Glasseye Vision

As I bus, rail, or bike around our region, utilising low-cost, clean public transport, or a network of connected cycle routes, I see safe, traffic-slowed streets with people walking, biking, scootering, or hoverboarding to school or work. Children are playing in the streets.

I see market gardens, orchards, and mixed cropping on fertile soils - such as olives, oats, and chickpeas - local food production, with local buyers, creating food resilience.

I see diverse agriculture, wood lots, with different rotation periods, instead of swaths of Pinus radiata forests. Trees in paddocks are coppiced for firewood and used for stock fodder. The steepest land is retired to native planting – allowing run-off in catchments to be slowed and soil to be preserved.

I see people swimming in clean rivers and lakes. There is a flax industry adjacent to the Clutha delta with young Kahikatea poking their heads above the harakeke, to be revered and carefully utilised by generations to come.

So, let's stop allowing “development” in places subject to natural hazards and paying the price when a hazard impacts. Let’s not put our reliance on flood control schemes that constrain the natural habit of waterways and often result in catastrophic flooding when they are overwhelmed (see Room for the river). Let’s continue to support and encourage water care groups that are restoring wetlands and protecting riparian margins, slowing run-off and reducing flood flows.

Let’s minimise waste and invest in innovative energy solutions, like retrofitting housing to high insulation standards, ground-sourced heating, solar, wind, biogas and biomass from wood waste, for example.