Landscape artist Grahame Sydney, of Cambrian, Central Otago, and North Canterbury sculptor Sam Mahon were among those who travelled to Wellington yesterday to launch an exhibition with Forest and Bird called "Artists as Activists", speaking of their fears over the future of the basin's wildlife and beauty due to big agribusiness development.
"This is why people come here, this is what they love and this is what they're spoiling," Sydney said of the "greening" of the brown basin area through the rapid spread of huge pivot irrigators for dairy and crop farming.
"They're ruining that marvellous range of landscape we ought to be preserving with pride.
"There are values beyond money that we think we are being far too slow to learn to apply."
Christchurch artist Jane Zusters said the plans would severely impact on wetlands which housed many rare birds and drew $46 million worth of tourism yearly to the high country. "Why kill the goose that lays the golden egg?"
The Mackenzie is more valuable as a storehouse for unique plants," she said, and economic growth must be balanced with "the loss of happiness of birds and fish and us all ... otherwise our children will inherit the weeds and dry river beds, when the birds are gone".
Forest and Bird spokeswoman Nicole Vallance said views from the air of the effects of large-scale corporate agribusiness on parts of the basin were "a shock", with 2km-wide pasture circles spilling across it.
"We're calling on the Government to come up with a vision for us ... which halts these threats.
"This is a place that touches our soul."
Conservation Minister Dr Nick Smith did not attend the launch but told NZPA he was "open-minded" about new initiatives to better protect the area.
"There is no question it's an iconic part of New Zealand and it's particularly fragile," which was why the Government stepped in to veto plans for cubicle indoor dairy farming last year.
"Where I'm cautious, if artists like a brown landscape that is privately owned and those farmers wish to irrigate that to be able to increase their production, I think it's a big ask to say that those areas should be permanently brown.
"Just in the same way that I don't have a right to tell you what flowers you have in your garden and whether you should water your lawn or not because I like it brown or green."
The campaigners should take it up with local councils in Mackenzie, Waimate and Waitaki, rather than the Government, Dr Smith said.
The Government had already taken steps to protect the region, through the Canterbury water management strategy and the land and water forum, where about 50 stakeholders were due to report on environmental concerns from intensive farming next month.
"I make no bones about a blue-green agenda. It's about improving the environmental management and impact that come from intensive farming, but equally so we are a Government that's about growing the economy."
Poet Brian Turner was too ill to attend the exhibition, which featured a sculpture by Sam Mahon of Dr Smith, forged from manure and resin and featuring skeletal terns rising from his open cranium.
Mahon said he had had lunch with Dr Smith since creating it but had failed to shift the minister's pro-development stance.
All that was left was to raise public awareness "and carry on ramping up the pressure".
