Future is in your hands

An idyllic lake scene that may be endangered. Photos: Lesley Paris

On any given autumn day in a region soaked with alpine beauty, ’neath the chattering yellowed leaves of weeping willows, women and men on a lakeside caper can be seen scouring the shores for a particular sort of stone.

Those stones will be flat of profile, smooth of surface, and gently rounded over a millennium of geographical activity and aquatic process into a complete and perfect circular or oval shape.

Once the humans have found one, two, perhaps five of these stones they will advance to the shoreline, crouch and coil their bodies, their fingers gripped tightly and their elbows bent.

After a moment’s reverie, perhaps a tiny prayer to the god of physical aptitude and a call on their most intense concentration, the slightest movement of the hips will herald an explosive liberation of potential energy.

The wrist, bent backward to its fullest extent, will be whipped forward, and a rapid uncoiling of the frame and a sudden contraction of the flexor digitorum profundus muscle will power the fingers to violently unleash a frantically spinning orb towards the sparkling waters of, say, Lake Wanaka.

The sparkling reflection of the sun, until that moment a serene shimmer on the lake’s surface, is shattered into skittish fragments of light as the stone brushes the water for a millisecond then skips in low arcs across the lake, four, five, six times, maybe more, before sinking, dancing through the pristine waters to the lake’s bottom.

Nearby a paradise duck honks, and a little black scaup dives for food, unbothered.

Such is the joy, the beauty of that holiday activity, the skipping of stones, an activity only long days of recreation during precious breaks from the daily humdrum of the 9 to 5 allow time for.

But the innocent pursuit, like so many in this confusing modern age, is threatened.

For across the Otago region, and particularly in those divine climes where summers swelter and winters numb, what were trickles and streams of holidaymakers have become tsunamis, breaking waves of humanity that flood the Lakes district so not a metre of space is free from their presence.

Then there is the explosion of residents.

Quiet paddocks by tiny centres now rumble and vibrate with the machinery of subdivision as tarseal snakes over hill and dale and row upon row of very similar homes form companies and battalions that spread out across the flat and march dangerously close to towering mountain peaks.

Then someone announces plans for 1000, 5000, 10,000 more.

Where land makes the fatal mistake of not looking busy enough, golf courses that have been crouching with intent in bushes nearby leap, turning vast tracts of land into a playground for the wealthy in the blink of an eye.

If an undiscovered pristine valley complete with wooded hillsides and charming heritage buildings is noticed, and it has made the mistake of being undeveloped, an economic vacuum forms above it and developers pounce.

So where just one or two once trod the shores by, say, Glendhu Bay, searching for perfectly formed skipping stones, now hundreds, perhaps thousands jostle for position, their circular projectiles smashing into each other in an unholy clatter of destruction.

And it gets worse.

As the stones are hurled lakeward, reefs begin to form about 20m out, at first small reefs of smooth round stones, but slowly growing bigger until they break the surface and begin to rise higher and higher, slowly but surely filling the lake and scouring the shore.

That will leave an enormous mountain of skipping stones, girt by a sort of moat-like structure where the stones have been quarried.

But it will not just be the lakes that suffer.

By the crammed roads and the jammed car parks of the western bank of, say, the Matukituki River, hordes of tourists are skipping what are possibly the best stones for the purpose in New Zealand to the eastern side.

Slowly but surely that bank of the river will rise to the height of nearby ranges as the west is dug out, and the frozen waters will begin to spill alarmingly, uncontained and dangerous.

Skipping stones are not the only human-based geological intervention we must guard against.

In homes across Dunedin, lying in the autumn sun in rockeries, on front steps and set in concrete in decorative walkways near hebes and flax plants are many tonnes of ...  Lakes district river stones.

Ever increasing hordes of Dunedinites are forever finding beautiful examples of greywacke or schist or quartz, throwing them in the boot and taking them home to add to their collections, because we just can’t leave well enough alone.

So what with the new mountains, the displaced lakes and rivers and the ongoing outflow of rocks to Dunedin, the very make-up of the lower south is changing.

The various transfers of tonnes of stones and rocks across our island is creating an unstable point on the globe, that will most likely make the earth spin in a haphazard way, eventually forcing it from its orbit to drift off into space.

That will be the end of us all.So think a little before you bend down to pick up a stone by a lake, or lift a handsome rock into your car.

Pause for a moment before you take to the precious land with trucks and diggers and tarseal and Colorsteel.

Stop altogether before you imagine the precious empty spaces of Otago as belching dormitories that ooze across the countryside.

Because this whole thing could go very, very wrong.