“I never thought I’d say this, but I may actually be tired of talking about dogs,” said Neil Silverwood, dog lover, three days into search-and-rescue dog camp. Silverwood shot more frames in one day than he ever has before—but after the high-pressure camp, was relieved to go home to his chilled-out black Labrador, Griffin.
When humans fish, we tend to go after the big fish first—the meaty, confident predators that are easy to catch. Tuna, swordfish, crayfish, snapper. As those become rarer, we move on to the next-biggest fish, and finally on to the grazers, like kina. This phenomenon has been dubbed “fishing down the food web”, and it’s a problem all over the world: “You take the top predators out of any ecosystem and you disrupt the balance,” says University of Auckland marine scientist Andrew Jeffs. An international group of scientists analysed 70 years of New Zealand fisheries data and found the pattern holds here, too. As bigger fish became harder to find close to shore, fishers started catching smaller fish, and moved offshore into deeper waters to target new species. Since 1950, larger inshore predators “were likely being overfished”, says the study’s lead author, Charles Patrick Lavin, from Nord University in Oslo. The team also found New Zealanders have been catching more tropical species like skipjack tuna and blue mackerel in recent decades, suggesting climate change is already impacting fisheries. For Jeffs, who was not involved in the study, the results underscore that New Zealand should be managing its fisheries more cautiously. “There are some major problems with how the quota management system is operating, and how it’s affecting the marine environment.”
Ploughing—the epitome of the colonial ‘civilising’ of land—is as fundamental to this country’s history as war and rugby. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we make a sport out of it.
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 was not excited about trying kina roe for the first time. She’d tried sea urchin before, but only once: when she was 18, her dad coaxed her to try some from a piazza stall in Syracuse, Sicily (pictured). “I thought it was absolutely disgusting. I think I actually spat it out.” But when fisherman Herb cracked open a kina fresh from the sea, Evans was surprised to discover she didn’t hate it after all. “It was a fresh, salty slurp of semi-solid ocean and it wasn’t at all bad.”
The other day I watched a man walk onto the bus, put down his laptop and blazer, and sneeze a streak of snot on his arm. He looked at it. Made a decision. And wiped his arm on the seat. Of all the bad things happening in the world, my immediate worry is COVID-19. Partly because we don’t understand it properly—especially long COVID, and the cumulative damage caused even by mild infections—but also because I keep getting it. Five times! This is a loopy bit of anecdata; it says nothing about my inclination to follow rules or avoid risk. I’ve been wearing an N95—a good snug one, with a Darth Vader filter—in crowded indoor spaces, and some outdoor ones, since the pandemic began. (It’s not the kids bringing it home, either: four of those times, I’ve been the only person in the house to get hit.) You might be more worried about the cost of living. Flood cleanup. Our broken housing market, the recession, ram raids. Cooked coral. Melting ice. Canada on fire. Maui on fire. Whichever place catches fire next. But zoom out and we are all worrying about the same thing. “A delusion of separation”, a colleague called it today: the idea that all of these things are just happening, that they have nothing to do with environmental policy, and that surface-level tweaks like removing GST or fixing potholes will make any difference at all to the terrifying downhill slide. We try to publish stories that have different trajectories. But time after time, all paths lead to loss—we’re either documenting the imminent prospect of loss, or the throes of it, or the ghosts left behind. Even in a story about people righting wrongs, like killing all the rats on a tiny Tongan island, that bigger, scarier narrative hangs over everything. Our stories are also stories of entanglement. Of repercussions, ripple effects. Wipe burrowing seabirds out of your forests—change the chemistry of the country—and the trees “run out of juice”. Send sediment down the rivers and the sea turns to soup, teeming with a parasite that’s killing endangered dolphins. Ratchet up the heat and watch new, ravenous caterpillars munch through your vege gardens. This is a catalogue of our screw-ups. But it’s also a lesson: the way we use our environment matters. The way we eat, and get from A to B, and orient ourselves around other species—it all matters. And we can change it. But right now, instead of making any real change, we’re barely coping with each symptom, each shock. Two weeks ago Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told Toby Manhire on the Gone by Lunchtime podcast that he felt his government had only really achieved one term’s worth of work, because COVID had been such a time suck. That’s going to keep happening. And it’s going to get worse. (Watch what happens to the cost of living if we blow past two degrees of warming.) We urgently need to focus on the causes. We can’t continue to be blinded by the flurry of effects. Yet in this election campaign, meaningful environmental policy is being treated as frivolous. Something separate and out of reach. Again. My vote goes to whoever shows me that they understand. That they see the stories we’re telling here—there’s only one story, really— and that they’re ready, finally, to rewrite it. So far it’s a pretty short list.
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.
Christchurch photographer Joe Harrison shot our Viewfinder photo essay with his son Mick in tow. The project of documenting the city’s rivers began during the slow, tired days of new baby-hood, when Harrison was desperate to get out of the house with bub. More recently, their photography excursions have been about keeping an active toddler busy.
Christchurch photographer Joe Harrison documents the waterways of his home city.
Otago Polytechnic/Te Pūkenga is widening the agricultural horizons of ākonga (learners) by letting them learn the ropes on a Central Otago high country farm.
A team of New Zealanders and Tongans have just carpeted a remote volcanic island in Tonga with poisoned bait, hoping to eradicate rats—and with that one action, restore a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem of seabirds, forest animals, coral reefs and marine life.
The Okarito Lagoon is the largest unmodified coastal wetland in New Zealand. It stretches over some 3240 hectares along the coast south of Hokitika, the consequence of flooding rivers, Tasman swells, landslides in the foothills, earthquakes and upheavals—a natural tapestry of change.
Lake Brunner/Kōtukuwhakaoka is the largest lake in the West Coast region, but also one of the hardest to get to. It’s miles from the state highway that runs along the coast and most of it can only be reached by boat. It’s so deep, shelves so steeply from shore, and looks so black in colour (from tannins in the water ) that locals believed it was bottomless, though the deepest point is just over 100 metres. Kahikatea can tolerate wet roots, so they dominate the lake edge as if permanently in flood.
Lauren Kelley braces herself for a crossing of the Hokitika River on a flying fox—a versatile if invigorating mode of transport on the West Coast. With variable river levels, the flying foxes are an efficient and safe means to get people and gear across the otherwise daunting rivers in the region.
Franz Josef Glacier / Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere is a 12-kilometre long jigsaw of ice and rock, tumbling some from a névé 2500 metres above sea level—where the ice is 300 metres thick—to 300 metres above sea level, in the middle of the rainforest. It once extended all the way to the sea (19 kilometres away). Today it is three kilometres shorter than it was a century ago.
New Zealand timber bound for markets in Australia and China are loaded at Port Marlborough on to bulk carriers by log loaders that can carry 18 tonnes of logs at once. The vessel will also stop to load more timber in Napier and Whangarei.
Rangers Natalie Johnson, Micaela Courtney and Chance Ngatai do some weed whacking along the steep cliffs at the northern end of the Maud Island. Here, strangely enough, pohutukawa is a weed, as seed blows across from Taranaki and takes hold anywhere there is open space. Once established it creates a monoculture canopy that prevents other species from growing.
High on the top of Maud Island/Te Hoiere, DOC ranger Emmanuel Oysten checks tracking tunnels to maintain the predator free status of the island. A predator entering the baited tunnel will walk across an ink pad, leaving footprints on a white card that allows rangers to identify the intruder and know how to respond.
The long spur of Harter Point on Maud Island/Te Hoiere, direct the view across Pelorus Sound. Kakapō were introduced to the predator-free island in 1974 but struggled to breed without forests. Takahe have done better, but Te Hoiere is best known as habitat for weta, flax weevil, Cook Strait click beetles and Maud Island frog.
Sandy Bay is a popular spot for southern right whales. Though calving and mating occur in winter, whales can be found here year round, cavorting in groups. There were at least 30,000 southern right whales around New Zealand before they were hunted nearly to extinction prior to 1900. Barely 100 whales (including just 13 females) may have survived the slaughter. Today the population is thousands strong and growing at around 7 per cent per year.
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