1080 GREEN WASH

By Carol Sawyer

Citing a Southland Times letter to the Editor

“Originally it [1080] was developed as an insecticide by Monsanto. But its lack of selectivity of what it kills meant it was too dangerous.”

“Declaring war on behalf of nature is not possible. Nature works in unpredictable ways and will adjust to intrusions indifferent to attempts to either save or destroy it. As DOC’s 1080 War for the Birds enters its seventh decade, the rodent emerges as its clear benefactor. This confirmed by each new seed mast.

Emotive claims of the annual loss of 25 million birds and the tens of millions of tonnes of devastated vegetation defy the laws of ecosystem equilibrium. The more likely villain may be its own tool of choice, 1080. Originally it was developed as an insecticide by Monsanto. But its lack of selectivity of what it kills meant it was too dangerous. It deprives the forest of its avian food source. Starving its victims, resulting in the often noted silent forest. It also prevents the essential breakdown in forest litter, a critical factor for a healthy forest ecology. Despite the millions of squandered dollars these phenomena have never been studied by its toxic proponents. Nor has there been a reasonable explanation of why the forest seed mast has now assumed “biblical” proportions.

Indications are these seed blooms are the result of the disruption created by the insect and flora/fauna relationship. With no insects to impede growth, the seeds bloom with increased frequency and intensity. Another example of human intervention in natural systems that has gone tragically wrong.

David L Langer

Gore”

The Southland Times, Letters to the Editor, August 24, 2016

Header Photo – Jim Hilton
Dead birds found over a few acres, after 270,000 hectare aerial 1080 poison drop, Kahurangi National Park, 2014.
This was the first year of DoC’s “Battle for our Birds” drops.

DOC’s dubious ‘success’ rate with 1080 – $3.5 billion, a decade later and not a single endangered bird species in recovery

See the stats! It really is 100 percent pure illusion! In our own district we’ve had no in stream biota survey since 2002 – and one year later we’re still waiting for an RDC estimate for when the next one will be – in spite of a 3 yearly consent requirement! Note in the header image, taken locally, the banks are also often slathered with glyphosate, a known, probable carcinogen.

“Of 112 monitored lakes, a 2010 Niwa study found 44% are eutrophic – so burdened by excess agricultural nutrients that they have become murky, smelly and inhospitable to many fish, reports Joy. Almost all (90%) our lowland wetlands – the “kidneys of our waterways” – have been destroyed. Three-quarters of our native freshwater fish are threatened with extinction (up from 20% in the early 1990s), yet only one – the grayling, which has been extinct for decades – has legal protection.”
Listener 26/11/15

unity1nz (Youtube)

Published on Aug 12, 2013

“Dr Mike Joy, NZ 100% Pure! The challenges of truth telling in a commercially driven world.

Note: Since the Key National Government came to power, the word ‘sustainable’ has been deleted from governmental and departmental vocabulary.

Meanwhile …

New Zealand is currently running at 162nd in our environmental performance out of 180 countries globally.

It is extremely difficult to access data on water quality in this country as it is ‘locked away’ from public scrutiny, even the Ministry for the Environment does not write it up for public consumption.

Researchers have to spend hours and days searching out any little snippet of information that is buried in Regional Council reports, because these reports too, are filed away from community analysis.

The reason for this impediment is because there is no Agency in this country that deals with such basic and important factual statistics and information and if this accumulated data was in the public domain, the Ministers involved would look so bad that the charade of ‘Clean Green NZ’ would be coherently shredded.

Yet, the latest statistics that are available for public information still go back to a 2004 report. Even though the 300 areas that are tested and sampled ‘to this day’ remain hidden from public view, and can not be accessed by scientists like Dr Mike Joy.

This vital information is being ‘censored by omission’ and the Ministry for the Environment and the 16 District Councils, only issue ‘feel good’ information on the better sites, (the upper high country where there is no population or industry) never the true story in the low land areas of farming, industry and population density. In essence, making a silk purse from a sows ear!

New Zealand has pristine highland lakes and rivers, which the tourist brochures revel in, but it is the low land lakes and rivers that are horrendously degraded in this country.

And it has been only in the last 20 years with the intensification of dairy herds that our water has really lost its purity. This due to the addition of far too many cows, as the population continues to increase.

11 humans are equal to one cow in their capacity to ingest and excrete. A conservative estimate is equal to 66 million people inhabiting NZ, the same population as the UK.

With the intensity of increasing cow numbers huge amounts of urine ends up in paddocks and in the process is changing the soil chemistry and seeping down into the water and into the greater catchment area, and this is not being factored into the pollution equation.

Adding to this, commercially manufactured urea is being spread on the land from urea plants as well as the use of more phosphorous to speed up plant growth, however a by-product of super phosphate is cadmium. NZ is now dangerously close to toxifying its soils, plant life and live stock with excess cadmium that ends up stored in the kidneys and liver of live stock, that if the animals are over 18 months of age – it is illegal to sell kidneys and liver for eating. (This is news to me!)

NOTE: New Zealand children are already exceeding the European levels of cadmium from our food chain

Scientists here in NZ like their counterparts worldwide are reluctant or prohibited from speaking out on environment or health concerns, for fear of losing their funding, or losing their job. They are under the hammer to keep their mouth firmly shut! Such is the power of the commercial imperative!

Treasury, which is the tail that wags the dog in this country is bloated with economists and Mike posits the idea that if we could have another department alongside it full of ecologists, we would strike a dynamic balance.

Mike says that what is happening in nature is that the fauna are now acting as the canary in the coal mine.

The tiny white bait (inanga) in our streams are being seen as the indicators of the health of our water ways and they are all being threatened, 4 out of 5 are now on the endangered list, same for fresh water crayfish and our eels, and the eel story Mike tells is near on bizzare in the extreme.

KPMG, one of the largest professional services companies on our planet, states in a new report that New Zealand has 5 years to clean up our clean green image, or we will lose it!”

Dr Mike Joy: The true story of New Zealand’s ecological status.

Related Article by the Listener 26/11/15 :

River stance

The Listener
By Rebecca Macfie

Ecologist Mike Joy’s unsanitised views of the sorry state of our fresh waterways make him a target of vitriol. But he’s not about to change his tune…If the pollutants that leach through our intensively farmed soils and into lowland rivers such as the Selwyn made the water run red, we’d quickly grasp the scale of the problem, says Joy. Instead, the water at Coe’s Ford – a spot where he spent blissful days as a Christchurch schoolboy in the 1960s and 70s, and where he now stands as one of New Zealand’s loudest environmental whistleblowers – is polluted by invisible toxins. READ MORE

new_zealand_s_clean_green_image_a_mirage__1862307185 — Photo credit: newzealand.com

Now see PM John Key make a complete fool of himself by denying the raw stats quoted by the interviewer from Joy’s research… even claiming we are 100% pure! The denial continues.