NZ’s Conservation debate…

The Wonder List

The worst place on Earth to be a predatory mammal

Bill Weir, CNN • Updated 4th November 2017
(CNN) — When the British explorer Captain James Cook was first exploring the South Pacific, he told his crew that the first man to spot land would get two gallons of rum.
Imagine the thrill for a 12-year-old surgeon’s boy named Nicholas as he shouted “land, ahoy!” and “discovered” New Zealand.

03 Bill Weir New Zealand

The steep Alps and lush valleys of the South Island create some of the most iconic vistas in New Zealand.
Centuries later, on an average Saturday in 1998, a different kind of explorer pulled into a farm two hours south of Auckland.
He was a location scout for director Peter Jackson. They’d done an aerial tour of the region’s rolling, sheep-covered hills and deemed it the perfect setting for a little movie series called “The Lord of the Rings.”
Captain Cook’s arrival changed everything for this land and the Maori — the indigenous people who first found it — but Hollywood’s discovery put those changes on steroids.
For years, New Zealand’s biggest problem was “brain drain,” as the country’s best and brightest took yearlong jobs or sabbaticals in Australia, Europe or America and never came back. But as more people realized that the Middle Earth, Narnia and Pandora on their HD screens are really #nofilter locations in New Zealand, foreign interest in this faraway fantasy land peaked.
And now after Donald Trump’s election win, the number of Americans looking to emigrate to New Zealand has reached record levels. Combined with a huge influx from Asia, their merit-based system of entry is being tested.
If Hobbiton was anything like Auckland, the average hole would go for a million dollars.

09 Bill Weir New Zealand

A “hobbit” hole on the Alexander Farm near Matamata, New Zealand.
Now as New Zealand wrestles with what people to let in, most are united in what kinds of wild animals they want out.
The government’s answer: All of them. Everything with teeth instead of a beak, fur instead of feathers.
Because when man first found these islands at the bottom of the world, there was nothing but birds. Aside from a couple of tiny bat species, New Zealand has no native land mammals. And with no predators to eat them, many of the native birds — including their beloved kiwi — never learned to fly.
The Maori hunted the biggest birds to extinction and the vermin that arrived on European ships did a number on the rest.
A quarter of New Zealand’s native birds are reported to be extinct and almost 4,000 plant and animal species are threatened or at risk. So this nation of animal lovers hatched Predator Free 2050, a plan so audacious in scope it’s been called New Zealand’s “Apollo Project.”
They aim to poison or trap every invasive critter on the island — hundreds of millions of rats and mice, weasels and stoats, possums and feral cats — and make the entire country predator-free by 2050.
Each year, government helicopters fly across gorgeous landscapes, spreading tons of cereal bait or carrot chunks laced with 1080, a toxin so deadly, it’s banned in many countries. The vast majority of Kiwi scientists and environmental groups defend the practice, while protesters are dismissed as fringe.
I took “The Wonder List” to New Zealand wondering whether man can put nature back like he found it, and ended up releasing an adorable kiwi named Croucher into the wild and rethinking everything I thought I knew about the natural order.

A hand-reared kiwi at the Rainbow Springs Kiwi Conservation Center in Rotorua, New Zealand.

A hand-reared kiwi at the Rainbow Springs Kiwi Conservation Center in Rotorua, New Zealand.
I went wondering whether this breathtaking, thrill-seeking nation at the bottom of the world can stay so pristine now that their secret is out. And I found that it is a lot easier to discover paradise than to keep it that way.

 

(Also on the same theme …)

 

“New Zealand’s environments and biodiversity have changed, will continue to change, and cannot be put back to how they used to be.” Photo: brianscantlebury.com
 NZ’s conservation debate losing its way

Victoria University’s Wayne Linklater and Dr Jamie Steer discuss why New Zealand’s conservation efforts should shift from eradication to adaptation

Conservation is about protecting the natural environment for future generations. It seems the right thing to do and almost everyone agrees with that.

But there is a lot of conservation to do and many different ways of doing it. And so conservationists debate a lot among themselves about what the priorities should be and how we should achieve them. These debates help us to make the best we can from limited time and funding.

In New Zealand, mainstream conservation has been about preserving our most iconic native species and restoring habitats to some semblance of how they were in the past. To achieve this, controlling exotic, introduced species has been a focus and the former National government’s Predator Free 2050 policy is the most vivid example of this approach.

But we think there are other priorities for conservation and other approaches to it beyond just species eradication and ecosystem restoration. We think these need to be considered and debated. It is being debated in other countries and a rich literature has emerged from it, but just not so much in New Zealand.

Others disagree with this debate, though.

Recently, the debate took a turn for the worse when Dr James Russell at the University of Auckland (with Professor Tim Blackburn at University College London) published an article calling other scholars, mostly fellow scientists, “science denialists” for being critical of the science of invasion biology. Then Professor Anthony Ricciardi and Rachael Ryan at the University of Montreal published a list of “invasive species denialists” – people they considered “guilty” of questioning aspects of their discipline.

Progress suffers when, instead of engaging with the ideas of a debate, arguments shift to personal attacks and name-calling. It seems especially troubling to us that this behaviour is coming from other scientists.

Criticism is the foundation of better science. And yet critics of invasion biology, in particular, are being dissuaded from communicating their ideas lest they are labelled and abused too. We wonder if the name-calling by leading invasion biologists indicates that their science, at least in its current form, is past the peak of its usefulness.

We’d like to clean up the debate about conservation in New Zealand, and elsewhere, and direct it back into constructive territory.

To this end, we invited Emma Marris, author of The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, to visit New Zealand. Emma is one of the world’s leading authors on how we should approach conservation in the 21st century. We asked her to give a public lecture and participate in a panel discussion about the future of biodiversity conservation in New Zealand. Emma doesn’t have all ‘the answers’, of course, but she is a great advocate for illuminating some of the options.

Rather than engaging in futile attempts to eradicate well-established species from the entire country, we should instead work to find ways of helping native biodiversity survive despite them.

Ultimately, we think the greatest problem with present-day conservation is its focus on fighting change and dedication to protecting the past, not building for the future.

New Zealand’s environments and biodiversity have changed, will continue to change, and cannot be put back to how they used to be. The ecosystems of the past and their communities of plants and animals are no longer compatible with our changing climate and the other dominant influences of our people. They need to adapt.

Our priorities and approaches to conservation are failing to keep pace with the speed of change in the natural world. That’s why, after years of persuing our current approach, we’re still talking about a biodiversity crisis. More of the same will not solve that. Instead, we need to start re-designing our conservation policies to more fully incorporate the changes we have brought to our environments, and to work with, rather than against, those currents.

Rather than restoring biodiversity to some original condition, conservation should instead focus on adapting biodiversity, habitats and ecosystems to what is in front of them. That is what sustainability and resilience is all about. Rather than engaging in futile attempts to eradicate well-established species from the entire country, we should instead work to find ways of helping native biodiversity survive despite them.

Should our conservation efforts shift from restoring and eradicating to reconciling and adapting?

We think so, because in a changing world even what we preserve and restore will eventually have to reconcile itself with the realities of the future. Everywhere and everything that conservationists do, whether we like it or not, is a negotiation with change.

We believe our challenge as conservationists is not to leave these changes to chance but to purposefully work to build the ecosystems of the future.

Wayne Linklater

Associate Professor Wayne Linklater is a conservation scientist in the School of Biological Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington.

Dr Jamie Steer

Dr Jamie Steer is a Senior Adviser for the Biodiversity Department at Greater Wellington Regional Council.

‘Defining wildness in a changed world’, a public lecture by Emma Marris, Thursday 9 November, 6pm–7.30pm, Memorial Theatre, Student Union Building, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington; ‘The fight for nature: a public debate on the future of conservation in New Zealand’, chaired by RNZ National’s Kathryn Ryan, featuring Emma Marris, Associate Professor Wayne Linklater, Dr Jamie Steer and other panellists, Friday 10 November, 2.30pm–5.30pm, Lecture Theatre 3, Government Buildings, 55 Lambton Quay, Pipitea Campus, Victoria University of Wellington. Both events are free but registration is necessary beforehand by emailing sbs@vuw.ac.nz.