Chairmans Report-July 2010

South Coast Environmet Society Inc AGM July 20 2010

Remembering everything that we have done over the past year would be quite a challenge, were it not for the Coastline Magazine in which our various activities over the last 12 months have been recorded. So that’s where I looked, using the on-line collection of Coastlines, and this is what I found.

We’ve been very busy.

In a rough kind of chronological order and with apologies to anyone I’ve missed or any activity I’ve overlooked, here are our most notable achievements, challenges and highlights:

Early in the piece, we lost our organic milk deliveries, due to the power of television. Organic Acres broadcast their activities too widely and the Milk Barons closed them down. Consequently, we’ve not had the tanker chugging away at our farmers’ markets.

We challenged Nick Smith over his feeble Emissions Trading Scheme in Queenstown, but had little influence over his actions. More fool he. He should have listened to our wise advice. Look at the trouble he got himself into in Gore last week as a result.

We saw Chris and Steve Cole get underway with their fruit tree care business. Robyn and I have seen some of the results of that work as we’ve visited orchards and it looks to be going well. We have bought a digital projector and it has served us very well here and on the road as we do our ‘talks’ and workshops. It’s very good quality and has been trouble-free.

We’ve sold over 500 heritage fruit trees to eager new orchardists in Southland. That’s a huge success for the Open Orchard project and will continue to be a benefit to the region. We’ve held workshops on managing those trees, pruning, grafting and planting. These are very popular workshops whether we do them here in Riverton or in communities all around Southland.

MfE has lavished praise on us for our ’pro-active’ approach to all that we do. We would like them to lavish money as well.

Our Worm farm and Bountiful Backyards workshops have been very popular and successful and have involved a range of tutors. The Green Fingers garden club for school children has been launched and taken up by a number of schools and individual students. We expect this project to grow and grow.

National Radio, on its Spectrum programme, aired a half-hour-long interview with grafters working on and talking about the orchard project and the skills needed to succeed. Feedback from that broadcast has been excellent. Garden Clubs from near and far have visited our gardens and the Centre in search of inspiration and entertainment and they have found both. We’ve taken our gardening expertise out into the boonies as well, with programmes in Ohai and Mataura causing a stir of the good kind and creating a precedence. Visits to various of the regions Garden Clubs and other interested groups, like the Waianiwa Woman’s Institute have had similar results. The requests keep coming in and look like they won’t stop any time soon. Next is Manapouri.

Radar and his film crew came, filmed and left … left us waiting for the broadcast, that is and wondering what it is they would show, but in the shakedown, it was all good and did nobody any harm. As a result of his visit, Radar has engaged to perform his ’Eating the Dog’ stage show here in Riverton in August. We flew the flag for the 350 movement at Oreti beach, drawing attention to the increasing amounts of green house gas in the atmosphere and making the Southland Times in the process. Our very own Marijke Aalders took out the title of Southland Gardener of the Year with her skills and beautiful garden and received a raft of prizes as a result. The Community Trust of Southland committed to a further round of generous support for the Society and we are very grateful to them for that. Chris and Jolene came aboard our jolly ship and now help us in their specialised ways, whatever they might be - it’s all out of my league and I don’t meddle with their business. They do it well though, it’s obvious.

The Organic Group turned 20 during this time. They are a fantastic group and deserved their party. They’ll get another when they turn 40.

Lyndsay McGarry, whom we all knew to be a mighty character, died and we were all saddened by his passing, but at the same time amused by the humour in which he did it. “I told you I was sick” was the perfect message for Lyndsay to leave for us.

The Rural heritage day was a wild and wet event, but went ahead anyway. We bravely manned our displays and talked with a lot of other brave Southland souls who weren’t afraid to venture out into the tempest. The clothing recycling parties and natural cosmetics evenings were are roaring success I’m told. I didn’t attend, but ate the leftover the next day (cosmetics, not fashion).

We visited Orepuki and Pahi as part of our learning picnics programme (just made that title up because I couldn’t remember what we called our visiting programme. It was fun though.)

I went to Ellerslie and promoted the Centre and Riverton like crazy. We held the very successful Heritage Harvest Festival. It ran very well and there were satisfied people every where. The Harvest Feast was especially marvellous. Estuary Care banners flew in the main street for a couple of months, advertising one of the activities the Society supports. They now hang from the beams in the Centre. Our mural caused and continues to cause a splash in the town. Very colourful and media attractive.

The Arts Centre held the Apple Iconography exhibition in support of out festival and orchard work and we were very pleased to be able to forge stronger bonds with them as a result. Those connections continue to strengthen with the ongoing sculpture happenings and other civic expressions of creativity.

We represented our environmental concerns at the Land Care symposium at Te Rau Aroha marae at Bluff and our Pest Busters at the Sern event on Stewart Island, telling our stories as often as we were able and making good connections with other groups in the country. We expanded upon our TradeAid activities with an significant increase in the amount of TA stock we carry in the shop and a mini business initiative by Chris Cole.

We took an active part in the exploration of the town and surrounds looking to the creation of cycling and walking tracks in cooperation with the Riverton Concept Plan steering committee.

We held a public meetings on the 1080 issue and provided several carloads of keen protesters for the anti mining march in Invercargill (and a very successful protest that has turned out to be). I attended the ECO conference in Lyttleton Harbour on behalf of the Society and some of our umbrella groups. As you hear, we’ve not been resting on our laurels or our bums. We are all increasingly busy here, in the shop and out and about with our projects.

Robert Guyton Chairman SCES