Seven Rivers Walking - Feature Documentary

SYNOPSIS

Seven Rivers Walking | Haere Mārire documents a series of protest walks and talks along the rivers of Canterbury. The city rivers of Christchurch and the braided rivers of the Canterbury Plains are in big trouble. Threatened by poisoning, plundering and encroachment – they are in crisis-mode, and people are getting more and more upset.

Wild rivers, such as the Rakaia are even in serious trouble. Beginning life in the snowfields of the Southern Alps, the internationally significant Rakaia is the largest and most outstanding braided river in New Zealand. It spreads across a braided gravelly-bed up to two kilometres wide on it’s journey to the coast. One of several alpine rivers that laid out the alluvial Canterbury Plains over millennia, as it erodes the mountains into the sea. And it is now barely limping to the coast – significant water-takes on every side threaten it’s natural state.

Even the high-country is not safe from the rampant synthetic fertiliser-driven ‘greening’ of once dry tussock alpine land. This encroachment threatens alpine water quality as well as fish, birds and plants habitats. And unsettles the image of ‘pure’ New Zealand we are so fond of promoting. Shelter belts are destroyed to make way for irrigators. More and more wells are dug. Water is taken and not returned. Nitrate pollution increases. Fish cannot survive as toxic algae blooms. Birds struggle to flourish in reduced habitat. River margins disappear. Farmers are forced by banks to shift to high-intensive dairying. Factories and cars leach contaminants. Sediment from housing developments and forest clearance clog many rivers.

Yet, the people of Canterbury owe the rivers the very ground they live on, and the fresh clean water they drink.

InSeven Rivers Walking | Haere Mārire we follow some of the people of Canterbury who walk and raft and dig around – the river monitors, the river guardians. What is the cause of the poisoning, why are their rivers drying up? The collectives are many and diverse – with memberships from 1 to 100,000. All combined in their single-minded efforts to see the health of their rivers restored. They get organised – they walk, they talk, they protest, they make a play, perform a skit, paint – they demand action.

At times it seems like the fertilizer companies, the irrigation companies, the factories, the politicians and the bureaucracy are in cahoots with each other. Ordinary folk feel powerless – their voices are small. There are not enough controls in place. No one is properly supervising what the city factories and the recalcitrant and corporate farmers are up to. The wheels of bureaucracy are slow and shiny and the government continues to pour money into irrigation and promote high water takes from the rivers – while the rivers continue to deteriorate.

In 2010, hundreds of people build a stone cairn in Cathedral Square to protest the illegitimate installation of an unelected council who threaten to build more damns, canals and irrigation schemes. This time, seven years later, people walk to shift something in ourselves. An old knowing comes to the surface – just as the eel who lives in the dark aquifers rises from the elemental realm.

Everyone can move forward together knowing that the rivers must be treated as whole living eco-systems with spiritual, cultural and natural values – and not just as an economic resource. To respect biodiversity and to live within the means of nature.