Speaking-Up For Arboreal Exoticism.

Space Invaders: Sadly, for the extreme conservationists, the conquests of ecological imperialism cannot be rolled back. The creation in Aotearoa/New Zealand of yet another Neo-Europe in the years following 1840 was completed in less than a century. The founders of Christchurch were part of that process, as these lofty oaks in Hagley Park attest.

THE FATE OF CHRISTCHURCH’S TREES is currently a low-level debate. It shouldn’t be. If the partisans of indigenous flora emerge triumphant over the lovers of Oaks and Cherry Trees, then Christchurch will become a season-less, olive-drab city. Retaining the beauty of their city’s exotic heritage vegetation requires Cantabrians to make their voices heard. Now.

 

Aucklanders, too, must stay alert. Not only are their city’s trees at risk of wholesale felling by property developers, but the likely next Mayor of Auckland, Phil Goff, is promising to repair the damage by planting a million trees every year – “mostly natives”. Auckland’s floral glory, like Christchurch’s, is under threat.

 

New Zealand is cited by Professor Alfred Crosby as the most extreme example of a “Neo-Europe” on Planet Earth. To a far greater extent than those who settled North America and Australia, New Zealand’s European colonists would dramatically transform the new landscape in which they found themselves. This “ecological imperialism”, as Professor Crosby describes the biological expansion of Europe, extended not only to the exotic flora introduced by the newcomers, but also to their release of a host of exotic fauna.

 

These cows and sheep now constitute the foundation of our key export industries. In this respect, New Zealand is no different to Canada, the United States or Australia. Its location in the planet’s southern temperate zone facilitated the rapid and extraordinarily successful transfer of agricultural, industrial, cultural and political processes perfected in Eurasia over a period of 10,000 years. Evidence of both the durability and extent of that success is all around us.

 

New Zealand’s success as a Neo-Europe is not, however, a matter of universal celebration. As Emeritus Professor of Nature Conservation at Lincoln University, Ian Spellerberg, wrote in June:

 

“There is more to plants that just species and varieties. There are plant communities with myriads of interactions between all the plant and animal species and their physical environment. Humans have mixed and stirred the biogeography of plants around the world. As well as causing plant extinctions, we have introduced exotic species into foreign surroundings and in doing so have extinguished the natural interactions. Such practices are as bad as habitat destruction and the ultimate threat to native plants – their extinction.”

 

At the heart of this argument lies the anachronistic desire to restore New Zealand’s natural environment to its pristine – that is to say pre-human – status.

 

That these islands boasted a unique natural environment is indisputable. Bereft of large reptilian and mammalian predators, it became a world of insects and birds. Its extreme geographical isolation encouraged the evolution of such extraordinary megafauna as the Moa and the Giant Weta.

 

It also meant that Aotearoa/New Zealand was the last substantial landmass on Planet Earth to be populated by human-beings. In marked contrast to the Americas and Australia, where Homo Sapiens have been present for between 25,000 and 50,000 years, the human settlement of these islands began a mere 800 years ago.

 

The New Zealand Bush: Evergreen - in every sense of the word.

 

The flora encountered by these Polynesian settlers was little changed from the age of the dinosaurs. The deciduous trees that register the transition of the seasons to contemporary New Zealanders with such beauty and bounty were almost entirely absent. With a handful of no doubt welcome exceptions, such as Kowhai yellow and blood-red Pohutukawa, the world the Maori encountered was dominated by vast forests of grey-green trees and ferns: an arboreal empire enlivened only by the cacophonous calling of birds.

 

It is easy to imagine how fervently a conservationist like Professor Spellerberg might wish to restore this vanished empire of trees and birds. It must have been a magical (if somewhat forbidding) place for the European botanists who first encountered it. In 1769, even after 600 years of sparse human habitation, much of the pre-human environment remained. Outside of Antarctica, that could not be said of any other place on Earth.

 

Sadly, for the extreme conservationists, the conquests of the ecological imperialists cannot be rolled back. The creation of yet another Neo-Europe in the years following 1840 was completed in less than a century. The founders of Christchurch were part of that process, as the lofty oaks in Hagley Park attest.

 

That it was a destructive process cannot be disputed, but it was also a creative process. The introduction of plants and animals from Europe, and elsewhere, has made New Zealand a staggeringly colourful and productive place. The idea that we should consciously deprive ourselves of the colour and variety bequeathed to us by exotic plant species – trees especially – bespeaks a romanticism that is as puritanical as it is misguided.

 

In his heart, Professor Spellerberg must understand that, ultimately, to achieve the sort of ecological restoration he is seeking, New Zealand would have to be emptied of human-beings. But only after every last oak, birch, poplar and pine had been uprooted and burned.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 August 2016.

Something Fishy About Nick Smith's Game

Intimidator-in-Chief: For eight years Dr Nick Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is the National Party's chief point of environmental resistance; the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

DR NICK SMITH’S crude intimidation of the Fish and Game Council points to the bleakest of environmental futures should National be re-elected on 20 September. It is now considerably clearer than 60 percent of New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams that there are no serious points of environmental resistance in John Key’s Cabinet. For eight years Smith has worked hard to convince voters that he is, indeed, one such point of resistance, the one brave voice raised in opposition to the milk-before-water lobbyists of Fonterra and Federated Farmers. Now we know that it isn't true.

 

Smith’s threats to “tweak” the legislation establishing the Fish and Game Council is of a piece with this Government’s proven impatience with all forms of institutional dissent. It will not, it seems, be happy until every official check and balance against unbridled executive power has been neutralised.

 

Unless it is absolutely forced to (as in the case of Environment Canterbury) the Government’s strategy is not to make this suppression of dissenting voices explicit. Its preference is rather to intimidate these legislatively mandated watchdogs into silence. This can be effected in two ways. Either by appointing new and more malleable individuals to quasi-governmental boards and councils, or, by stripping those not subject to ministerial manipulation (like Fish and Game) of all their effective regulatory and/or advisory powers.

 

To casual observers it will appear as though nothing has changed because all the institutions created to permit democratic participation in the management of irreplaceable public resources will still be in place. But they will be looking at a regulatory ghost town. Behind the fading signage, nobody will be home.

 

A succession of National Party ministers have perfected this process by using the Department of Conservation as their guinea-pig. Since 2008 John Key’s government has systematically starved the "DoC" of the resources needed to properly manage and protect the vast estate it administers on the public’s behalf. Constant restructuring has allowed the Minister’s hand-picked managers to purge the Department of its experts and visionaries, wipe clean its institutional memory and leave in place only those willing to make the best of a situation which long ago made the transition from bad to worse.

 

Smith calls Key’s administration a “Blue-Green Government”. But the veteran conservationists, Guy Salmon and Gary Taylor, who established the original blue-green political party, the Progressive Greens, would almost certainly disagree. Much has changed since the early 1990s when Nick Smith and his fellow “Brat Packers”, Bill English, Roger Sowry and Tony Ryall, first entered Parliament.

 

Back then it was still possible for a National Party Environment Minister, Simon Upton, to seriously pursue the idea of a Carbon Tax. Over the past twenty years, however, the ideological and political consolidation of Neoliberalism has downgraded the natural environment to the status of a mere sub-set of the economy when, in reality, it is the other way round. 

 

Neoliberals quickly grasped the deadly threat the science of ecology posed to the re-emergence of laissez-faire capitalism. In Marxist terms, the planet’s finite capacity to absorb the deadly externalities of carbon-based industrial civilisation constituted “the final contradiction”. Capitalism must either be tamed or it and the civilisation which created it will perish.

 

Rather than accept this last, irrefutable, existential challenge to Capitalism its defenders have opted instead for the politics of outright denial. But climate change “scepticism” is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg when it comes to the political and cultural consequences of Neoliberalism’s refusal to face the facts of anthropogenic global warming.

 

Resisting “the final contradiction” requires neoliberalism to destroy the rationalist and scientific foundations of the industrial civilisation upon which it stands. This can only be accomplished by undermining the public’s faith in the scientific method and investing all opinions – no matter how absurd – with a spurious equivalence. Evidence-based decision-making, which former National politicians like Simon Upton accepted as the sine qua non of competent and rational governance, is being supplanted by ‘evidence’ commissioned and purchased on the open market from ‘experts’ who specialise in telling Capitalism and its political agents exactly what they want to hear. (Alister Barry’s documentary film, Hot Air, shows how the Carbon Lobby and Federated Farmers utilised this technique to delay and/or defeat every attempt by successive New Zealand governments to combat climate change.)

 

The politics of denial also requires the complete hollowing out of those state institutions deliberately constructed to collect evidence from individuals and groups best placed to provide it. Institutions – like Fish and Game – whose democratic composition protects the processes of gathering evidence from those with a vested interest in suppressing information antithetical to their purposes.

 

When it comes to the Department of Conservation, Nick Smith and his colleagues know they have nothing to fear – as the censoring of the evidence DoC's scientists had gathered about the ecological effects of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam made clear. But Fish and Game and uncooperative Regional Councils still have an evidential sword to draw in defence of Mother Nature.

 

Shut them down.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 28 July 2014.

The 100% Pure "Model Nation"

As We Would Like The World To See Us: But repeated contamination scandals and a growing international awareness that all is not well in the New Zealand environment is causing more and more people to doubt Tourism NZ's staggeringly successful slogan. New Zealanders must now decide whether they wish to live up to, or abandon, the promise that has, for better or for worse, branded their nation.

 

NEW ZEALAND was barely half-a-century old when it became a “Brand State”. Our first government elected under (nearly) universal male suffrage – the Liberal Government of 1891 – had, within just a few years of taking office, earned New Zealand an international reputation for being “the social laboratory of the world”.

 

The bitter struggles between Capital and Labour that were tearing the societies of the Old and New Worlds’ apart at the turn of the Nineteenth Century seemed to have been tamed in New Zealand by the passing of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. And, while the women of Great Britain and the United States were staging massive demonstrations in favour of women’s suffrage, New Zealand women were already marching to the polling booths.

 

The potency of New Zealand’s “progressive” brand was only enhanced by the radical reforms of the First Labour Government. So much so that, well into the 1950s, the publishers of encyclopaedias were still accepting introductions to the entry on New Zealand like this one, from the 1958 Edition of the Richards Topical Encyclopaedia:

 

“The World’s ‘Model Nation’: How Little New Zealand, Starting Her Career amid Wars and Many Money Problems, Built Up for Herself a Government So Sound and Humane that She Came to Be Called the Best-Governed Nation in the World.”

 

 

As The World Used To See Us: New Zealand in 1958 - A "Model Nation".

 

Between 1984 and 1999 there was a deeply cynical attempt on the part of the right-wing promoters of the neoliberal economic “reforms” responsible for dismantling the progressive achievements of earlier generations of New Zealanders, to appropriate that “model nation” brand.

 

To no avail. People from other lands looked at New Zealand and saw the same destructive economic forces at work – albeit in more extreme form – that had disfigured their own societies. From being the little nation that marched to the beat of a different, more “humane”, drummer, New Zealand had fallen into the same, sad, neoliberal lock-step as the rest of the world.

 

But then, miraculously, in 1999, New Zealand got a second chance.

 

Commissioned to come up with a new slogan for Tourism NZ, the Saatchi ad agency boss, Alan Morden, came up with “100% Pure New Zealand”. Everyone who heard it sensed they were on to a winner.

 

Two years later, just a fortnight before Christmas 2001, things got even better.

 

Into a world still reeling from the terrible events of 9/11 came the first of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and people saw a landscape of unbelievable beauty. In this, the most far-flung tourist destination on the planet, God seemed to have hidden the very last, most lovely jewel of his creation.

 

Overnight, “100% Pure New Zealand” ceased to be merely the advertising slogan of Tourism NZ and became the motto of a “Brand State”.

 

Almost accidentally, New Zealanders found themselves bound to meet the near impossible challenge of 100% purity. But they could not turn back, because already the magic of the motto was transforming the expectations of New Zealand’s customers.

 

The global consumer reads the name “New Zealand” on a label and, instantly, their minds are filled with the imagery of snow-capped peaks, sparkling rivers and streams, unspoiled beaches and endless vistas of deep green pastureland. Surely, they say, the food and beverages from such a land must be the purest, the safest, the very best in the whole world! It is difficult to imagine a perception more likely to clear the shelves of the world’s supermarkets for New Zealand’s agricultural exports.

 

But the magic works in other ways for New Zealand. Purity, if it is to go on selling our exports, must be more than a rhetorical flourish – it has to be real. Our rivers and streams must be clean all the way from the mountains to the sea. Our green pasturelands must leave no chemical residues in our food. The milk from our free-ranging, grass-chewing cows, and the products derived from their milk, must, just like the slogan, be 100% pure – not contaminated by botulism.

 

Fonterra’s latest scandal has revealed, in the most dramatic fashion, the double-edged nature of all magical incantations. We know now that our 100% Pure designation can just as easily prove a curse as a blessing.

 

We stand now at a fork in the road. One way leads us to a future of reduced expectations. To a New Zealand no longer described as 100% Pure: where open-cast mines disfigure our conservation lands; deep sea oil coats our coasts; and cow-shit pours into our poisoned rivers and streams.

 

The other way leads to a New Zealand that dares to live up to its promises. To a future where intelligence and creativity are enthroned as our culture’s sovereign lords. And where the purity of our environment is matched only by the purity of our purpose.

 

A “Model Nation” again.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 August 2013.