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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (211926)	12/17/2012 2:49:21 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 541139

Don't forget ignorance. It's greed and ignorance. <Nope, my attitude is because there are too many <rude word>, in too many places, who value the dollar in their pocket more than the biosphere we all live in, and are willing to sacrifice the latter out of greed." > I know just what you mean, having experienced it up close and personal during my childhood 60 years ago when the despoliation of the Manukau Harbour began in earnest. As a 4 year old, it was seething with life. It was still alive though rapidly losing ground when I was 15. 10 years later it was game over. By 1989 there was nothing alive in it. Not even algae. There were probably some anaerobic bacteria which could survive lead and other toxins. The local government decided my harbour was a great place to build a sewage treatment and disposal plant, an excellent place to fill with truckloads of rubbish from the city dumped straight over the edge into the water at Pikes Point [now a light aircraft aerodrome], a suitable place for Westfield abattoirs to dump all their unwanted offal and blood, hosing the place down, rendering the harbour red when I looked up that way, with hordes of seagulls flying up that way in the evening [many thousands], an acceptable place for Pacific Steel and hundreds of surrounding industries to empty waste, and for hundreds of tons of lead, engine oil, tyre rubber and other detritus to run off streets via stormwater. Even with large tides washing the harbour "clean" a couple of times a day, the harbour didn't have a chance. Walking out in the harbour at low tide, my feet would sink a foot into the black ooze. Now, with all that disgusting pollution stopped, the harbour is rapidly coming back to life. Once again people can go fishing from the bridge and actually catch kawhai, though not yet schnapper, trevally and I once even caught a blue cod 50 years ago. There are not yet hordes of mullet jumping either. Nor surging sprats. Nor cockles or pipis. Governments which allowed and carried out all that destruction were not simply evil and greedy. It was mostly ignorance and economics from their points of view. But they did try to conceal the fact that mega billions of midges swarming all over us were from the sewage treatment ponds. My uncle Bill Kirk climbed the fence one night and took a sample in a jar to prove the fact that blood worms by the billion were the source of the midge problem The stinks were another matter. People had just come out of surviving [or not] journeys to NZ from war torn poverty in Europe, world war I, the great depression and world war II. They were finally getting going so the harbour came second. Mqurice PS: That's just one example of harm. A huge one which largely escaped attention was the damage to brains from lead in petrol, aka gasoline. People are not aware of the scale of the damage, which was really all to no avail as lead was not necessary to avoid knock. It was a cheap way of making petrol which wouldn't cause knock, but it didn't give good performance, it polluted the engine oil, caused knock through deposits on the piston, which required carcinogenic lead scavengers to avoid excess, it fouled spark plugs, poisoned brains and made working on cars a health hazard. Fortunately for the USA, they had smog, which was solved [in part] by using catalytic converters, which required no lead. So the smog saved people from being poisoned by lead. Smog is nasty enough, but lead actually damages brains. Without the smog, lead would have been used for another couple of decades.