A time for change — letter from the Publisher
New Zealand Geographic is partnering with Rolex to bring readers a new series of solutions-based journalism. Publisher James Frankham explains more.
New Zealand Geographic is partnering with Rolex to bring readers a new series of solutions-based journalism. Publisher James Frankham explains more.
James Frankham is the publisher of New Zealand Geographic, former editor (2008–2017) and a contributor since 2005 in writing and photography.
Formerly the editor of Mana magazine, Leonie Hayden faced a unique set of challenges writing for a more mainstream audience in this magazine. “I was surprised by how many words and concepts common to Māori required definition,” she says. “I thought that ancestral maunga, the idea that a mountain can be more than mountain, was a concept that all New Zealanders understood. But despite hundreds of years of shared history, not everyone understands the physical and psychological connections to landmarks that are important to Māori.” This lack of understanding in language is also reflected in law, the ultimate construct of state. “But world views differ,” says Hayden. “Māori are unable to question it, and still have to play by the rules. We have to look to academic leaders to lead the conversation, to slowly translate and incorporate the Māori world view into the British legal system. But how do you even do that? It feels like a long and impossible task.” The SOUL protestors, profiled in her feature, are part of advancing that public discussion of difference, of redefining what it is to own land and what it is to belong to the land. “I’m not convinced that we’re very good at protecting our taonga,” she says. “In researching this I feel like Heritage New Zealand have let a lot of New Zealanders down. I don’t see how outcomes like this can protect special places. “Providing resources for people who are here right now is more important than what has gone before. You have to house and clothe people, and history won’t do that, but I hope that thinking of the past as a living thing will be a concept that’s relevant to more than only Māori.”
How many moa were there before the human settlement of Aotearoa? “We don’t know,” came the emphatic answer from the experts consulted for this issue. Estimates ranged from thousands of moa, to millions—though the higher end of the range was dismissed as “bollocks” in the carefully chosen words of one scientist. Why do whales strand? “Well… it’s complicated. There’s a range of contributing factors.” Simple questions can have complicated answers, and the popular image of science as a realm of orderly ideas and binary responses usually underestimates the complexity and tangled nature of problems that modern researchers are attempting to solve. Sometimes, there are thousands of variables, not the single cause-and-effect relationship of Newtonian physics. Which is what makes the Earth System Model—described by Naomi Arnold in this issue—such an audacious idea. It’s founded on the principle that every natural system and relationship can be described mathematically, and if you have rules that describe all of them—and a super-computer at your disposal—you can construct the perfect model of the planet, and demonstrate order within the apparent chaos. Not every process of this planet is fully understood, but the model will also serve to highlight those gaps in our understanding—the Southern Ocean being the largest missing piece in our region—and gradually resolve and refine it. Ultimately, this mathematical world will become the researchers’ play-thing. Like setting up a model train set, they will be able to re-route the tracks, build new tracks, and determine the route of the model train in order to understand how the real train might behave given different scenarios. Making sense of a complex world is the work of an Earth System Model, and for 55 issues editing New Zealand Geographic, asking simple questions and presenting the complicated answers in a compelling way has been my job too. For more than half of that period I have also been the magazine’s publisher, and now the moment has come to spend more time setting the direction of the title, and doubling-down in our efforts in the digital realm. I will still be involved with the print edition as a photo editor, but from next issue the editor’s torch will be passed to Rebekah White, currently deputy editor, award-winning former editor of Pro Photographer and frequent feature writer for this magazine—including in this edition. She is only the fourth in New Zealand Geographic’s relay of editors, and I know that she will bring the freshness of a new runner—a vibrant new voice and a new approach as the magazine approaches its third decade. Occupying this chair is a role I have cherished. Working with contributors to imagine a story, being the first person to read a freshly minted text, or receiving the first samples of a photographer’s work—sometimes sent direct from the field—has been a sublime privilege. Witnessing the magic moment when the text first touches the pictures on the designer’s screen, and watching the visual and textual narratives become entangled has probably been my greatest reward. And I trust this position will afford Rebekah as much satisfaction as it has me; even as she works to deliver insights and delights to you, in print and online. As for me, my mission remains the same—to give readers experiences that allow them to see New Zealand in a new way; to shed old mind-sets and build new notions of what this country is and could be. For the large and growing number of readers of this title, the future is full of possibility.
Every other week I go for a long run through bush close to our house in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead. Much of it is dominated by towering macrocarpas, but as I scramble up the trail that runs along the edge of Duck Creek, the thin understorey of ponga becomes more dense and diverse, the natives become larger, and at the head of a valley in the comparatively new suburb of Chatswood, I find myself surrounded by giants. Four kauri form a copse, rising like Apollo rockets from the undergrowth. I can get my arms about half way around the trunks of three of them, the other, not even close. I lean back on a perfunctory wooden seat and stare upward, the trees tilting toward a common vanishing point high above. Tūī clatter and whirr through the canopy. A core sample taken by University of Canterbury researcher Dave Norton suggests that the largest—1.7 metres in diameter—is about 475 years old. That’s not particularly old as large kauri go, but it pre-dates the arrival of Tasman by a century. It stood here throughout the tumultuous period of European settlement, and survived the kauri timber industry that enabled the construction of the colony. While its brethren were felled to provide the weatherboards and floors for my house, built some time before 1900, the Armed Constabulary were sacking Parihaka—a story of injustice barely mentioned in the public history of this country, but now recounted in detail in this issue. But these trees can do better than stand mute in the presence of history; they are living barographs of natural events, as Kate Evans investigates in her feature ‘Buried Treasure’. Ancient kauri provide a continuous climate record back 4500 years, and a more disconnected record back to the limit of radiocarbon dating 60,000 years ago. Ironically, the science benefits directly from the commercial extraction of swamp kauri, a resource being exported as ‘tabletops’ and ‘temple poles’ to international buyers, echoing the complex politics that has divided Northland. Is swamp kauri worth more in the ground or out of it? Are our remnant forests more valuable dead or alive? How do we begin to value these things when our sense of value is coloured so greatly by our perspective? This is the same question posed by ecologist Jamie Steer, profiled on page 28, who is being accused of conservation heresy. His suggestion that introduced species are as valuable and relevant a part of our ecosystem as natives has raised the ire of those whose focus is on eradicating them. He’s not committing scientific treason, he says, simply forwarding an opinion that “opens up the conversation”. What can we learn from controversial conservation ideas? What can we learn from logs buried for aeons in metres of peat? What can we learn from the long-obscured story of Parihaka? For Andrew Judd, former mayor of Taranaki, learning about the events at Parihaka was life-changing. When he was elected, he had “no knowledge of the Treaty, no true knowledge of our past, no understanding or empathy towards Māori. I was wrong, I was ignorant and arrogant,” he said in a candid interview on RNZ recently. New Zealanders pay lip service to the Treaty and are blind to its privilege, he said. “We do a haka at a rugby match, we sing the national anthem in both languages and think we’ve hit the mark . . . It’s archaic, and it has to change, because it’s not working.” New perspective is powerful. It can recalibrate one’s sense of reality, even reset the course of a nation. Like Judd, facing history’s inconvenient truths, acknowledging nature’s evolving complexity, reconciling the relative values of temple poles and taonga are among those difficult processes that are tempting to ignore, but in addressing them we will start a new and enlightening conversation for everyone.
The photographer with a veterinary science degree.
A parcel arrived today, one that I had ordered so long ago I had nearly forgotten about it. Inside, nestled within volumes of packing material, was a single feather. It’s black, and broad, and the top quarter of the feather is brilliant white to the tip. Except that it’s not a feather. It’s made of ceramic, a giant-sized plaster replica of a feather belonging to a huia, a bird that was hunted to extinction more than a century ago—a bird gone so long that the shape and shade of its plumage are now a totem that powerfully signifies all that modernity abandoned and destroyed in this archipelago. For me, however, it also represents everything that makes New Zealand unique, and everything that still remains here. Kākāpō, for instance, a bird that probably should not be here at all. The mechanisms of its absurd mating behaviour, and lack of success therein, should have been at odds poor enough to guarantee its relegation to the annals of pre-history. The kākāpō’s unique lack of preparedness for mammalian predators should have sealed its fate completely, if it were not for the precipitous hanging valleys of Fiordland, and the rugged outcrop of Stewart Island. At one point in the 1990s, the total population was barely 50 individuals. On this tender genetic thread hung the future of the entire species. For four decades, conservationists have focused on the fortunes of the remaining individuals, increasing the population to 155. Today, as deputy editor Rebekah White reveals in this issue, scientists have turned their attention back to that frail genetic thread, analysing it in cross-section to reveal the fabric of the kākāpō genome, and the specific genes of every kākāpō in the population, to breed the population back to health. The new knowledge has already led to one of the most successful breeding seasons ever, which researchers hope will be enough to ensure the kākāpō won’t go the way of the South Island kōkako, which may now be lost forever, despite the ongoing search detailed in the May–June issue. (North Island kōkako, too, had a close shave, with only the intervention of vigilante conservationists to save them in 1978—examined in Andrea Graves’ new Currency column on page 21.) It was all too late, however, for the huia—though it may yet be saved, even a century after the fact. In a 2002 paper published in the journal Common Ground, palaeobiologist Jeffrey Yule mounted a philosophical argument to restore species using genetic cloning of viable DNA that meet a very narrow band of criteria—that they were driven to extinction by humans; that the extinction occurred very recently; that the habitat is present to support a wild population; and that scientific effort in cloning extinct species does not distract from the effort to conserve species still extant. Yule singled out New Zealand’s huia, Australia’s thylacine and North America’s passenger pigeon as examples that fit the criteria for ‘ethical’ cloning. (He even quoted a—now defunct—international university project to revive the huia that had already secured the support of the manawhenua, Ngāti Huia.) So while the plaster feather now swinging from a nail on my wall echoes a distant past, it may also represent a distant future. “Cloning could provide the means to not only correct specific past mistakes,” writes Yule, “but also the opportunity to demonstrate to a too-often-dispirited public that it is still within our power to repair some of what we have so carelessly broken.” Genetic technology is rapidly bringing us into a brave new era of conservation biology, for better or for worse.
Today the government announced a $28-million fund to start a public-private partnership intended to move towards making New Zealand pest free by 2050. Will it work?
For Tim Cuff, life is black-and-white.
Since the first search engine, ‘Archie’ crawled through cyberspace in September 1990, the world has been enthralled with searching—for information, for images, for ideas—within the vast library of the internet. Today, the search engine Google is the world’s second-most valuable company, and easily the most visited website. Searching is actually more popular than any of the search results served. It has always been the way. A pilgrimage is an end unto itself, and the notion of enlightenment as a journey of self-discovery is the foundation of many religions. For some, the journey is to a holy site, but for most, the end point is irrelevant—devotees seek out inspiration in the desert, in the mountains, in the wilderness. The journey is the destination. In his essay on wilderness areas in this issue, Carl Walrond quotes American author and ecologist Aldo Leopold, who believed that wilderness is a “counterpoint to the ennui of the modern world, a tonic against striving ‘for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life and dullness’.” Like those seeking spiritual enlightenment, we go into the wilderness for a more primal experience. The journey embodies “remoteness, discovery, challenge, freedom and romance,” to quote the lyrical wording of the Wilderness Policy 1985. It’s probably no coincidence that these values match the unstated ideals of New Zealand identity: independence, egalitarianism, adventure, self-sufficiency, an affinity with nature and the ability to withstand hardship. Rhys Buckingham knows something about hardship in the outdoors: he has spent the better part of his life chasing the echo of a lost song through the forest, looking for a bird that had been considered extinct for nearly half a century. He believes he has heard the sad, lilting call of the South Island kōkako in the forests of Murchison, Otago and South Westland. He’s detected what he thinks are signs of their browsing on the forest floor, and even believes he’s seen the shimmering slate-grey plumage of the bird soaring through the forest canopies of Stewart Island and Fiordland. He knows that the probability of finding kōkako in the South Island is small, but is adamant that it is not zero. On the balance of evidence, the Department of Conservation seems to agree, and in 2013 changed the bird’s designation from ‘extinct’ to ‘data-deficient’. History would agree too—searchers found the takahē, the kākāpō, the New Zealand storm petrel; all believed extinct at the time they were rediscovered, against tremendous odds. In a sense, Buckingham is not looking for a lost bird at all, but a lost world. “One of the tragedies is that most New Zealanders walk through the bush and think that what they see and hear is normal,” South Island Kōkako Trust chariman Euan Kennedy told the author of our story, Kate Evans. “All of us in our trade know that it is far from normal—that what were once great cathedrals of song, are now deadly silent.” Yet they're not about to give up, perhaps acknowledging that the search itself has a meaning of its own. Looking for that lost world, anticipating a better ending, wishing for a more complete New Zealand is surely the first step to achieving it. Will we find the South Island kōkako? I don’t know, but like Buckingham, I’d prefer to believe that’s still there, haunting our forests, avoiding human contact, singing its siren song, to be heard only by those who go in search.
New SEM imagery reveals strange structures on glowworms.
This is my 50th issue at the helm of New Zealand Geographic, though familiarity with the job hasn’t made it any easier. The better I understand the forces acting on this place and its people, the more complex and interesting our shared story becomes. It’s an arcane ecology, with a strange cargo of life and a short but explosive human history. I’ve been stirred by the analysis of writers and photographers who have forced me to reconsider my assumptions and prejudices on a bimonthly basis. And I’ve come to realise how many of the ideas that we unconsciously adopt—and then fiercely defend—are founded on very contestable facts. Everything that makes our environment unique became the matching criteria for its failure when circumstances changed. It’s hard to reconcile the myth of that pristine and unusual archipelago—infamously branded 100% Pure—with the tale of the fastest deforestation on Earth, or data that reveals that our rivers are among the most polluted in the world. In the past few years, we have published stories that confront these flawed notions, and challenge our assumptions about our society, too: Our founding document meant different things to the parties who signed it, and was pre-dated by an earlier declaration that sheds light on those very different intentions. With every issue I am reminded that this country is not what we think it is, and we are not who we think we are. In this issue is another reality check: we discovered that one per cent of the adult population are using methamphetamine, a destructive psychoactive drug now more readily available than marijuana. Last issue, we put a cute baby kiwi on the cover, and it sold like hot cakes. This issue, we’ve got a junkie smoking a meth pipe, and the marketing manager’s face fell about a foot. News like this doesn’t sell well. It’s not the reflection we want of ourselves—but it’s the truth nonetheless. Recently we’ve produced unpopular stories on waste, homelessness, poaching and sea-level rise, because they’re important. They’re forces that are changing the shape of New Zealand and New Zealanders. We have received equal measure of praise and criticism for highlighting these uncomfortable realities, including the complaint that such stories aren’t “recreational reading”—presumably the kind of material that leaves one’s prejudices unruffled. Observations. Values. Judgements. These are how we form a view of ourselves and our nation, and they shape our responses to challenge and opportunity. This is a publishing ideology set in motion from the first issue in 1989, and three editors have maintained it across 139 issues, which now loom large on an enormous shelf over my desk. Today, that great archive exists in another realm, too. Six years of effort and the generosity of magazine contributors have resulted in a complete redux of the New Zealand Geographic website, nzgeo.com, which now features every story ever published—more than a quarter-century of insight and endeavour by hundreds of New Zealand’s leading writers and photographers. In addition, the world-leading television production company NHNZ (formerly Natural History New Zealand) has joined the platform, contributing its entire back-catalogue of programming—hundreds of hours of natural history documentaries—for a new streaming television service available at nzgeo.tv. Together, the combined catalogues represent one of the largest and richest bodies of New Zealand content available anywhere. This new endeavour positions New Zealand Geographic as one of the leading voices in the online conversation, just as it has been part of the discourse in printed media for decades. I hope it will be a place where we can continue to be stirred by new versions of the New Zealand story, what I now realise is a story without end—a bimonthly process of redefining who we are and where we’re from.
In this issue, we feature stories on New Zealand’s endangered sea lion and our endangered rowi, the rarest of our several rare kiwi species. They’re two of a growing list of creatures facing a precarious future in Aotearoa. Also in this issue is a story about something that at one point seemed to be an endangered commodity: wool. What links these stories is the question of value. How do we value commodities, and how do we value nature? For nearly two centuries New Zealand’s economy has been built on commodities such as wool, milk, fruit, meat and so on. But in the case of wool, discovers Aaron Smale in his feature, today’s buyers care as much about what wool represents as what it is. They buy it not just for the qualities of the fibre but because it is perceived to be sustainable and natural, and these societal values have an impact on wool’s commercial value. This invites the question: How do we value our most vulnerable species? What do they represent to us? Economists assess value not only by what people physically pay, but also by ‘revealed preferences’—how much people appear to be prepared to pay, whether they’re aware of that value judgement or not. How much, then, is a sea-lion worth? The empirical measure currently used is the number of sea-lion deaths that we as a society are prepared to tolerate as a consequence of commercial fishing activities. Today, that number happens to be 68. The New Zealand public (via its government) tolerates the ‘incidental death’ of up to 68 sea-lions in any given year in order to maintain current fishing effort in the Southern Ocean. How much is a rowi worth? The country spent about $380,000 to safely nurture the 59 rowi chicks that hatched this summer. That’s about $6000 each—a lot of money for a bird, but the kiwi is our national bird, and it’s in trouble everywhere on the New Zealand mainland. As taxpayers, you and I sanctioned that expenditure, so arguably that’s what rowi are worth to us. Economists are increasingly trying to refine these measurements and quantify natural value, using constructs of commercial value such as ‘natural capital’ and terms to express nature’s utility, such as ‘ecosystem services’. For many people, the idea that everything is somehow for sale is disconcerting, and there may be good reason to be suspicious, because not everything can be bought. The conundrum is that trade only works bilaterally. If you cash in some ‘natural capital’ for a dollar, you need to be able to buy it back for a dollar. But the natural state doesn’t work like that. It’s not a bank. It’s more like a mine, from which you can extract only the gold that’s there, until there’s none left. It’s finite. In a market accustomed to infinite trading, where everything has a dollar value (and even dollar values have dollar value), this idea of a finite, non-tradable, non-transmutable system of resources is difficult to reconcile, which is perhaps why climate-change summits have ended in failure, again and again. Monetary value can’t capture the full spectrum of natural benefit, let alone worth. Rowi have value beyond what it costs to protect their chicks. Like sea-lions, they are better thought of as citizens of the state, not just part of its biological cargo. Perhaps we need to be asking: How do we put a value on life itself?
There are more than 160 islands making up the archipelago of New Zealand, another 40 or so trapped within our lakes and rivers, some 30 more outlying islands, 20 that are part of the wider Realm of New Zealand (such as Tokelau and the Cooks), and a dozen others that are part of our territorial claim in Antarctica—islands within islands, islands without, and islands far-flung. As a nation we’ve become used to the idea of living a life adrift in the South Pacific. It’s part of our history and ingrained in our culture and ideology. It has made us tribal—just ask a ‘Mainlander’ about those from the North, or a Chatham Island ‘Weka’ about the ‘Kiwis’ over on ‘New Zealand’. Isolation has created connections and rivalry, it has stimulated innovation and built trading relationships. In this issue we visit some of our islands, but for reasons as diverse as the islands themselves. A government-commissioned report by the consultancy firm MartinJenkins looked at the unusual economic environment on the Chatham Islands, where every item carries an import-export tax in the form of ‘council dues’, where the employment is as finite as available work, and where the population has been decreasing at a rate of 10 per cent each decade. The report included some alarming insights and some future scenarios designed to move towards a more self-sufficient economy. On her first assignment for New Zealand Geographic, Anna Pearson travelled to Chatham Island to compare the report’s findings with circumstances on the ground, and to record the story of the islanders in their own voice. She found a situation more complex than the report made out, and within it, some islanders bringing characteristic tenacity to the opportunities afforded by their isolation. On a separate assignment—my first in some time—I ventured with photographer Richard Robinson to Great Mercury Island in search of kōkopu meant to illustrate last issue’s feature on the native fish. It didn’t go very well—we found just one—but stumbled on a much bigger story besides. The Department of Conservation and the merchant banking partnership of Sir Michael Fay and David Richwhite had just completed a unique eradication programme to rid the island of predators. In an environment of diminishing funding for conservation, this public-private model appeared promising. And in an environment without predators, the results were staggering. Within months of the eradication, birds were resettling burrows unoccupied for decades, and the island’s farmers were reporting record numbers of geckos, bumblebees and spiders as the island’s ecology rebounded. But it wasn’t the rebound that surprised DOC staff, it was the rate. Another staffer, deputy editor Rebekah White, deserted her desk for the relative discomfort of a climbing harness and visited the little-explored islands of life in the tree canopy. “The canopy is one of the least visited, least researched and least understood ecosystems on Earth,” writes White. “As a human race, we’ve spent more time sending spacecraft to Mars than figuring out how this layer of the forest operates, especially in temperate zones such as New Zealand.” Each of the islands we visited for this issue surprised us. Consider the eruption of an undersea volcano off the Tongan coast, depicted in the Viewfinder department in this issue. In 2009, an island sprang from the sea, firing rocks and steam into the air, and rose to a height of some 30 metres. A few months later, it was gone, devoured by the ocean swells. When it happened again in 2015, it stopped air traffic. This time, the cone towered to an altitude of more than 100 metres of ash and tephra, and joined two adjacent islands. Kiwi scientists cobbled together an expedition to see what the world’s latest island might reveal about the eruption sequences of volcanoes, to see what surprises this island might have, says study leader Marco Brenna, “before it disappears, too”. Islands appear to concentrate and juxtapose the challenges and achievements of life and culture that are averaged out and homogenised in the wider spaces of continents. In New Zealand, we are all islanders, adrift yet bound together by geography and circumstance, on the last and perhaps most surprising archipelago on the planet.
Steven Pearce goes out on a limb for a good picture.
Great Mercury was one of the first sites of human habitation in New Zealand. Last year, a radical new public-private partnership sought to rid the island of pests. It was a unique operation, and the results have been astonishing.
Te Papa Press' publicist Elizabeth Heritage must have been cursing the richness of New Zealand’s fish fauna as she carried the 2000- page, four-volume, 11-kilogram back-breaker The Fishes of New Zealand up the six flights of stairs leading to New Zealand Geographic’s Britomart loft. The four-volume title catalogues all 1262 of New Zealand’s described fish species—only the second descriptive catalogue of our fish fauna. The first was compiled by Frederick Hutton and James Hector in 1872 and ran to just 148 (mostly coastal) species. This fact alone indicates the extraordinary scientific effort conducted in Aotearoa’s aquatic realm over the intervening 143 years. And yet it’s not complete, and will probably never be complete. For the sake of practicality, the cut-off date for inclusion in the book was June 2013, and since then, at least 14 new species have been discovered, while more than half of our four million-square-kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone remains unsampled. So this is a mile- stone, a summary of our knowledge to date from the minds of 44 specialist authors and generations of scientists. Together they surveyed the fish spectrum, from writhing hagfish to dainty triplefins, basking sharks to blobfish, cut-throat eels to sunfish—a myriad of bizarre body plans and bewildering life cycles. They were hauled out of swamps and scooped into sampling sleds in the abyssal deep, and many of these first holotypes are under the scientific gaze still, preserved in formaldehyde or printed in one of these volumes, with diagrams, distribution maps and biological notes, for the next generation of scientists eager to explore the remaining half of our liquid realm.
Bill Morris grew up on a farm in the headwaters of the Rakaia Valley, the son of a farmer and bush poet. As a result, he became interested in writing at a young age, and the sometimes-fraught relationship between people and the land. Later, he worked as a commercial diver around the coast of Stewart Island, trying to eradicate the invasive seaweed Undaria. The team had been tearing up the fast-growing weed by its roots for four years already, and Morris worked in the frigid waters for a year before DOC ultimately pulled the project—Undaria had got away on them, and their work had become futile. He crossed Foveaux Strait and began a career in journalism, first with the Southland Times, later as a freelance writer and television director at Natural History New Zealand, where he still works. His first feature for New Zealand Geographic was on country music, his second on 60-million-year-old whales. In this issue he writes about the tiny fresh-water fish, kōkopu. Variety is the spice of Morris’ life. “I didn’t really know anything about native fish before writing the story, but found this entire subculture of conservationists, scientists and impassioned people—almost a secret society—that exists around these little fish,” he says. “Most of the species are endemic to New Zealand and we know so little about them, people are fascinated by that, and the prospect that there may still be new species to be found.” This month, he was browsing produce at the Dunedin farmers’ market when he came across one of his dive buddies from his days combat- ting Undaria. To Morris’ alarm, his mate was selling Undaria, which also happens to be the raw ingredient wakame, the seaweed used in Japanese cuisine. He bought some. “It raises some interesting philosophical questions,” says Morris. “How much energy and effort do you pour into protecting indigenous ecosystems, when nature is a thing that’s in constant flux? All conservation is artificial, in a way, so where do you draw the line? “In New Zealand we have a very black and white view of conservation, of trying to return to a Garden of Eden state, but we live in a modified landscape, and we need to find a balance between existing here and using the country’s resources without compromising what makes it unique. We’ve got a long way to go in terms of finding that balance. It’s something we’ve been searching for since the first Polynesian set foot here, and that influences not just our environment but our identity as a people.”
In a story full of surprises, the most staggering notion in Kennedy Warne’s rising seas feature is that all the world could stop burning fossil fuels today, and it wouldn’t make a shred of difference to sea levels for at least 100 years. The chemical changes that we have wrought in our atmosphere and seas since the Industrial Revolution have set our course, and the consequences are baked in. We are, as Warne puts it, “slouching towards Atlantis”. Other elements of climate change can be mitigated—even reversed—in the medium term, but the seas will keep rising. We may keep carbon dioxide under 400 parts per million. We may keep warming to a figure around the average of 2o°C warming to avoid the worst effects of a high-energy atmosphere, but our coasts will erode, seas will over-top barriers that have withheld the waves for generations, and saltwater will leach into our groundwater and bubble up through low-lying areas as surely as the Earth turns about the Sun. In his book Climate Change and the Coast, Massey University professor Bruce Glavovic suggests that our coast is the “frontline of the sustainability struggle in the Anthropocene, and the primary arena in which humanity must learn to adapt climate change”.High seas and Violent weather humanity will survive. In the fullness of geological time, these changes will define the human epoch to the same degree as the social forces of population and consumption. Critics of the public discussion around climate change have noted the themes of catastrophism in statements such as this. It’s a fair observation, but the scientific support is compelling. The International Energy Agency has concluded that meeting the 2o°C target will require leaving two- thirds of the Earth’s known reserves of oil, gas, and coal in the ground. That would require most countries to write-down the $40 trillion value of those fossil fuels, and switch, almost entirely, to renewable and carbon-neutral fuels for energy and transport within the next 30 years. Yet we’re burning more fossil fuels than ever, and increasing the rate at which we’re burning them. This, and the long-standing political gridlock, led a team of scientists from the respected Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research to model our current trajectory, one in which we burn all available fossil fuels. The results, published in the journal Science Advances, were neatly summarised by the paper’s lead author Ricarda Winkelmann, “If we burn it all, we melt it all.” And if we melt it all—the Arctic ice cap (already well on its way), the Greenland ice sheet, the east and west Antarctic ice sheets—the sea level will increase some 70 metres. That would inundate all of Auckland, cutting it off entirely from Northland and swamping the city’s isthmus to a depth of more than 50 metres. The sea would surge up the Hauraki Plains and allow one to sail a yacht inland as far as Te Kuiti. Carterton would be a seaside town, Palmerston North and Hamilton sunk. Wellington would be underwater, Miramar awash, the Hutt Valley a long, deep harbour. You could safely navigate a container ship across the Canterbury Plains inside of Banks Peninsula, and half of Southland (including all of Invercargill) would join an expanded Foveaux Strait. This result didn’t particularly surprise the scientists—after all, Antarctica was once covered in lush rainforest—but what did alarm them was the timeframe. Half of this melting could happen within 1000 years, on the order of a foot of sea level rise per decade; about ten times the rate at which it is rising now. This is not catastrophism, but a consequence of our current consumption. Switching to eco lightbulbs isn’t going to stop the juggernaut, and the problem has now become too large for the consumer to fathom, too complex for one country to solve. We are, as a species, trapped in the headlights of the oncoming train. Do we pretend it’s someone else’s fault? Do we hope that the train might just be a figment of scientific imagination, or look for a ‘technological solution’ that might stop it in its tracks? Do we run, or just watch in awe, and brace for impact? Do we demand political action, or wait for failure?
New Zealand's newest domain, gazetted only in 1982, stretches 200 nautical miles in all directions from our shore. Our Exclusive Economic Zone takes in an area of sea that puts New Zealand, ironically, among the ten largest countries in the world, at least in terms of marine estate.
Every Monday morning, I join my neighbours, plopping a 45-litre bag of rubbish on the curbside. By 10am it is gone, leaving nothing but a rainshadow.
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