Particularly in the Western consciousness we've become mired in short-term thinking.
The mantra of economic growth at all costs has become overriding.
We need to provide for our needs not for our greed.
[crowd chanting] "Hey hey, ho ho, you can't take our H20."
When I created a petition back in December asking Environment Canterbury to revoke the
Belfast water bottling consents, not in a million years did I expect more than 150,000
of you to feel exactly the same way.
Their water was becoming merely a commodity in our community.
[showing the crowd] This here is a water bottle from Cloud Ocean Water.
[crowd booing]
This is the sort of thing you expect to see more of if these guys are allowed to go ahead.
We're protecting our water for generations to come.
We're looking seven generations ahead to make sure that the people of Christchurch have
clean drinkable water.
[applause]
We're a group that was formed to advocate for the mana of the water.
We stand for communities whose water security and sovereignty is threatened by corporate
action, particularly around water bottling but also around huge irrigation tapes that
deplete aquifers that adversely affect the environment and the ecology.
For way too long the voice of people and not only the voice of people but also the voice
of the water itself, the voice of all the animals and plants that rely on healthy waterways
and healthy aquifers just has been ignored and the only groups that seem to have been
listened to are the ones that have an interest in making money from the use of water.
[speaking to crowd] Ladies and gentlemen the enemy of the water bottling industry is community
water supplies.
The biggest threat to the water bottling industry is pure and abundant water that communities
can obtain from their tap.
We need to remember that in this battle.
[applause]
Primarily we were founded in response to a huge application for a consents to take water
for export water bottling in Christchurch.
So those consents have fully implemented which they probably will be, would take billions
of litres of water from aquifers beneath Christchurch that ultimately the people of Christchurch
will rely on to supply their drinking water needs into the future.
We launched proceedings to challenge those grants of consent and we've been engaged in
that process now for probably three years.
We rather naively expected that the arguments that we would raise around matters of principle
and values would have some weight but we ended up being brought down to earth I think you
would say by the reality of the situation.
The legal system certainly has its place but ultimately that win and lose dichotomy is
not the way that we're going to heal the planet or heal the soul of humanity, we need we need
a different approach.
Chair and councillors we think you've inherited a planning framework that essentially has
prioritised economic growth at the expense of ecological wisdom and that we continue
to reap the outcomes of that in Canterbury.
One thing isn't going to solve all of the problems, it needs to be a multi-dimensional
approach, it needs to involve people working in every sphere.
So it involves public protest, it involves direct action where that's necessary, it involves
challenges within the legal space, it involves advocacy so it involves submitting on regional
plans which we do, it involves submitting on local district plans which we do, it involves
submitting on legislation which we do.
[speaking to the crowd] To affect real change we need unity, we need clarity of purpose
and we need a strategy.
We can and we should use this present challenge as a sort of transformational opportunity
that ECan pays lip service to.
Here's a chance not to play the game or to practice a new game but to engage with the
actual reality of the situation in a new and creative way.
There's no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
Ngā mihi.
Kia kaha.
Thank you.
I believe in the goodness of human nature.
Everything turns you know, everything turns we, you know we've had decades of neo-liberalism
you know, unrestrained capitalism based on exploitation and short-term gain.
I think the wheel's turning, the more people who get involved the quicker that'll happen,
it will accelerate that and it will shift consciousness.
I have a vision for things to be different and I think you know we will get where we
want to and the important thing is that we'll take people along with us, we won't impose
that by force you know we'll bring people to that place willingly, that's my hope anyway.
We're not seeing this as a commercial exploitation model where we're just ripping out timber,
we're actually trying to manage this ecosystem.
Our objective is that if you look at this forest from a landscape perspective there
is no discernible change.
We are supposed to be future proofing the next generation and do need to be these better
ancestors.