Environmental scientist Peter Frost, after a short appraisal of the Ministry for the Environment's proposed National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity, implicitly agrees with its policy thrust - to set mandatory national standards to stem biodiversity loss (Conservation Comment, July 23). He continues in a scientific vein (island ecology) and proposes the creation of corridors linking existing fragments of native vegetation.
All very scientific, but in reality birds fly between islands, carrying seed with them.
Kiwis leg it across paddocks at night and there is a time of year when eels do the same.
Faint corridors exist along road verges, riverbanks, railway lines, forestry margins, and through reverting farmland. Indigenous flora and fauna in turn invade agricultural land (manuka and pukeko for example) and even the urban environment (I recently observed a couple of kaka cracking walnuts in a tree in the Aro Valley, near the centre of Wellington).
By neatly dividing New Zealand into conservation land and land altered by humans over the past millennium Peter Frost falls into the classic trap of scientism. As the above examples illustrate, exotic and indigenous species these days are irrevocably intertwined; a dialectic division may aid simplistic comprehension but plainly does not reflect reality.
