Bruce Bisset: Rich greed ruining rich green

Tree protesters celebrate saving the 500 year old Kauri in Titirangi on Thursday. Photo / NZME.

It's hard trying to be responsible towards the planet that birthed us when so many fellow humans seem to regard her merely as a playpit on which to act out their wantonly destructive fantasies in pursuit of the fictional notion that is money.

The proposed felling of a mature kauri (along with a score of other mature natives) in Titirangi, Auckland, is a classic case study: it encapsulates what is wrong with our relationship with the Earth and how that is transposed into the way we govern ourselves.

Chillingly, despite mounting global environmental crises, this debacle points up how far we have regressed in the past 20 years. We are not striving to make things better. We are actively conniving to make things worse.

See, back when the threatened kauri was a mere seedling, the whole Auckland region was kauri forest. Later, within a decade of New Zealand being "discovered" by Captain James Cook, the British Navy was established in the Hauraki Gulf, felling kauri to refit their ships.

Such was the rate of extraction that on Waiheke Island the last kauri was felled in 1863, leaving only a couple of small immature stands in a bare pastoral landscape. Even as late as the 1960s there were hardly any trees in evidence, save a few stands of exotic radiata pine.

It was only through the conscious effort of the community, led by visionaries such as the late Don Chapple, that natives began to be replanted and regenerating bush encouraged. Thus today much of the island is bushclad.

As part of that effort, the former Waiheke County Council and its succeeding community boards brought in forward-thinking protections, such as the "3m rule" that prevented any tree over that height being felled without consent.

Thanks to the advocacy of the boards of which I was part, that rule was adopted by our adoptive parent body, Auckland City, helping keep the metropolis greener than any other of similar size.

Yet no sooner was the rule in place than it was under attack from developers and moneyed landowners wanting to "improve" views and "capitalise" sections by trimming or chopping down "annoying" trees.

John Banks' council did away with our protective rule, and its less-rigorous precursor too, putting almost all trees on the isthmus under imminent threat.

Since then changes in legislation (notably the Resource Management and Local Government acts) have eroded public environmental rights to the point that if you are developing a section it's open slather on tree removal.

Indeed the RMA, once globally recognised as a meritorious system for safeguarding and enhancing the environment, has been degraded to the point where it is now used to justify and condone the despoliation of our natural resources.

Combine that with the behemoth of bureaucracy and its welter of consultants that is the new "super" Auckland City and you have a tyranny of epic proportions that only wealth can navigate.

Buy a section in native-bushclad Titirangi and you can, by all means, strip fell it. Just pay at the desk.

Property rights? The only "right" we should uphold is the right to make as low an impact on the surrounding environment as possible.

The land - and its trees, if we save them - will be here long after the "owner" who would despoil them is gone.

But we are vain and selfish, greedy and short sighted. We forget the Earth is our mother, so do not care for it.

It should come as no surprise then if one day we fail to wake because the Earth no longer cares for us.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet