“Forget your Geopark, tourism, and future plans – you can’t run a community with absentee land owners that are willing and able to destroy our waterways, our biodiversity, and our ecology.” Those comments were directed to the Waitaki District Council by Five Forks farmer Jane Smith after a public meeting on Tuesday night to discuss the long-term effects of large-scale carbon farming in the headwaters of the Kakanui River. After the meeting, Mrs Smith said she had “even less faith” that regional and district council regulators were going to put any urgency around the issue. “I believe every attendee was completely underwhelmed … on what appears to be a series of buck-passing by councils.”