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I live in New Zealand, known for having more sheep than people, hobbits, rugby and probably other things too? We also market ourselves as being clean and green despite being anything but. 72% of our freshwater fish are at risk of, or threatened with extinction, 30% of our plants and invertebrates as well. Most of our rivers aren't swimmable any more due to pollution from high intensity dairy farming. Our government announced they would fix this, by simply changing the standards so that what was once "wadeable" is now "swimmable" and what was once a "B" rank is now an "A". 30% of our country is classed as conservation land, with varying levels of protection. One of these classifications is what's known as "stewardship land", which is basically held by the government but not really actively looked after. It lacks the management plans and legal status of things like national parks, and most importantly, it can be "swapped" for private land if there's a "net benefit". In practice this means private developers are constantly trying to get bits of pristine but less-protected conservation land swapped with land that they either own or lease from the public under various nebulous claims of "net benefit". To quote Forest and Bird about a recent swap: quote:The proposed swap could not be described as a land exchange. A foreign-controlled company would be given a freehold on publicly owned land with high conservation value in return for giving up a lease on land under no conservation threat and which is already owned by the New Zealand public. A huge portion of our water that isn't used up on farm irrigation is instead bottled up and sold overseas by companies that don't pay anything to take it, instead simply buying water permits from farmers that sell them for in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tourism is near breaking point. 100000+ people walk the tongariro alpine crossing per year now. An average day has more than 600 people go over it, with all the wonderful rubbish left behind that you'd expect. Tourism operators keep trying to get more concessions to helicoptor people into remote areas, build private lodges (turning public land into private land that no one else can use) and just get more and more people using their services despite the cost to the environment from things like fragile alpine moss being trampled and such. On the plus side, we still have a strong conservation community here, due to a long tradition of trampers and hunters and a general public attraction to the whole "100% pure NZ" ideal. Federated Mountain Clubs and Forest and Bird campaign constantly and have had a number of wins in the courts, and famously got called "hysterical" by our ex-PM when they released leaked documents showed the government was going to allow mining in a number of national parks that contained endangered trees, native frogs and so on. Then it turned out that oh yes, that was actually true, and the government had to drop the whole thing due to public outcry. We, unfortunately, don't have a strong protest culture here. Lots of the usual "they're all bums, why aren't they looking for a job instead of pissing off people all day" rhetoric. Our national indigenous population, the Maori, are much better at it, with Hikois about lots of things. They also have a number of rights under the Treaty of Waitangi which help to strengthen conservation stuff, as they need to be consulted for many things, and their culture has a spiritual link to the land which means they tend to oppose mining etc. as from their point of view you're drilling into their ancestor. DOC (department of conservation) is severely under-funded, but at least we don't have a prime minister who flatout killed funding to it. Or whatever exactly it is Trump did. And Peter Thiel is a NZ citizen because he donated some money to local startups which is just loving lol.
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Apr 27, 2017 04:29
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:20 |
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