MR. SEMPLE'S STREETS AND STREAMS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 148, 25 June 1938, Page 8

MR. SEMPLE'S STREETS AND STREAMS

An understanding of deforestation, flooding, and erosion can be reached if each river, with the land it drains, is considered as one whole—as a unit of Nature's architecture, i An understanding cannot be reached by placing under a river board some limited portion of a river where the land owners are able and willing to meet the local costs and the rateliability, to the total exclusion of other land owners whose riparian difficulties and. rateable values make them undesirable or unwilling entrants into the board area. No such partial system of board administration can envisage any river problem as a whole in the way that Mr. Semple, Minister of Public Works, desires to envisage it. It is quite likely that Mr. Semple will achieve his desire—that he and his engineers will, after comprehensive surveys, see the problem as a whole, and not in the present fragmentary way. His next step will be to make each river administration as comprehensive as the survey, and this means clashing with, local government —a thing on which Mr. Semple could possibly obtain some information from Mr. Parry. But perhaps the river boards do not present to river-planning such a formidable obstacle as local bodies present to town-planning and regional planning. It is therefore not unreasonable to hope that Mr. Semple's attack on causes of erosion may arrive somewhere. If he can solve the traffic problems oLthe streets and the streams it will be a notable I achievement.