Bucky Bogart
California, United States (Abridged)
Dominion Post

22 January 2004

If you love your land as nature designed it, close your borders to the land developers and corporations that want to redesign it.

Do not allow what happened in California to be repeated in New Zealand, or your spectacular country will be stripped, ploughed under, levelled off, cemented over and stacked with massive blocks of bland, insipid, homogenised, off-the-assembly line rows of houses and commercial buildings with the character of an ice cube.

The California where nature combined its diverse beauty in one state is but a memory. The great oaks are gone, the abundant woods of rich walnut groves are gone, the forests not yet cut are in harm’s way, the open deserts are gone, the unbroken golden coast has been barricaded by those who can afford to buy it and token broken patches of beach are designated for the natives to crowd upon.

The ocean is filthy, the fish have fled, the highways are a nightmare of wall-to-wall traffic, the air is a brown-orange hovering haze, crime is out of control, chain link fences have replaced picket ones and our skylines are indistinguishable rectangles.

What little is left of the natural masterpiece is there only because it was fi ercely fought for in expensive and time-consuming court battles.

This is New Zealand’s fate too, if it allows these people to build on your land. It should not be seduced.

California has been pretty much used and abused by the unimaginative minds of the developers. Now they are aiming their bulldozers at New Zealand.

Head them off, don’t let them in. Or the homogenisation that has spread across the whole United States is on your horizon.