Spare Us a Wretched Waituna

PROVIDED it’s not a case of greasing the palms of the handwringers, the Government’s willingness to stump up with money to confront the hideously imperilled Waituna lagoon is welcome.

The lagoon, and two other wetlands facing a similar scale of degradation, at Whangamarino in the Waikato and the Ashburton Lakes- Upper Rangitata area in Canterbury, will share a $2.2 million package to enhance protection.

Enhance, indeed. We await specifics of what this protection work will entail, particularly when nutrient leaching from private farmland in the Waituna catchment is such an important component in the wetland’s problems.

The three sites, Green Party conservation spokeswoman Metiria Turei says, will be test beds for developing new technologies and methods for wetland conservation. Unhappily, this test bed status exists because their state is so dire. As well as nutrient leaching we have sedimentation and invasive weeds and animal pests.

A hearts-and-minds campaign to increase public appreciation of the wetlands has already been afoot, through projects to improve public access and recreational opportunities.

It’s all well and good to make the lagoon more accessible for people in wheelchairs. But if the essential problem isn’t more effectively confronted, neither they nor anyone else would want to be within coo-ee of the place.

In case we need to be reminded, Otago University research concludes that the lagoon is so ecologically run down it could at any stage degrade into a murky algal pond. Picture, if you can, the unlovely state of Lake Ellesmere. Quite probably, you can’t.

It’s hardly an attraction, nowadays.

The boffins say the Waituna lagoon could “flip” into such a sorry state, having lost its tall water plant beds, and become a scummy soup devoid of the plant and animal life it now enjoys.

And this could happen with startling speed and haste.

Yet we can hardly protest that we haven’t been given fair warning. Waituna’s decline has been conspicuous for many years.

The Waituna Landcare Group started monthly water-quality monitoring in 2001 because of “perceived” poor water quality.

Talk then was of a co-operative path to progress. In 2005 the group obtained a Sustainable Farming Fund grant to look at ways of, ahem, lifting economic and environmental outcomes through sustainable land management practices among the farming community in the Waituna catchment.

Whatever progress can be cited since then, it hardly qualifies as the goods, does it? Now we have a big wodge of lovely money directed at the problem, and promises of even more co-operation and initiatives.

However, complainants still rumble about the inconsistency of the Southland District Council issuing permits to clear still more vegetation — native aquatic plants holding so much less appeal than native land plants.

It is easy enough to piously conclude that “something must be done” . Harder — and certainly expensive, to conclude that something must be undone. Either way, the details of the Waituna project will make interesting reading.

(c) 2007 Southland Times, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.