LETTER OF THE MONTH
Could ZERO growth be the answer?
So, Martinborough’s sewage woes continue, and have seriously clogged up the council’s, and town’s, plans for continued growth. Sewage and the matter contained therein does clog things up, true.
Studies will “help the council decide the level of growth they wish to enable.” Karen Krogh goes further with this dire warning: “a town which cannot grow will inevitably decline.”
It could well be true that one sign of possible decline in a town is a declining population, but is it equally true that a non-growing population must thereby mean a decline in its coping, its happiness or its wealth?
What evidence is there for such a claim? Many successful small towns in rural Europe have not grown significantly in a hundred years. What is self-evidently true is this: Martinborough’s growth must be a major cause of the town’s inability to manage its waste – the population approximately doubling in fifty years, along with its ordure. And you might well think too that this extra population and their extra money all contributing to the rates should mean individual household rates declining. Yet rates here have rocketed astronomically. So down the toilet goes that fond imagining, along with the sewage.It seems to me at least that growing populations, far from being a supposed boon to a town, or country, bring considerable difficulties to communities which must then provide, within the ability of local landscape, for the basic human needs of this growing population. What are Wellington’s woes but a similar example? Though of course the present government is trying to cure this problem by making much of the town redundant and assuming the affected folk will just move along.The same growth fetish certainly applies to the entire country. Rates of growth of the New Zealand population over the past thirty years have averaged around 1.3% (at times over 2%); this average if continued means a doubling of the population within fifty-three years (the population has indeed doubled in the last sixty years). … Continue Reading
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