Save the NZ Wairau River Inc.

Monday, August 13, 2007
Posted in Environment | Tagged Environment

Lipitor Online Buy Lipitor Erythromycin Online Buy Coumadin Penisole Online Buy Phentrimine Zelnorm Online Buy Elavil Flomax Online Buy Aldactone

Today, Save the Wairau River Inc. has formally appointed BrandNew, a Wellington-based firm of communications advisors. BrandNew’s mission will be to assist Save the Wairau in its campaign to remove the threat hanging over the iconic river on which Marlborough’s economy and quality of life depends.

A panel of commissioners, appointed by the Marlborough District Council, has recently ruled, in an interim decision, that TrustPower of Tauranga, an Infratil subsidiary, can divert up to sixty percent of the median flow of the Wairau into a massive, fifty-kilometre trench for use in electricity generation.

The Department of Conservation and other submitters have already appealed to the Environment Court on grounds of the excessive ecological damage this scheme will entail. Save the Wairau plan to be a party to these appeals and anticipate that they too will be appealing to the Environment Court.

Rapid climate change is a great danger facing New Zealand society. It is important to generate electricity using non-carbon emitting technologies. However, the collapse of previous societies has been mainly due to their degradation of the environments from which they drew their livelihoods. Though New Zealand needs to increase its generating capacity, that does not mean that all non-carbon emitting generation projects should be grasped at, no matter what their cost to the environment.

Several expert witnesses at the Marlborough District Council’s hearings detailed many of the alternative, more modern and less expensive methods of increasing the nation’s electricity supply using non-carbon emitting technologies. The preferential adoption of such eco-friendly technologies is a question of the Government’s will and ability to organise the nation’s affairs as effectively as possible.

Save the Wairau plan to raise around $100,000 to fight the decision and to bring to public notice the folly and unnecessary damage to one of the nation’s most valuable and complex eco-systems that will be caused by TrustPower of Tauranga’s� project, should it go ahead.

In the words of Hugh Steadman, Chairman of Save the Wairau “TrustPower’s proposal is an unimaginative and environmentally hazardous scheme using outdated technology. It is the wrong project on the wrong river. New Zealander’s must unite in rejecting it - lest a similar disaster befall a river near them.”