WHY NOT PROTECTION?

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 239, 8 October 1940, Page 6

WHY NOT PROTECTION?

After eight months of idleness following flood damage the Stratford Main Trunk line is to be reopened in a fortnight. The task of reconstruction has been an immense one, almost as difficult and costly at some points to building a new track. This line is on© of a number in this Dominion along which axe and firestick have swept the protecting forests from the hillsides, leaving their ribs bare and unstable, ready to fall headlong on to the track when rainstorms, no longer filtering slowly through the green blanket, cause washaways and landslides. The lesson is there for all to learn; it has been told in every part of New Zealand, from Xaikohe to Invercargill, but Governments pay no heed. During the eight months of rebuilding the Stratford link, for example, nothing hag been done to hold back another flood from destroying the new work, no effort has been made, by reclothing cleared highlands, to confine flood watew to the creek beds which in pre-settlement days bore them safely to sea. Sixty millions in a year for expenditure not concerned with the war—and nothing worth mentioning for insurance against such enormous costs as that of renewing this vital railway link, nothing to safeguard the scores of miles of railways which run through areas subject to landslides when heavy rains Joosen the top stratum of soil, no longer pinned to its subsoil by the roots of the giant trees which formerly stood its guardians. There has been plenty of theorising about protective measures in successive reports of the Lands and Forestry Departments, excellent suggestions have been made, protective belh on the uplands have been set aside for planting. And there it has ended. Cabinet occasionally turns over in its sleep and mutters

a word or two about land conservation and then, when hopes are highest, returns to slumber without finding the energy to even tackle the fringe of a problem for which a solution has already been found in its own tree-planting experiments and those of private companies.