from my research - I fear it will not be the growers who pay to clean it up, it will be us, the taxpayer.
The same can be said about where the piles of fertiliser end up after arriving by ship, then distributed by spreaders on to whenua to make the grass and the bottom line for farmers grow bigger and faster.
Way back then in Coleridge's day and my Mount College learnings, who would have thought the price of water at a gas station was going to be more expensive than the cost of petrol itself?
Who would have thought we as kaitiaki (guardians) would poison our whenua and waterways to an extent it will take a couple of generations to recover - if we stopped short-term gains and started becoming the sustainable kaitiaki our ancestors were?
I guess it will always come down to the currency we measure success with and until it is mana not money, then sadly nothing will change other than governments and climate itself.
Water is the new oil and now there is a rush on to own it, bottle it and be able to preserve its pristine status of 100 per cent pure, the brand that brings our overseas visitors to the supposed clean and green of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Finding a toxicologist is not easy. It took me a year to find a good one and we need more of them.
So what am I doing about it? I'm paying to get our whenua, waterways and harbour tested.
We need to know the true state of the nation's health and science.
broblack@xtra.co.nz
