Lifestyle and Leisure
Green and pleasant?
After a failed fishing trip, Maike van der Heide voices her concerns for New Zealand's pristine status.
Three men and a teenage girl are lined up on a wharf. The boys are intently looking into the shimmery blue water. The girl is listening to her ipod and staring at the sky.
They are all holding fishing rods. Nobody has caught anything for an hour, despite perfect conditions – the tide is on the turn, the weather's calm. The boys have tried everything to lure in the big snapper they're after, using all sorts of bait like squid, fish and even cat food.
And then a line twitches. It's the one being held by the teenage girl. She jumps to attention and yanks on the rod. The men all gather around, mortified, but full of advice on how to reel the big one in. The girl easily pulls in a silvery blue kahawai, only just big enough to keep. It will be the appetiser to the big snapper that will land on the barbecue, the men decide, and bait up their hooks again before resuming their positions on the wharf. The girl, her job done, heads back to our holiday bach in the Marlborough Sounds to try and find a place with enough cellphone signal to text her friends.
The men fish for hours, with no luck. There simply are no fish, something more and more recreational fishers are complaining about.
It's the unfortunate side effect of a thriving fishing culture and industry, and brings with it a new realisation for New Zealanders: Clean and green doesn't last forever.
They say it's not easy being green and, until recently, New Zealand has had a free ride. The world looked at the mountains, the pristine lakes and rivers and the general appearance of the place and declared it pristine. And then the tourism officials dubbed it clean and green. But for Kiwis, being green is only just becoming the trendy way to be in the last few years. While many major centres have kerbside recycling schemes, in most medium to small cities and towns such a service is either very limited or totally non-existent. In the South Island city where I live, kerbside recycling was supposed to be implemented this year but the local council decided to put it on hold in favour of a new theatre. Luckily this town has a recycling centre although it requires users to sort their own rubbish, something many people simply can't be bothered doing.
New Zealand is also a country still very reliant on private cars. Auckland and Wellington have bus and train services – although Auckland's public transport is notoriously unreliable – and Christchurch has quite a good bus system. Even most medium-sized cities such as Hamilton, Invercargill and Dunedin have buses. But once you start getting to cities such as Nelson or Rotorua, the number of bus routes start dwindling and small towns often have no bus service at all. Even travel between cities is limited.
Luckily, New Zealand is starting to wake up. More emphasis is being put on sustainability, both privately and commercially, and being environmentally aware is trendy. More people are growing their own vegetables or choosing organic food and the New Zealand government has taken steps to preserve what we have.
In the Marlborough Sounds, this meant a ban on blue cod fishing but for us, this seems to have come too late.
But at least the barbecue was good. We had chicken.
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