KEY POINTS:
New Zealand's isolation and diverse landforms have created a treasure-trove of distinctive plants and animals. Many survive in a fragile network of parks and reserves. Exclusive extracts from New Zealand's Wilderness Heritage , we celebrate this legacy - and consider the challenges of keeping what's left.
It is easy with 21st century hindsight to judge our forebears harshly for their zeal in so transforming, in little more than 1000 years, the landscape of what till then was arguably the last of Earth's major archipelagos to remain isolated and uninhabited by humans.
To most of the early European colonists the wilderness was not only a place to be feared but also in need of salvation through axe, plough and the surveyor's theodolite. Most equated the subjugation of nature and the establishment of familiar pastoral countryside with virtue and godliness.
The first Maori settlers had only limited technology at their disposal for survival in this new temperate and dynamic living environment. Their most powerful tool was fire, and it was used to devastating effect. By the time Pakeha settlers arrived in the early 19th century, they had reduced forest cover from about 78 per cent to 53 per cent of the land area. As a consequence of the fires and hunting, moa became extinct. The introduction of the Pacific rat, the kiore, had a very significant impact on an extensive range of indigenous fauna - small birds, bats, lizards, tuatara, large flightless insects and land snails.
In the much shorter period of Pakeha settlement - from 1840 to the present day - the area of native forest was halved again, to only about 26 per cent of the land. Ten native birds, including the huia, the piopio and the Stephens Island wren, became extinct during this period. While the clearing of lowland forest, wetland and coastal habitats by Pakeha settlers had a massive impact on the indigenous fauna, pests introduced by the settlers decimated wildlife and irreversibly modified vegetation communities.
And long before the main phase of Pakeha settlement, marine mammals, especially the New Zealand fur seal and several species of whales, had already been hunted almost to extinction.
Gradually the wild landscapes and indigenous biodiversity of New Zealand retreated from the lowlands to the mountainous hinterland, to the offshore and outlying islands and to the South Island's wet West Coast.
New Zealand experienced possibly the most rapid virgin landscape transformation of any nation; over 6.5 million hectares of lowland indigenous forest was cleared ... an extraordinary 25 per cent of our total land area.
By the 1870s the inexorable loss of indigenous forests was widely decried, prompting Prime Minister Julius Vogel to introduce the Forests Bill of 1874 to Parliament. Gradually, influential scientific groups were able to convince the government of the need for offshore island flora and fauna reserves as sanctuaries for our rapidly disappearing wildlife.
The small but influential scientific community which led the drive for flora and fauna reserves were not interested by and large in encouraging the public to visit these priceless sanctuaries. However, many worker, farmer and artisan settlers wanted to be free of the Old World class and tenure barriers which might prevent them from enjoying ready access to the wildest and most beautiful places in their new land.
This was a New World phenomenon, an egalitarian ethic which stressed access to the public land "commons" and became enshrined in our legislation through provisions like the Queen's chain. Just as Maori expected the Treaty of Waitangi to guarantee them continued use of their forest and fisheries, so too was the Crown expected to acquire public lands where all New Zealanders could freely enjoy their natural and historic heritage.
The popularity of the "scenic wonderlands" of New Zealand grew markedly during the 1880s and 1890s, and the increasing number of visitors highlighted the need to protect these places as parks or reserves. The first significant step in this regard was not a government initiative but a remarkable gift to the nation of the volcanic cones which in 1887 became the core of our first national park, Tongariro.
Other prime tourist attractions were the Pink and White Terraces (until the 1886 Tarawera eruption) and other Rotorua geothermal areas.
The Whanganui River was promoted as the "Rhine of New Zealand" during the 1890s when steamers carried tourists up-river, some of them venturing on by coach to Tongariro National Park, Taupo and Rotorua.
In the South Island the first Hermitage Hotel was opened at Mt Cook in 1884. By 1890 Quintin Mackinnon and Donald Sutherland had opened up the Milford Track and glacier guiding was available at Waiho (Franz Josef Glacier) by the turn of the century.
But the concept of national parks, and the prevention of commercial opportunities within them, still did not come easily to a colonial society beholden to agriculture for export incomes. Our second national park, Egmont, was formed in 1900, but only after a strenuous campaign for its protection.
Fiordland became a national park in 1904 and Arthur's Pass in 1929 but the next decades of depression and war meant there was virtually no progress in national park designation apart from Abel Tasman in 1942.
Only with the passage of the far-sighted National Parks Act in 1952 was public frustration turned into action with the setting up of the National Parks Authority, park boards and a national parks section in the Department of Lands and Survey. Several parks were formed in quick succession: Mt Cook in 1953; Urewera in 1954; Nelson Lakes in 1956 and Westland in 1960. When the alpine wilderness around Mt Aspiring was declared our 10th national park in 1964, political leaders stated that this was likely to be the last of New Zealand's national parks, and for the next 20 years it seemed this was to be the case.
One of New Zealand's greatest natural resource tragedies, largely lamented only in hindsight, was the failure of successive governments in the first half of the 20th century to rein in the wasteful exploitation of our State indigenous forests by the timber milling industry. If our once-vast podocarp, tawa, beech and kauri forests had benefited from careful sustained-yield management, they would have been capable of producing a small but perpetual yield of high quality indigenous timbers.
From the 1940s to the mid-1980s, the NZ Forest Service increasingly found itself in an impossible situation - doggedly adhering to its multiple use philosophy while a large section of the New Zealand public cried "enough" and demanded representative reserves of the wide range of forest ecosystems.
The first serious challenge to the multiple-use philosophy in State forests occurred during the 1940s, in opposition to the magnificent kauri forests of Waipoua being milled. Public pressure for a national park, led by a troika of Forest and Bird, the Auckland scientific community and a Waipoua Forest Preservation Committee, mounted over the decade as distrust of the NZ Forest Service increased.
It was a bitter battle, not helped by the patronising attitudes of many leading foresters towards what they considered were extreme preservationists who would "lock up" the nation's dwindling timber resources.
However, the first truly national campaign on a wilderness conservation issue was not about forests, but concerned the destructive intrusion into our largest national park. The Save Manapouri campaign began spontaneously by Southlanders under the leadership of Ron McLean in October 1969, in an 11th-hour effort to stop the government raising the levels of Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau in Fiordland National Park. The Electricity Department wanted to raise the level to supply cheap hydroelectricity to the Comalco aluminium smelter at Bluff. The protest spread across the country and contributed to the [National] government losing the 1972 election. Emboldened by the victory (the level of Manapouri was subsequently controlled but not raised), a new breed of younger conservation activists spawned a variety of environmental conservation groups, from Ecology Action to the Native Forest Action Council, from small specialist groups of lawyers and scientists like the Environmental Defence Society to umbrella coalitions like ECO - Environment and Conservation Organisations (of New Zealand).
Environmental concerns became big political issues throughout the 1970s and early 1980s: nuclear power, Think Big energy developments and Maui gas, the Clyde Dam on the Clutha River, the Aramoana smelter proposal, mining proposals on the Coromandel Peninsula and many others.
However, the main wilderness protection campaigns were for wild and scenic rivers, marine reserves, wilderness areas and, most controversially of all, to save our remaining lowland indigenous forests from logging. Initially, the public were not really aware that the Forest Service had largely given up any hope of sustaining cutover indigenous forest; instead, the service seemed to deem most podocarp/hardwood forests as too slow to grow the next rotation and therefore too difficult and costly to manage in the long term.
In 1969, a highly respected DSIR scientist, Charles Fleming, took the brave step of calling the Forest Service to account with a Listener article entitled Mammon on the Mamaku. This perceptive and persuasive analysis exposed the short-sightedness of the service's multiple use policy, especially the attendant loss of habitat for indigenous biodiversity - in the case of the Mamaku Plateau, for the iconic endangered kokako.
For the next 15 years, in a dozen or more forests, battles raged between conservationists, local sawmilling communities and the Forest Service. The main forest conservation objectives of the campaigners were expressed in the Maruia Declaration, presented to Parliament in July 1977; it was the largest petition ever collected in New Zealand, with 341,160 signatures.
Many of those indigenous timber communities, like Minginui and Tihoi, are now ghostly shadows of their former vitality. Some of the beautiful names of the forest battlefields - Mangatotara, Mamaku, Maruia, Warawara, Whirinaki, Erua, Rangataua, Pureora, Orikaka, Paparoa, Inangahua, Ahaura, Okarito, Waikukupa and Waitutu - have been forgotten, but all were ultimately saved, if only in part, to be conserved and visited by future generations.
* * *
Today, in the huts on DoC's Great Walks, Kiwis are very much a minority.
Ask most local trampers why they no longer frequent the Tongariro Crossing or the Abel Tasman Coastal Walk and they are likely to say it is because of the loss of solitude and the crowds of overseas visitors who make them feel like strangers in their own country. The tourism tiger is no longer content to pace its package tour cage; it is indeed out, stalking the back country.
DoC is required to foster recreation on conservation lands ... but only to allow tourism (defined as paying for facilities and services provided by a private concessionaire. Concessionaire activities must not "compromise the intrinsic natural values of areas managed by the department ... and must safeguard the "qualities of solitude, peace and natural quiet." Yet these fine policies are being steadily eroded and compromised by sectors of the tourist industry and DoC's inability (or unwillingness) to stem the pressures - from the overcrowding of Milford Sound and the Milford Road and the foot approaches to the terminal of the Franz Josef Glacier; to unscrupulous tour bus drivers disgorging ill-prepared tourists on to the Tongariro Crossing, or the granting of helicopter landings at Bevan Col adjacent to Mt Aspiring/Tititea or Turner's Bivvy on the slopes of Mt Tutoko.
Helicopters carry rafters and kayakers to the headwaters of the Karamea, Hokitika, Landsborough and a multitude of other wilderness rivers; mountain bikers to the heart of the Kaimanawa Mountains of Pureora Forest Park; and hunters virtually anywhere.
At the same time, a subtle undermining of the Conservation Act has begun with the erasure of the word 'tourism' from the Conservation General Policy (2005), and attempts by the tourism bureaucracy to imply that indigenous visitors to conservation lands have no more rights than foreign visitors - all are deemed by them to be tourists.
Just as tangata whenua are accorded a privileged position as the first people of Aotearoa, so too should all New Zealand citizens expect that their recreational needs in the back country will take precedence over those of overseas tourists. But there are many claims that DoC's building of front-country facilities and back-country comfort-seeker lodges over the past decade is a massive subsidy for tourism from Vote Conservation.
The best long-term proposition for keeping the number of visitors to the carrying capacity of any wilderness area in New Zealand is still physical difficulty, [which] is the intent of DoC's Wilderness Policy - not to deny access in the hope of protecting it, but instead to leave the wilderness open for those with enough physical and mental toughness to travel there, enjoyably, safely, and without the need for "mountains with handrails."
We all have to take responsibility - and part of that involves trying to change our society's dominant paradigm of growth and consumption; learning to restrain our own acquisitiveness and desire to manage everything, and experience every outdoor recreational thrill and every wild place. Only then will we feel the immense satisfaction of leaving some of New Zealand's wilderness for future generations to discover - or even some that no one will ever visit; places that should be left to just exist in their state of wildness.
THE AUTHORS:
Dr Les Molloy worked for 10 years at the Department of Conservation, where he was principal adviser on natural history interpretation. Now a private consultant, he recently wrote the nomination for world heritage status for New Zealand's sub-antarctic islands. he is the author of seminal books on our natural history including The Ancient Islands, The Fold of the Land and Landforms: Shaping New Zealand.
Craig Potton has established himself as one of New Zealand's leading photographers of wilderness landscapes and is actively involved in conservation work. He is the founder of Craig Potton Publishing.
Lavishly illustrated, New Zealand's Wilderness Heritage, Craig Potton Publishing, $89.99, is the New Zealand Herald's 2007 Book of the Year.
