Richard Steele with governor general Dame Cindy Kiro.
These two subjects are totally unrelated as far as I’m aware, but they do have one thing in common that causes me concern.
That commonality is that we should stop doing both of them, and the sooner the better.
Richard Steele
Formula One car racing to start with. Every time I pick up the national newspaper we have delivered to our gate five days a week, there is this Liam Lawson person, and where he is placed in the competition, what’s wrong with his latest escapades, and why his car isn’t the fasted on the circuit.
And I couldn’t care less. I’ve enjoyed a bit of sport all my life, so it’s not that. It’s that we shouldn’t be racing silly cars around a silly track hundreds and hundreds of times, encouraging the overuse of our dwindling fuel supplies.
Because it’s not just the silly racing that’s the issue here, it’s that that this activity encourages millions of men to drive cars and utes bigger than they really need, too fast around our roads for the sole purpose of massaging their inflated egos.
I’ve nothing against Mr Lawson and his fellow competitors, but you all know the guy behind you who follows too closely, passes you and a heap of other travellers and ends up stuck at the next roadworks, exactly two seconds ahead. That person has proved what a waste of time going that fast is.
Far be it from me to agree to Green Party policy, but in campaigning to stop trawling for fish and the general overfishing that goes on everywhere, they are exactly right.
In fact I’d use even stronger language than they do. It seems to me that we have raped the fish resource for so long. More and more species are under threat, and we keep fishing them toward extinction.
Imagine fish and chips, a meal we have all enjoyed, all of our lives, being without the fish. Because that’s where we are heading, at about the same speed as those formula one racing cars.
It’s been announced that tarakihi, one of the most popular fish ever to fish for, is under the threat of extinction.
Every fish is under threat of over exploitation, and we keep on looking for more to catch, rather than taking a firm stand.
It’s not just the commercial fisher people either. The days of a couple of people going out to catch a feed seem to have given way to going to sea to fill the freezer.
I’m sure bottom trawling is the worst, but I have a sneaking suspicion that until all fisher people act to stop the overfishing nothing will change.
So that’s two things that I think are wrong in the world , that we can fix without resorting to bombing each other to smithereens. In doing so we could make an amazing amount of difference, long term, to the world’s sustainable future, and to enhance our lives positively.
