Letters: Please don't sell our water

Private companies are buying up the rights to water for bottling plants.

Community first please
I read with deep concern your front page article on a local company's application to Horizons to set up a water bottling company on a coastal Whanganui aquifer. You report that Whanganui District Council would also need to consent to the building of a water bottling plant.

This is not just happening in Whanganui but around the world. Private companies are buying up the rights to water for bottling plants. They lock in 25 or 30 years of permission to bottle the water. They know that with the world's ever-growing population and the increasing effects of climate change causing drought, water is becoming a scarce and valuable commodity.

If this bottling company is given consent by both Horizons and Whanganui District councils, it will open the door to many more such private companies taking control of our water. The residents of Whanganui, factories and businesses and agriculture need adequate water supplies for the future. We should not be turning over a public resource to private control for profit and threaten the amount of water needed by the city.

Also these water bottling plants greatly increase single use plastics which are overwhelming the world's beaches and oceans. Millions of plastic bottles are used once and thrown away.

I sincerely hope the district and regional councils will keep the community's need for adequate future water supply in mind when considering these applications.
DONNA MUMMERY
Whanganui

SEE ALSO
Editorial: Water soon to be as precious as oil?

Muddled science
Dennis Nitschke (Oct 15) has his science muddled. Statistically, the threat of nuclear war is more likely now than when he was a kid hiding under his desk. And there is no scientific dispute about climate warming being due to humans farming too many cattle, burning too much fossil fuel and burning down too many forests.

The hypothesis that eating fat causes heart attacks has indeed been modified, but the hypothesis Professor Svante Arrhenius made in 1896 about increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 causing our planet's temperature to increase proportionally has been repeatedly confirmed.

Is Mr Nitschke unaware of the unprecedented melting of the Arctic Sea, the Antarctic and Greenland icecaps and the world's glaciers? Of the heatwaves in Australia, Europe, America and the Middle East? The huge typhoons? The great floods? The disappearing coral reefs? The unprecedented forest fires in Indonesia, the US, Alaska, the Amazon, Spain, Siberia - and Nelson? Did he not look out his window and notice how little snow there was on the Ruahine Range this winter, where within my lifetime there used to be a ski field on the deep all-winter snow?

Every New Zealand child learns about the carbon cycle at school, and every Year 12 Biology student since the 1960s has learnt about animal populations growing faster and faster then collapsing suddenly to small numbers when the environmental changes they produce make life unsuitable for so many of them. As our biology students observe their elders destroying more and more carbon-absorbing trees, and replacing them with more and more carbon-belching farm animals, every one of them can perceive the imminent collapse of the planet's human population.

The best proof of the coming environmental collapse is from Donald Trump. We all know he is a compulsive liar, and he has categorically denied the existence of any climate crisis.
JOHN ARCHER
Ohakune

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