The latest earthquakes which have damaged so much infrastructure, environmental and economic value in the South Island bring focus on sustainability and what we usually consider sustainability to mean.
I look out into my vege garden and wonder how long all the greens, spuds and berries would last me if I was reliant on them. The supplies in my pantry look inadequate to cope with a disastrous disruption to food supply chains. I relish my gas stove, oven and hot water because they give me independence from mains electricity if there’s a power cut.
But a major earthquake could mean even lighting the gas is dangerous. I’m usually smug about the resilience provided by my water tank. But an earthquake of any scale could easily turn it into a pile of crumbled concrete and a flood of water across the section. My bike, which is so good at getting me around on a daily basis, would probably still be an important lifeline in a catastrophic event. But if roads are impassable, our car won’t be much good.All the utilities we take for granted, even those of us who try to live a resilient, ‘self’ sufficient, sustainable lifestyle, are at risk in a significant geological disaster. We’re so locked into reliance on supermarket food supplies, electricity at the flick of a switch, ability to drive across the region for anything, and ‘just in time’ goods and services, that events like the Kaikoura earthquake should make us think about how sustainable our lifestyles are.
Natural disasters are dramatic, scary, terrible and all too real, when they reduce our cities and regions to rubble as they have in the South Island over recent years. But we still dismiss the potential impacts of landslides, inundation and coastal erosion from extreme weather events and climate change, as if they’re abstract fears that will never, could never happen to us.People oppose Council property information memoranda that identify their sites as potentially at risk from slumping, slipping or flooding for fear of reduced property values. But that’s a small fear compared with the real impacts of earthquakes, tsunami or storm surges that wipe out low lying coastal properties. Nothing like a landslide that takes out your coastal home to reduce property values.
The wild barrage of earthquakes, storms and other events that batter our long, skinny, shaky isles, make people wonder why we’ve built our towns and cities in earthquake zones and near the coast. Though of course there are good reasons for that historically. We can’t change tectonic plates, or the maritime weather conditions. But we can change where and how we live. And how we’d live after a natural disaster is worth thinking about now more than ever.
Inevitably, the latest earthquakes show too, that sustainability also depends on strong, connected, and caring communities, and the value of that is priceless.
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