Waters of life

Renowned environmental activist Mike Joy's eventful life is laid out in this smartly written memoir.

- MIKE JOY

Mike Joy is a freshwater scientist at Victoria University Te Herenga Waka and an environmental activist renowned for irritating the dairy industry, regional councils and the occasional prime minister. But one of the less expected pleasures of this smartly written memoir is the relating of his rollicking younger years on the way to academic respectability.

You imagine his parents slumped with exhaustion over their questioning, pulleverything-apart child. Fortunately, he learnt how to put things back together and was able to internalise his father's motto of never paying someone to do something you can do yourself.

Joy applied that handiness to his passions: sound systems, vehicles, firearms, and eventually houses and yachts - he owns a 1932 kauri ketch.

A firearm incident was one of many teenage high jinks: Mike plus mates infiltrated an air force base to reach a dump containing guillotined machine guns. With enough such parts, they found, you can build one working gun.

They built a beach buggy from car parts, too, and Joy was arrested because he was driving when the enraged police officer arrived. The local council attested to the boys' actions to repair the damage they'd caused the ground, a grass strip beside a river, but Joy says his lawyer didn't present the letter. Joy was convicted of wilful damage. "I felt incredibly let down by the system that I had believed in," he writes.