Thursday, May 21, 2009

leave the landscape alone please fonterra

Arthur Burns Mosgiel Woolen Millsby John Toomer

Trees are underrated. They not only provide shelter, protection, reduce erosion, and numerous other benefits - they look good as well. I have to say that I prefer natives before introduced trees, but any tree is better than no tree - in most instances.

Now that f and p have got rid of all the workers in Mosgiel, fonterra are looking to use the site for storage.

"Fonterra plans to construct storage facilities for 62,000 tonnes of product on the former Fisher and Paykel site in Mosgiel, but it is too early to know the impact of facilities on the landscape.

A 45,000-tonne dry store and 17,000-tonne coolstore were in planning stages as the company looked at developing the site to meet its business needs, New Zealand warehouse transformation manager Greg Pope said.

"While some changes to the landscape will be required to enable site access and development, we know that a lot of work has gone into planting and enhancing the site."

The company wanted to recognise community interests and "preserve as much of this landscape work as possible". "

The key words are "as much as possible." Those words really mean "as much as we want." And those words translate to, "as much as will increase our profit."

I grew up in Mosgiel. We learnt absolutely zero about maori history around taieri. No information on Lake Waihola, Taieri Mouth, Henley, Maunga-atua, saddle hill. Zip. The Taieri plains would have been magnificent with it's full covering of bush, swamp and forested areas. I just don't like trees being cut down to make more room for fonterra to store it's stuff.

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