Trainee search-and-rescue teams—one dog, one human—meet at a twice-yearly event that’s part boot camp, part Survivor. Not all of them will make it through.
Kate Evans had a mask. She had a snorkel. She was missing her flippers. And that’s why she’s trailing behind environmental advocate Karen Stone and photographer Richard Robinson in the image above, swimming against the current in an attempt to reach the Tongan islet of Fonua’one’one. The trio were trying to land on the islet, one of many uninhabited places in the Vava’u archipelago, because the rats living on it had been eradicated in 2016. Evans and Robinson wanted to see—and hear, and smell—what the end result of rat eradication might be. As they discovered, a healthy island is a stinky island, at least in places. Since Stone’s previous visit, a bunch of red-footed boobies had started nesting there. “You could smell the guano immediately and you could see these white paint splashes of it on the leaves,” says Evans. Good news for the surrounding coral reef—guano nourishes all kinds of life. “There are a whole bunch of these little tiny perfect tropical islands—white sand with forest sitting on top and a perfect coral reef around the outside,” says Evans. And, islet by islet, that life is being restored.
Of all the species living on Earth, perhaps two-thirds of them live in the dirt under your feet, according to a group of Swiss scientists who set out to make an educated guess on the matter. Obviously, it isn’t possible to count everything in the soil everywhere on Earth. The scientists’ estimate is built on multiple estimates made by other groups of researchers. The Swiss trio looked at the entire tree of life—they wanted to know how many bacteria and viruses lived in the soil as well as how many plants, worms, bugs and fungi. Viruses were particularly hard to measure, because viruses aren’t categorised as species, like plants and animals are. Instead, the researchers decided that viruses with sufficiently different DNA or RNA would count as different species. What’s the point of making such a guess, if it’s just a guess? We know that dirt is the basis of life on Earth, and that it even has an impact on human health—previous research has shown that the soil microbiome and human microbiome are connected. That means it’s useful to have a big-picture idea of what lives down below.
Jeremy Hansen and Jade Kake, Massey University Press, $75
Two people have been counting albatrosses on remote islands in the subantarctic for more than three decades. Their research shows that at least one species is en route to extinction. A few changes to the way we fish could save it.
When I started looking for stories about young people in New Zealand, I discovered that a lot has been written about them, but very little of it spoke to actual teenagers. This is what you might learn about teenagers from the media: Teens have higher rates of mental illness than ever before. They protest against climate change, but also, they’re not as wild as their parents were. Less sex, fewer drugs. They’re spending an awful lot of time on social media. They’re really pessimistic about the future. We hear from the people around them—their parents and teachers and counsellors. The people who watch them and worry about them. We don’t really hear their own worries, thoughts, concerns. Part of this is because it’s delicious to be outraged about what the youth are up to, sure. But part of this is also to do with good journalistic ethics—it’s not cool to put a kid on the spot for a quote. We’ve all said dumb things as teens and none of them are written down in the pages of a national magazine. And yet, as the pandemic went into its second year, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to be on the precipice of adulthood at this moment in time. An uncertain present and an uncertain future. The big OE temporarily out of the question. Family finances strained. A tough job market to enter. A second world, online, which never stops or sleeps—and which you can’t opt out of without losing friendships. We knew that if we wanted to produce a story about young people, it would require time. A lot of time. Enough to really get a sense of a person, a family, a circumstance. And it couldn’t be about just one person—there would have to be many. It was the kind of project that was too big and expensive to make. It went into the box of impossible stories. Then, in the wake of COVID-19, NZ On Air began offering grants to magazines like this one. Normally, NZ On Air only provides funding to broadcast journalism—television, video and radio—but during the pandemic, for a three-year period, it expanded its remit to include written journalism and photography. We received funding for a year-long project to document a group of young people who were broadly representative of the ages, locations, and ethnicities of teens in New Zealand today. We sought out teenagers. We met their parents. We mobilised a big group of writers and photographers. We bothered our teen participants as they studied for exams (Liam and Seilala), got ready for the ball (Vidi, Will, Ceejay), at their birthday parties (Hawaikii, Ceejay), at their prizegivings (Vidi). We photographed their bedrooms (Te Orahi, Ceejay) and their soft toys (Jaxon), their breakfasts and board games and sports tournaments (Mihi). It turned out to be a tough assignment. “I honestly think these might be my most challenging interview subjects yet,” one writer said. There were floods and COVID-19 outbreaks and a lot of unanswered messages, calls, chats, DMs. But it was also joyful. Documenting one of Seilala’s performances at Papatoetoe High took photographer Edith Amituanai back to her high-school Samoan group dancing days. Photographer Becki Moss sat in on a health class she wished she’d been able to take in school. And we all came to care for these teens and their families. We hope that comes through on the page.
One thing about having a 33-year online archive of every New Zealand Geographic magazine—from issue 001 in January 1989 to this one, issue 177 in September 2022—is that it’s possible to see all the ways the magazine has evolved. If you haven’t yet explored the archive, it’s an interesting, occasionally infuriating place. There are original stories by Michael King and Keri Hulme; there are articles that would be better suited to an encyclopaedia than a magazine; there’s some excellent photojournalism, especially of the way we live; there wasn’t always the diversity of voices and viewpoints we strive for today. Some of these changes are simply because you, the reader, have needed different things from us over time. Now that you carry an information portal around in your pocket, our features are less completist: more like stories, less like Wikipedia pages. We face issues today that we didn’t think about much in 1989 (“Who does outer space belong to?” “How do we rehabilitate our rivers?”) but we’re also looking at the same things all over again from a new vantage point (“How do we protect the vulnerable?” “How do we honour the Treaty?”) Some of these changes are because journalism has evolved, and our ideas about how to tell stories responsibly have developed. These days, we want you to know a little bit more about the people who are writing and photographing the stories in the magazine. We want to acknowledge the perspectives they hold. That’s why there are now credit lines in stories describing our contributors a little more, and that’s why we’ve started listing the iwi of any Māori contributors or sources—so that others can pinpoint them in the web of networks and relationships that is te ao Māori. The unchanging part of the magazine—our magnetic north—is that we’re committed to learning. We don’t consider anything to be finished. Like the scientists we write about, we keep open minds, sift new evidence, listen to those who have a long history and connection with the whenua. And we start stories in the same way, a candle in a dark room, reaching towards something we feel is there. Most of the stories in this issue began as musings—a sixth-sense notion that there may be something worth bringing into the light, worth sharing with others. “I see a lot of rosellas these days,” I said to Auckland journalist Ellen Rykers. “Are they bad?” Our oceans journalist Kate Evans heard talk about an terrible seaweed on Great Barrier Island. “Is this even a story?” she wondered, and went there to find out. I asked Tulia Thompson to attend a siren battle and tell us what it was like and Kerry Sunderland suggested travelling up the remote Baton Valley to find out what life there is like. We start, always, in ignorance, and then we learn. After five years and one pandemic editing New Zealand Geographic—a job that is a bit like being an air traffic controller, where journalism and photography are the planes—I’m taking a sabbatical to learn more about journalism in the United States, with some help from Columbia University and Fulbright New Zealand. I’m planning to listen, to reconsider, and to return not with more certainty but more curiosity. The magazine’s next editor, Catherine Woulfe, is sitting right next to me as I type, and I’m excited to see what the magazine—this country, our lives—look like from her vantage point. You’re in good hands.
One of the first sights that NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope observed was Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. This picture, the biggest produced by the telescope so far, is a composite of about 1000 images. If you printed it out at its actual size, it would be about 700 kilometres wide. Scientists hope that looking at Stephan’s Quintet this closely will teach us more about how stars are formed by galaxies crashing into or moving past each other. The left-most galaxy, NGC 7320, is nearest to us—40 million lightyears away—and so it appears in the most detail. The other four galaxies are about 290 million lightyears away. One of them, NGC 7318B, is smashing through the centre of the cluster, while the top galaxy, NGC 7319, has a supermassive black hole at its centre that’s 24 million times as big as the sun.
Mark Barber documents the construction of two multibillion-dollar railway tunnels.
To take part in a celebration drawn from this land. To continue a tradition going back centuries. To feast on the summer’s bounty, to look for signs of the coming season. To consider time differently. To remember those who passed away; to say their names again, into the night, and to let them go. In Aotearoa, the new year begins in mid-winter with the rising of the constellation Matariki. This year, for the first time, we all have a day off to celebrate it together. What should we do? Nic Low spoke to Rangi Matamua, the guy responsible for it all, and a number of tohunga kōkōrangi, astronomers, about what Matariki was and is and could be. One of the themes that emerges is that Matariki offers an opportunity to look outwards rather than inwards. The lunar calendar, the maramataka, like the one included with this issue, is a way to start thinking about your relationship with the land, sea and stars. You can also start in your backyard. Go to nzgeo.com/local to read stories about exploring what’s around you. These are stories about what can be found on the rocky shore, what can be foraged and eaten among the weeds that grow on driveways and berms, and what species live in the mudflats that border urban motorways. These are reminders that the natural world isn’t out there in a national park: that the turning of the seasons can be marked by the flowering of onion weed (which is delicious) as much as by the migration of the godwits. Throughout Aotearoa, we’re lucky to have a good view of the stars. So: rug up and go outside for Matariki. As omicron continues to spread, as medical professionals predict a flu season to rival all flu seasons, spending time outdoors is a safe way to see others. In the past, our survival depended on our ability to closely observe the natural world. We no longer rely on these observations for our next meal, but they’re important to us in a different way. They counteract the abstracted fashion in which we increasingly connect with each other online, the fracturing of our attention spans by the communication devices in our pockets. Many of us participate in online communities, and the internet offers us a place of affirmation and connection. The internet can also make it harder for us to empathise with others and to be present in the physical world. The way to pull our minds out of the Cloud and back to earth is, literally, to concentrate on the earth, in ways that might seem, at first, to be pointless. In ways that are usually deemed unproductive. One of my favourite thinkers, Jenny Odell, dedicated a whole book to this, called How to Do Nothing. She writes: “I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.” Matariki is a reminder that we inhabit an ever-changing place alongside ever-changing fellow humans, and that there’s something crucial in noticing these transformations.
One town, five days, 21 photographers.
As this issue went to print, hundreds of kororā had been found washed up dead in separate events along Te Oneroa-a-Tōhē/Ninety Mile Beach and other beaches in the Far North, in what are called penguin wrecks. The Department of Conservation says little blue penguins are dying as a result of the summer’s marine heatwave, which makes it harder for them to find food. Read more at nzgeo.com/penguins
He could have retired years ago, but there’s still so much to do.
Melanie Burford, a New Zealand photojournalist in Norway, turns her lens on intangible subjects: her son’s autism, her family’s search for belonging.
The fifth issue of New Zealand Geographic, published on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, began with an observation that “differences were not understood, respect not offered, deals not honoured, wrongs not righted and, for many, a corroding ignorance widens the gulf”. Thirty-two years later, those words are still accurate, so we asked ourselves how we could do better as a media outlet to address the widening gulf and bravely confront some of the questions still vexing New Zealand society. We turned to writer and author Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), funded by NZ On Air’s Public Interest Journalism initiative, as a sort of navigator to help steer the waka through these difficult seas. We set out priorities. Developing Māori journalism talent is critical, but so is the careful, considerate, respectful explanation of what is meant by rangatiratanga, how co-governance might be relevant, how iwi can balance commercial priorities with kaitiakitanga and how to close the yawning faultlines created by the trauma of colonisation. “Luckily these aren’t uncharted seas,” says Low. “Māori writers, thinkers and leaders have had to grapple with these questions since before the time of Te Tiriti, so there’s generations of matauranga to draw on. My small part is to try to bring Māori voices and perspectives into New Zealand Geographic in substantial ways, give people the space to tell their stories, and provide some of the history and context needed so these issues make sense.” A picture is worth a thousand data points In 2008, Edith Woischin and Timo Franz went on their big OE, exploring surf beaches around the Pacific before arriving in New Zealand. Here, they co-founded Dumpark, an agency specialising in data visualisation and infographics. From mapping oil spills and plastic pollution to reporting on social development and human rights, their work involves making complex information intelligible. This issue, they took up the challenge of transforming sea-level rise data into visualisations for the story A map of the future. The long reach of war Tatsiana Chypsanava’s multi-stop journey to her present-day home of Nelson has encompassed being a dance student in Belarus and a cocoa farmer in Brazil. Now, she’s a photojournalist. With family in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, Tatsiana has first-hand experience of how much the conflict in Ukraine is affecting Kiwis with roots in the region. It grew into this issue’s story about how authorities overseas can intimidate or crack down from afar on dissent. Hold still As a 12-year-old, Becki Moss won a camera at the Fieldays biosecurity tent, then taught herself photography from the online community Flickr. From the age of 14 onwards she was spending summers shooting weddings, and eventually, she quit her science degree to freelance full-time. In Wellington for a contract, she began documenting the local drag scene, and continued to photograph the LGBTIQA+ community over the course of several years—a project that was part of the portfolio that won her Young Photographer of the Year in 2020. Much of her work touches on invisible chronic illnesses—such as her story Stay Home Club.
There’s a cost to our existence. There’s coal mined to forge the steel to build the cities we live in and the cars we drive; the forests we’ve cleared to produce our food; the land we’ve peeled away to build new subdivisions; the river rapids drowned under the dams of the hydroelectric schemes that keep us warm at night. Yeah, we know. No need to go on about it. But it’s worth talking about, because we need to understand our footprint and be comfortable with its consequences. Presently, we designate some areas for total exploitation, and others for total protection. These protected places are salves for the conscience, our national parks and wilderness areas and marine reserves, as though they cancel out the places we’ve irreversibly changed. Some have suggested this approach seems old-fashioned, that we need to co-habit with the natural world, and exploit it sustainably. It’s a theme, in particular, of the Māori worldview, which is partly why national parks vested as Crown land and no-take marine reserves don’t sit easily with some iwi. We know that our wild places are affected by what we do everywhere else, and as a result, we’re trying hard to unexploit some places—rewilding suburbs, creating bird corridors, planting stream margins—all of these an acknowledgement that we need to reduce the sum total of human exploitation on the world, or we’re going to ruin the whole thing. Yet conservation science tell us that protecting some places and fully exploiting others often has better results than a little bit of exploitation everywhere. This is most obvious in the sea, where the convection of life is constantly stirring all things together. There, having some areas untouched is critically important to the structure of the ecosystem—otherwise everything is compromised. These are among the challenging terms of reference for the panel deciding the fate of stewardship land. Should it be entirely protected—no use permitted—or entirely exploited? Other voices, predominantly Māori ones, are pointing out that perhaps this all-or-nothing approach isn’t necessary, and that, historically, the concept of kaitiakitanga allowed for both protection and utility, even commerce. You could have your birds and eat them, too. We can’t copy-and-paste exactly the same tactics today—there are too many of us who are too comfortable using lots of resources—but the same principles apply. It may be possible to use and protect, and it may be necessary, too, because all of the natural world requires our care, and all of it bears our signature. Many of us would like to see a reduction in the net total of human exploitation, but most of us haven’t calibrated our expectations around what that would look like, or how that would affect our lives. If we stop burning coal for heat, that deficit will need to be paid in reduced consumption or increased generation, which may require rivers turned into hydro lakes, or significant government subsidies for switching coal boilers to biofuel. These are unpleasant choices. Yet this is something we’re all part of—this is not only a national project, but a global one. More than ever, we need to listen to one another, communicate respectfully, and weave these threads of knowledge together to find a new and more durable approach to living in Aotearoa.
Making remote portraits of New Zealanders in isolation—using only their phone cameras.
During Auckland’s most recent lockdown, I got in the habit of going on a passeggiata. I called it this to make it seem more interesting; I went on a walk around the block. For Italians, a passeggiata is the stroll you take on a summer evening to see what’s happening in the town square and say hi to everyone else. For me, it meant putting a beer in the pocket of my cardigan and wandering down the road. I live in a suburb of Auckland known primarily for its giant spider sculpture and boy racers, and as I walked I found myself wishing there was somewhere to sit down and watch the world go past. Then I found myself wishing the world would go past in something other than cars, so that I could see it better. There’s a reason people-watching is a thing, and car-watching isn’t. I missed people-watching. In other words: there’s a difference between a road and a street. A road is a space for vehicles to travel on. A street is that, plus everything around it: the freesias sprouting underneath the neighbour’s fence, the loquats ripening on the berm, the kids walking to school, the buckets of fresh flowers and the stacks of bananas and taro outside the dairy, the flamingo tree, the tradie who stops me to ask directions to the giant spider. “It’s called Dale,” I tell him, and his face breaks into a huge grin. These are some of the reasons that I like walking—you see all the details that you miss when you drive. In this issue of the magazine, we explore what’s wrong with roads, and how we could start turning them back into streets. One of the biggest changes—and one with a lot of evidence in its favour—is to make it just as easy for people to walk or bicycle as it is to drive. Our drive-everywhere experiment, which New Zealand has been running since 1955, has had a good run. It’s had some anticipated consequences (crashes, noisy roads) and some unanticipated ones (social disconnection, carbon emissions). Cars have dominated our infrastructure spending and social habits for so long that we’ve really got no idea what our cities could be like if we made the other options just as good. We’d never make a road that was too narrow for a car, or that had a staircase in it, but there are plenty of places you can’t use a pram or a wheelchair. We’d never build subdivisions that weren’t connected by roads to the rest of the city, but we make new developments that aren’t served by public transport or that are unsafe for bicycles. Conversations about city transport often involve splitting people into teams. Drivers in this corner, cyclists in that corner. (Fight!) But I’m an advocate for dual citizenship. We’re never returning to some idealised state of prelapsarian carlessness—it smelled like manure back then—but we do have the ability to give New Zealanders more choices about how they move around. It’s not just about movement. When a space is filled with people rather than vehicles, there’s a life to it. In this age of social isolation, it’s more meaningful than ever to see each other’s faces, to nod at the familiar strangers of our neighbourhoods, to remind ourselves that humans are always weirder and more surprising than we expect—and that while we live apart, we also live in our cities together.
If you had looked in the New Zealand Geographic office fridge in the summer of 2018 you would have found, next to the beer and the old film, a carefully wrapped plastic bag containing half a dozen transmitting GPS tags. Each one was worth thousands of dollars, and each was destined to be attached to a manta ray. Except no one knew where to find a manta ray. Department of Conservation marine scientist Clinton Duffy and Conservation International’s Mark Erdmann had assembled enough sightings of manta rays in New Zealand waters to know they visited. But the observations were spread from Cape Brett to Cape Colville, right on the edge of New Zealand’s territorial limit. Neither Duffy nor Erdmann could summon funding to investigate further at that time, so they were riding along on other boats doing other things—such as on photoshoots with New Zealand Geographic. It took a year to get the first tag into a manta ray, but then the animal immediately set a record for diving. By 2020, Erdmann had his own boat, and photojournalist Richie Robinson joined him to document the manta ray search. It involved a lot more looking than it did photographing. Richie spent 20 days on the water across two summers searching for manta rays before he was able to photograph one underwater. (Journalist Kate Evans, on the other hand, saw one on her third day.) All up, this issue’s cover story represents close to a month on the water for Richie. As this issue went to press, he was still out looking for manta rays—and not finding any. “I’m back to thinking mantas don’t exist,” he says.
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