I published this over a year ago, and it still gets a lot of traffic. The Ruataniwha Dam is now under review, and the new Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is doing quite frankly an excellent job of peeling back the layers upon layers of dubious rationale. But one thing the review will not focus on is the initial rationale for the dam, which went something like this “Central Hawke’s Bay is declining, therefore we need the dam.” It seemed that understanding the reasons why was never in the interests of the proponents – and so they accelerate the trend to our very own provincial Trump voting middle America, because we don’t heed the lessons of an industrial commodity approach to human life and land.