National Landscape Architects Conference

Monday 5 April 2004

Greetings, temporary Ecopolites. Rest assured that your organisers have left nothing to chance, even down to including instructions on how to pronounce Ecopolis. I'll take that as a tribute to my powerhouse Irish intellect.

The briefing papers also sum up Ecopolis as, and I quote, "a magical combination of all things sustainable for our cities of the future, mixing environmental sustainability with individual and social health." In that context let me assure you that you have come to the right place.

Christchurch city was one of the first to voluntarily adopt triple bottom line decision making. We are also the lead city in New Zealand in showing how natural capital can be turned into capital capital. Or wealth if you will.

We became the hub for high-technology in New Zealand by offering something no other city can. A vast amount of natural beauty and recreational resources both within the city and close by. We got nosey enough to probe into why we were drawing what they call the gold collar workers of new technology.

The answer was that we were offering lifestyle opportunities that few other countries or cities could match. It is worth

holding that thought. Retaining and enhancing natural resources can have significant economic benefit as well as social and environmental benefits.

In recent years I have helped put together two significant projects for Christchurch building on this theme. One is the Prosperous Christchurch idea that calls on us all to take a much broader view of prosperity than just the traditional economic one. It's an idea that has got massive support from what the PR people like to call "key influencers". We'll be rolling that one out in the next year.

We also have just got into the active phase of the Healthy Christchurch project that again makes the demand that we all raise our sights from our own bunkers and start looking at health in a wider way. We have to do this.

Plans like this are not window-dressing, or green washing. They are what responsible leaders in any area should be taking on as key parts of their governance package.

In addiction circles therapists talk about how families in denial act very hard to avoid denying the reality of the sickness in their midst. The saying is that there is an elephant in the room. People in addict families can get very grumpy if you have the bad manners to point out the elephant. In the human family I believe we have our own elephant to recognise, acknowledge and confront. This elephant is that of major climate change. As a lapsed accountant let me point out some of the bleeding heart liberals now having to deal with this elephant.

Radical hotbeds like the global groups for insurers and re-insurers are facing the grim fact that 80 per cent of their recent losses in the last two years have been from extreme weather event claims. The insurance industry is not a known haven for hippies. Nor is the equally radical World Bank has also just issued reports warning that the global economy will take some major hits from extreme weather events.

Even more daunting are the reports from the lair of that well known pinko extremist, Donald Rumsfield, President Bush's man at the Pentagon. The Pentagon's climate report and projections are dire and dreadful. We should all hope they got it wrong. Just for once I'm with the President on this one. Hopefully the Kyoto protocol is starting to look good to him as an alternative.

My point with all these recent reports of the sighting of the elephant is that we all face the threat of having to drastically change how we do business. Whatever our business. Landscapers are no exception.

In fact, in this swing time your role as harmonisers and providers of reminders of our natural world are going to be crucial. You are going to have to be prepared to take a leadership role in providing the public with reminder of our very real and very precious links into the natural world.

We are facing a time when the old barriers between the intellect and the natural, physical world are going to have to be broken down. It is a crucial time. If I sound urgent about this it is because I am. Weeks after the worst of the recent floods up North I flew over much of the damage and devastation. It was a life changing event.