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Sustainability race yet to be won

The Christchurch City Council mayoral contest is tied, with the main issue yet to decide the outcome, one candidate believes. About one third of voters support each of the two main contenders, or are undecided as yet, according to recent polls.

Rik Tindall is challenging the incumbent Mayor, Bob Parker, and his main rival, Jim Anderton to present leadership that can make sense of the current destabilised climate.

“We are living in a region of legislated emergency, after the damaging 4 September earthquake, and unsustainable thinking just has to go,” Tindall asserts. “Nowhere do we see new answers presented - in the democratically impaired mayoral debate - that can connect people with this new age of increasing risk.”

“Democracy is fundamental to finding good solutions. But the leaders in this so-called ‘two-horse race’ - which has been mostly a media-manipulated convenience - show no real commitment to open democracy at all,” Tindall says. “If Parker and Anderton had anything genuine to offer they would both demand a maximised exchange of ideas right now.”

“We need the latest environmentally friendly technologies brought straight to the Canterbury rebuild, to help stave off further disasters, and not just more hidden hand-outs to established big business whose pollution is causing this crisis,” says Tindall.

Scientists have produced much commentary on this month’s quake, and Tindall wants to see it brought together properly - for sustainable economic action.

“If the Greendale Fault has not slipped for 16,000 years - when the last ice age ended - then this confirms unequivocally a new global warming phase now. Emission reduction and carbon capture have become the first duties of every global citizen - if we want our species to survive in good numbers,” Tindall says. “Home-grown, new industries are available for this style of efficient and responsible building, and the region must foster them strongly now.”

People are questioning the role of aquifer depletion in the earth-shattering local quake, and Tindall agrees that a gross lack of resource management wisdom is being shown here.

“Theoretically, the unprecedented great weight of groundwater pressure removed by irrigation in the past two decades could be enough to allow magmatic counter-pressure to fracture brittle bedrock. A very wet winter has just replenished groundwater, so restored gravity could just have completed the break,” Tindall suggests.

“That risk aside, increased warming is predicted to speed tectonic plate movement, which drives all earthquakes. We have entered a period of heightened seismic activity, and people need ways to keep themselves safe,” Tindall concludes.

“An inclusive and proper debate on the Canterbury rebuild is called for immediately.”

[Ends]

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