If our website’s tagline is ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ then don’t you think that’s what we should be? This statement is misleading, causing people around the world to think that we are a role model for sustainability, when we are far from it.
An American tourist recently released a post on his blog called ‘The Myth of Pure New Zealand’, then leading to Newshub releasing an article about what he had to say. Some of the topics he had to talk about were lack of public transport, meaning more land cleared for roads and car parks, along with more cars on the roads; contamination of waterways from excessive dairy and meat production; the lack of understanding tourists can have regarding how we do things here – “Being a foreigner, I didn’t know how things were done there, like recycling my plastics, or where to dump food when going through cities”, to which I can agree with, even locals tend to get confused sometimes. From a tourists point of view I imagine they would be able to see our country from a new perspective, being able to identify the things that have now become normal to us.
“Mr Viktorius said all he’d seen of New Zealand before coming here was Lord of the Rings and flattering Instagram photos”, but we need to be more than just a pretty picture. We should be leading by example and implementing change. Compared to other countries, New Zealand is relatively young, so you would think that we would be keeping up with new technologies, and be more open to change without old values or ideas to hold us back.
Perhaps we should start living up to this ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ ideal that we are advertising to the rest of the world, instead of just pretending. We definitely have a lot of improvements to make, and they all start with regular people like yourselves demanding change. This is proof that we aren’t as green as we say or think we are here in New Zealand. Yes we have plenty of amazing nature here, but you have to look deeper than that. Our streets and nature walks are littered with trash; our waterways are continuing to become more and more contaminated; the freshwater we do still have we are exporting overseas; consuming more than ever and producing more waste – but we aren’t addressing any of these issues. When did everyone forget to live by ‘Be a tidy Kiwi’?
You can read the original blog post here.