And fixing things that might appear unfixable.
Whanganui is Aotearoa’s third-longest river. It begins on Mount Tongariro and flows 290 kilometres to the Tasman Sea, joined by thousands of small tributaries along the way. Whanganui iwi have long sought legal recognition of their relationship with the river. They petitioned Parliament in the 1870s for protection of their awa. From the 1880s, the Crown undertook a series of damaging ‘improvements’ to the river. Works to establish steamship services destroyed eel weirs and fisheries. Mineral extraction and the introduction of foreign fish and plants further damaged the river’s ecologies. The Crown did not consult iwi on the diversion of Whanganui waters into the Tongariro Power Scheme before construction began in 1971. In March 2017, Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act passed into law. The Act covers the main river and “all tributaries, steams and other natural watercourses” that flow into it. Like Te Urewera Act 2014, the Act recognises the Whanganui River as a legal person. The legislation describes the river as an ancestor of the Whanganui people: Te Awa Tupua is an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the Whanganui River and all of its physical and metaphysical elements. This map shows the Whanganui catchment’s astonishing complexity.
Amber Aranui searches the world for Māori and Moriori human remains to bring home as a researcher for Te Papa’s Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme.
It’s one of New Zealand’s most important wetland habitats, and it’s also one of our most polluted lakes. Restoring it to its former abundance of birds and fish will take generations, but it’s possible.
Out there in forest reserves, down remote back roads and tucked away in corners of small towns hide giant tōtara, mataī and rimu. A tiny group of obsessive people, guided by old records and half-remembered stories, regularly hit the road in search of these monsters. Their aim: to bag a champion tree, one whose size, age and majesty will put it at the top of New Zealand’s notable tree register.
More than a century ago, people were granted temporary leases to build baches on Rangitoto Island, and a thriving community grew around these rudimentary dwellings. But Rangitoto is public land. A debate over the legitimacy of private baches existing there began in the 1920s and continues today. Meanwhile, three of the historic baches have now been opened for public use, welcoming a new generation of people to the island.
Rob Suisted figured he was in for an easy assignment. His subjects had other ideas.
When Juliet Arnott came across a pile of red-painted timber labelled ‘Firewood’ in the Christchurch suburb of Mount Pleasant, she paused. The stack of wood was on land that had once belonged to a church. The church had been badly damaged in the second Canterbury earthquake, along with the homes of many of its parishioners. In fact, so many people had moved out of the suburb that it wasn’t feasible to hold services, even though the church was repairable. So the building was sold and torn down to make way for a private house. Thus the pile of rimu weatherboards. Arnott, an occupational therapist, had started a social enterprise, Rekindle, which aimed to make use of waste materials from the many residential demolitions taking place around Christchurch. Concerned about the loss of useful materials, especially native timber, Arnott set about showing how they could be repurposed. Foraged wood, such as the former gable ends of the Mount Pleasant Church, became tables and chairs. Today, Rekindle operates according to the same kaupapa, though there isn’t the same influx of waste wood that first sparked Arnott’s imagination. Now, her focus is on education. Rekindle runs workshops in Christchurch’s Arts Centre teaching people how to use repurposed or foraged materials. Arnott calls these “resourceful crafts”. Since then, Te Papa has acquired one of the red weatherboard chairs and a side table made of salvaged wood for its permanent collection: a record of a moment in time and a person who made the best of it.
Edible plants grow throughout our towns and cities: in verges, margins, berms, parks and empty sections, along driveways, pavements and hedgerows. The trick is knowing what to look for.
During the two devastating earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011, land in the suburbs east of Christchurch sank by a metre. What’s a city to do when an apocalyptic landscape appears right on its doorstep?
Wildfires were rare in Aotearoa prior to humans. That changed, but it is climate change that will fuel the inferno of the future.
My family has always had cats, but never on purpose. Our first cat was left behind by our neighbours when they moved. We made the mistake of naming him, and after that, he was one of us. When he died, there was a respectful pause of a few months, as if the local feline community knew how much we’d loved him. Then another cat started hanging around. She moved in, and after a while, we accepted the fact. She was terribly afraid of fires, and that made us wonder what her past held. When she started wobbling as she walked, and then had a stroke, it took even less time for another cat to turn up on our doorstep. This one was smaller, with patches of grey and white fur. It looked up at us imploringly, as if to say: “I’m here to apply for the cat vacancy.” We don’t know where these cats came from. Our new cat doesn’t have other owners, we’re sure of it. It sleeps 23 hours a day in the basket of clean laundry, and runs pointlessly back and forth across the lawn. Somewhere in Auckland’s suburbs, it seems, there’s an inexhaustible supply of unloved cats. A house is different with a cat in it. You’re never alone. Slowly, you learn each other’s idiosyncrasies. If you live alongside one another for long enough, you may even convince yourself the cat has a sixth sense for human emotion. From its muteness you will infer that it understands either everything or nothing. Animals, and cats in particular, are a small piece of the wild embedded in our homes: inscrutable, unfathomable, nonsensical. Most importantly, they don’t judge humans in the same way that humans judge each other. Being required by an animal is a meaningful experience, more important to us than it sounds. It’s hard to reconcile wanting a house with a cat in it with wanting a forest resplendent with birds, but as Hayden Donnell points out, those things aren’t mutually exclusive. We can love our cats and give them rules, too. New Zealand’s most famous feline embodies the difficulty of cat management. Every day, an enormous ginger cat called Mittens wanders central Wellington. He slopes into offices, rides elevators, leaps into cars, inspects shops. He is fearless and indiscriminate with his affection, and as a result he is much loved by the internet. His roaming is the very thing that cat-control advocates are trying to prevent. But I think Mittens’ popularity also speaks to the desire for something wild in the middle of a city, something untameable. This issue investigates a few other aspects of the urban wild. Christchurch has a massive park-in-waiting, one so large it’s hard to wrap your head around its scale. The Red Zone is almost twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, its razed suburbs a space for all. And in all our cities can be found a network of rebel plants, growing despite attempts to manage them. As I discovered this spring, many of them are delicious. The wild is here, alongside us. We just need to know how to see it.
A journalist’s cetacean counterpart.
The last time I left New Zealand, I flew to Tonga, which is one of the few places in the world where it’s possible to swim with humpback whales. There, I learned two things: that it’s possible to get vertigo from snorkelling in water so clear and deep that the sea floor is visible far, far beneath your feet, as though you’re standing on the glass floor on a skyscraper. And that when a gigantic creature emerges out of the dark blue sea-gloom, awe overrides fear. Beneath it was a calf, nestling its head underneath its mothers chin—and that’s where I have to pause, because it seems wrong to describe a whale as “it”. We don’t have words to confer personhood or importance on things of unknown sex. So a whale is an “it”, the same word we use for objects like spoons or tyres or tennis balls. I often wonder if the lack of distinction in English between living and unliving things leads to a blindness in how we perceive the natural world. Whales are lumped in with the miscellany of “it”. But whales have sentience, culture. Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer points out that we confer dignity to people in the way we use language. Imagine if I wrote about edmund hillary or kate sheppard; Kimmerer feels the same discomfort about the natural features of her home not receiving the same level of respect. “It would be laughable to write ‘Mosquito’ if it were in reference to a flying insect, but acceptable if we were discussing a brand of boat,” she writes. “This seemingly trivial grammatical rulemaking in fact expresses deeply held assumptions about human exceptionalism.” And so Kimmerer capitalises Maple, Heron, Sweetgrass. Those species represent qualities she wants to embody, lessons she wants to learn. This is connected to a question we often ask: what is the natural world good for? Does it cost us to reclaim a wetland, or does it better serve us as pasture? Which endangered species should we spend money on saving? Which species should we let die? Should ancient trees automatically be protected by law? Usually, we characterise the importance of nature in one of three ways: in terms of its beauty, its similarity to human intelligence (consider the kākāpō), or its importance to our wellbeing. Wetlands were once looked down upon as swamps, until we discovered they were effective filtration systems. In Tonga, I read a book called How to Do Nothing, in which American artist Jenny Odell makes a case for turning one’s attention to useful, nourishing parts of the world. Living things, like birds, rather than inert things, like phones. Odell began birdwatching as a way of alleviating the anxiety she felt about the United States presidential election, learning to tell her local crows apart. “Even after years of observing the same crows,” she writes, “their behaviour is ultimately inscrutable to me, as much as mine must be to them. Nothing indicates that something exists beyond you as much as its departure in to the sky, as sudden and unceremonious as its arrival. All of this makes for a being that cannot be ‘understood’ or ‘interpreted’. And that which cannot be understood demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter.” And so, as New Zealand welcomes in a new government, I’d like us to think about the natural world less in terms of the benefits it provides, but rather in terms of other lifeforms that live among us. It’s easy to dismiss this approach as a bit spiritualist, a bit woo-woo, but it’s just a shift in perception. A reminder to see the living parts of the world as living, even if our language does not remind us that they are so.
Fire season is coming, and first responders will soon be on high alert around New Zealand. With climate change causing more intense weather, we can expect more extreme wildfires in the future, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage and endangering homes and lives. What is New Zealand’s risk from fire, and how can we better protect ourselves?
COVID-19 has Coasters pondering their future. Some see salvation in mining. Others see an opportunity to do things differently.
A unique New Zealand landscape is at risk of losing what sets it apart. Here’s what needs to happen.
Ocean Mercier’s journey from physics to the science of her ancestors.
Feijoas have become a New Zealand emblem. So how did they end up in Aotearoa, and how did we end up adoring them—to the point of obsession, for some—when feijoas have not really caught on anywhere else?
While normal earthquakes release energy suddenly and catastrophically, the slow-motion variety can last from days to months, can’t be felt by humans, and cause no damage. Slow-slip earthquakes were discovered around 20 years ago, and scientists are still trying to figure out what causes them. New Zealand’s Hikurangi Subduction Zone, off the east coast of the North Island, has become a global hotspot for the study of slow-slip quakes, because they happen at shallower depths than they do elsewhere, and so are easier to measure. The Hikurangi Subduction Zone is where the Pacific Plate is being shoved underneath the North Island, which lies on the edge of the Australian Plate. Off the coast of Wellington and the Wairarapa, the seabed is covered in sediment washed off the Southern Alps. That gives the Pacific Plate a nice, smooth surface, and as it’s pushed underneath the Australian Plate, the two plates tend to lock tightly together. (Every 500 years or so, this breaks in a giant megathrust earthquake of magnitude 8 or 9.) North of Hawke’s Bay, it’s a different story. There’s less sediment, so ancient undersea volcanoes called seamounts stick up out of the Pacific Plate, giving it a bumpy surface. That causes all kinds of strange behaviour as it’s sucked beneath the Australian Plate. GNS Science geophysicist Susan Ellis and her colleagues used a sophisticated computer model to simulate what happens when a seamount is pulled into the subduction zone. “The ground ahead becomes brittle and prone to earthquakes because the water is squeezed out,” says Ellis. As the seamount inches forward, it drags the seabed with it, stretching apart the rocks behind it and allowing fluids to fill tiny gaps in the rock. That weakens the rocks and makes slow-slip earthquakes possible. Researchers are trying to figure out what this means for New Zealand. How much of the stress built up along the fault will be released in slow-slip events? What will happen when the southern part of the Hikurangi Thrust eventually ruptures in “the big one”—something that hasn’t happened in recorded history?
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