I recently had an altercation on a local community Facebook page with a person who, contrary to FB rules, uses a pseudonym. He posted something which sought to lay the blame for the smelly and sometimes toxic algal blooms that are now a feature of the region’s rivers in summer, on “council contractors” digging holes. The aim of these “council engineered ponds”, according to him, is so the smell and toxins can then be blamed on farmers to justify further environmental regulation.
I posted a mildly worded reply pointing out that responsibility for issuing licenses to commercial companies to extract gravel lies with the regional authority, Environment Canterbury. I also said that reduced river flows, and the increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers combined with heavy irrigation are factors in the now yearly algal blooms.
Articulate women, especially older women, are anathema to men who suffer from fragile masculinity syndrome (FMS). Another man can call them a dick, thick as shit, a clown, etc but let a woman sound smarter than them, and their emotional fuses start to blow.
I was soon to find out that this particular FMS sufferer is a misogynist of the first water; a wanna-be patriarch who believes that men should rule, and women should submit; that a woman’s place is serving her husband and looking after kids, and as for old women, they should do the world of men a favour, acknowledge their uselessness, and die.
He began the process of consigning me to the ranks of what eventually became a cabal of screeching-feminist-hippy-climate-change-doomsday-cultist-leftie-vaccine-promoting-authoritarians who, in his view are intent upon destroying the NZ economy.
That combination of extreme ignorance and arrogance is like a red rag to an earnest pedagogue like me, so I tried to explain more about why ECAN licenses gravel extraction, and the part played in the blooms by increased use of artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.
My explanations about reducing riverbed elevation to maintain capacity between the stopbanks and thereby reduce flood risk, were clearly not comprehensible to someone so deeply mired in confirmation bias. He was clearly ignorant, even of what stopbanks are, why they were created in the first place and are carefully maintained.
A tongue in cheek reply advising him to calm his amygdala and engage his frontal lobes was a step too far for his FMS, and he fixed me firmly in his misogynistic sights.
(Spelling and grammar original; my emphasis in bold.)
HOW is THIS thing going to stop any flooding if there is a few banks ACROSS the river bed???if you think what you wrote made you sound smart, it didn't. The world doesn't revolve around you and that might be very hard thing to comprehend for old woman that's well past her expiry date. it doesn't mater if I say 1 + 1 =2 or if I say you are dumb if you don't know 1+1 = 2. It's still correct statement and it's nothing hyperbolic about it. This hippie attitude that it's bad to point out stupidity rather than the stupidity itself is going out of fashion and more and more people are starting to catch up. NZ is too ruined, economy is destroyed and the whole country was run to the ground while hippes were cheering about progression of feminism and environmentalism instead of making sure things are run responsibly, by competent men and in a way that would make tomorrow better than yesterday. So far the only result of this current madness is the fact that median income of $65 000 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8 000 in 2000 and everything is worse than 25 years ago...”
Unwilling to engage on his post any longer but wanting to clarify issues for others, I posted something myself.
As someone who grew up in Canterbury, I know the streams on our region's shingle riverbeds have always grown algae as the flow decreases and the temperature of the water increases. I know also that there has been an increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers on the plains' thin alluvial soils, along with an increase in heavy irrigation which accelerates the leaching of nutrients into waterways.
As a result of that, when the rivers experience low flow, and/or water gets trapped in either naturally or artificially formed depressions, there is now a greater likelihood that the algae will proliferate and form "blooms".
Each alga is short-lived and as they die off, the resulting high concentration of dead organic matter in the water has the effect of reducing dissolved oxygen. The reduction in oxygen kills freshwater organisms which adds to the organic "soup" and to the unpleasant smell. Some algae also secrete toxins which, in high concentration, can harm mammals.
District Councils do not employ contractors to "engineer ponds" that form algal blooms in order to either deliberately or opportunistically blame it on farmers to justify an increase in environmental regulation of waterways. The responsibility for granting licenses to remove shingle from the region's riverbeds (to help slow bed elevation) lies with the regional authority, ECAN.
It may be the case that the way shingle is being extracted needs to be more closely monitored.
It is certainly the case that the social and environmental costs of the impact on our region's waterways of an increased reliance on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation to force grass and legume growth on thin alluvial soils, need to be addressed.
There are science-based facts and there are opinions. As noted by a pseudonymous poster on this page, it's a science-based fact that I'm part of the older demographic. His depiction of my age making me, "an old woman who is well past her expiry date", is opinion. We are all entitled to our opinions but when they are ill-informed, ideological, or stray into expressions of bigotry, best be prepared to be challenged.
Mr FMS soon made his noxious presence felt on my post. (Spelling etc as per original)
You sound like someone involved in the scam or devout fanatic of the doomsday cult of climate change. any conflicts of interst you wanna disclose?
Stagnant water is ideal for growing algae and that's a fact.
Making ponds like that will supercharge algae blooms - fact.
making banks across river bed doesn't help prevent floods - fact.
NZ doesn't use liquid manure PITS so leaching nitrogen (aka liquid manure) leaching into rivers is no concern.
Fish, ducks gulls and so shits into the water and that's the main source of nitrogen in the water, not a cow peeing into grass 1km away.
Farmers were blamed for the stink because very few people know about cyanobacteria and how it stinks when the bloom dies off and decays - fact
Kids and families were exposed to the toxins - fact
FIY: you know how to gaslight and BS and yes you are well past your expiry date but you still think people will treat you like if you were 20 when you had some value. you should be busy taking care of your husband, kids and grandkids insted of trying to mess things up.
On another post, he made the extraordinary statement that “99.999% of science is wrong” which made me chuckle given he’d taken exception to me calling him out for hyperbole. Presumably in his world all the means by which he forms and communicates his views and earns a living are created by magic.
I wanted to address his points, but others weighed in and challenged him which made his final fuse blow and served to increase his obsessive focus on me. He went into a full-throated rant against pretty much everyone who is not a middle-aged, white man with misogynistic, ageist, anti-authority, conspiracist political views.
Had I been able to address his post, I would have pointed out that I specifically referred to nitrate and phosphate fertilisers in conjunction with heavy irrigation on the Canterbury plains’ largely thin alluvial soils which lie over deep layers of porous gravels containing vast amounts of water, interspersed with impermeable finer sediments.
When functioning properly the rivers feed water into the aquifers which drain towards the sea. With heavy irrigation on land adjacent to the rivers, the surface flow of nutrient-laden water may be towards them. The amount of liquid cow dung and urine on intensive dairy pasture is undoubtedly an added factor.
A lot of our region’s once pristine bore water is now contaminated with nitrates, and other water sources are contaminated with coliforms and require chlorination.
Our rivers have always had trees dropping leaf into them, and arguably way more fish and birds pooed into them in the past given the populations of both have dropped in recent years. They have also always had naturally formed depressions which trapped water as flow decreased and in which grew mats of algae. Those natural depressions are now added to by gravel extraction, and it may well be that ECAN needs to monitor that extraction more carefully.
Gravel extraction aside, there is no question that the scale of algal blooms, and especially toxic blooms, is connected to changes in land use, away from predominantly dry land sheep and arable farming into intensive dairying that is dependent on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.
Eventually I closed the comments and blocked him, and the page admins then removed his post and most of the comments under my post which is a shame as I wanted to screenshot them as evidence in the event that his abuse took a physical form.
This man, who seems to think it’s 1825 not 2025, and doesn't care that his ageism and misogyny will offend a lot of people, has clearly not factored in how easily identifiable he is given the internet and NZ's famous two degrees of separation which, in North Canterbury, is more like 1.25 degrees.
Anyway, all this brouhaha diverted attention away from the pertinent issues – as it was intended to do. The strategy used by these people is, if you cannot address an argument, you troll the person making it. It's a despicable tactic when the issues are so critically important.
