Environment – Baseline blues

Sometimes living in an expansive, rural landscape on the edge of New Zealand’s biggest city has disadvantages. We can feel like a dumping ground, expected to accommodate the region’s infrastructure, utilities and extractive industries with few of the benefits. The proposed Dome landfill and seabed mining at Pakiri/Mangawhai are examples of huge proposals that capitalise on Rodney’s proximity to Auckland, and our natural resources, including space.

It’s not just all new infrastructure either, but also infrastructure that has been here for so long it’s now part of the landscape itself. These include power pylons that stretch through the district, dominating the skyline and emitting radiation. Meanwhile, our own access to secure power supplies, good internet and good local roads are all subsumed to the broader regional or national demands.

We are also a preferred site for other industrial land uses. Near me, for instance, there are arrays of factory farm chicken sheds, supplying the Auckland market. It is awful to live near smelly chook sheds knowing they are crammed full of hundreds of thousands of chickens that live an artificially induced and short life to meet the insatiable demands for cheap meat. People near Dargaville also had to fight a mega-chicken farm proposed a few years ago, as Tegel sought to establish even bigger facilities, where poorest communities are least able to fight them.

Energy infrastructure has sought to become established in Rodney to serve the city and make the most of comparatively cheap large land parcels. Decades ago, there were reckless proposals for a nuclear power station in South Kaipara. That seems incredible now. But equally reckless and retrograde plans were promoted by Genesis Energy for a gas-fired power plant near Kaukapakapa. It took huge community mobilisation and resources to oppose. It was about 15 years ago, but then and even more so now, the folly of fossil-fuelled electricity was clear.

South Kaipara has a new challenge – a proposed ‘solar farm’ in Helensville. This proposal is for a large installation of solar panels on a farm on the river flats. Concerns are about the loss of productive land, flooding, and negative visual and amenity effects. It’s definitely better to have distributed energy produced as close to users as possible to avoid transmission related energy losses, which can total up to 15% of energy wasted. And it’s not like the Kaipara River flats are a pristine, unmodified landscape, as pretty as they are.

The status quo presents a particular baseline which many of us love – the river winding like a silver ribbon across bright green flats. But once, there were probably dense kahikatea and totara forests, diverse birdlife, swamps full of richness. Sometimes how we judge proposals depends on what our reference points are, and change is constant. We must aim not just to be not as bad as past proposals, but to leave the world a better place.