Obituary: Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith

Conservationist. Died aged 51.

Kevin Smith's role in ending the logging of native forests on the West Coast brought him admiration from conservationists but deep resentment from the locals.

Former Forest and Bird Protection Society president Gerry McSweeney described the time during the 1970s and 80s as bitterly divisive: "The ordeal of those vicious South Westland public meetings made anything that came after tame by comparison". But Smith was never deterred, and his later battles against a perceived lack of biosecurity rigour were just as vigorous. He died this week while cycling with his daughter.

His first forays into conservation began as a member of the Native Forest Action Council in Christchurch in the mid-1970s. At that time the council was organising field trips and public meetings to the West Coast to save stands of kahikatea and other native forests.

Smith and his family moved to Hari Hari south of Hokitika and he tried to follow his degree in botany from Canterbury University with a PhD in forest ecology.

"He gave it up, he felt he couldn't be doing the science and a PhD while the forest was being felled all around him," says Kevin Hackwell, Forest and Bird conservation director.

Smith joined Forest and Bird in 1984, and continued his conservation work in the face of enduring public hostility. The Coasters considered the forests to be their territory, to be logged as they saw fit. Conservationists were seen as interlopers, demanding that logging be stopped, which would lead to local jobs being lost. In 1984/85 Forest and Bird ran a campaign in the central North Island to save Tongariro Forest from being converted to pine trees.

In 1989 he was appointed conservation director for Forest and Bird and moved to Wellington. His views on conservation widened, and he advocated energy efficiencies, including using CNG in cars and scrapping the plans for a coal-fired power station at Marsden Point.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was an advocate of improved biosecurity measures, insisting that their importance was reflected not just in conservation, but also in agriculture and forestry.

Mr Hackwell of Forest and Bird credits Smith's campaign with a full overhaul of the biosecurity regime.

In 2000 Smith became senior conservation officer in the parliamentary office of the then Conservation Minister, Alliance MP Sandra Lee. This position was put under pressure the next year, when Lee turned down a mining company's plans for a huge opencast goldmine on the West Coast.

Smith was believed by opposition MPs to have unduly influenced the minister's decision. Lee supported her adviser, and the mining went ahead on a much smaller site.

Outside of work, Smith was a recreational hunter and an avid mountain biker. He is survived by his partner, Tania, and children Danica, Rachel and Karl.