white or the long
p. 54 · Read in the full issue
Opinion
Land of the long white or the long grey cloud?
It is 650 pages long and although it’s all about New Zealand it is also a warning to every country in the Pacific.
“It”, is a report called State of the New Zealand Environment, and the picture it paints in its thousands of words is not a pretty one.
It shows that New Zealand, which has long promoted its tourist attractions and food exports overseas on the strength of a “clean and green” image, is not the paradise most New Zealanders like to think.
It shows, in fact, that we are a grubby little nation, daily con taminating our soil and the air we breathe, polluting our rivers and the ocean around and hounding our native animals and plants into extinction.
Even the Kiwi, New Zealand’s national symbol, is at risk.
Numbers of the northern brown Kiwi, the most common type found all over the country, are declining by almost six percent a year, one of 800 animal species identified as being threatened with extinction.
Aotearoa, it seems, is not so much the Land of the Long White Cloud as the land of the Long Grey Cloud.
It is a report that should be read and studied by political lead ers and officials of every Pacific Island country who will find invaluable pointers to help in formulation of their own environ
mental policies.
For if they do not leam what they should be doing from this report, they will certainly pick up some tips on what not to do if they want to avoid the New Zealand experience.
And that should be a major aim for all the island states, who with little else to provide a sustainable economy, must, like it or not, increasingly rely on tourism for their survival. The simple fact is: The tourists come to the Pacific to escape the overcrowding and polluted environments of their more developed homelands.
They will not come if they fail to find the pristine conditions they expect. The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment s report is the first comprehensive study of the country and how it has been changed by human habitation.
Among its major findings are: • Only 54 percent of the population has safe water supplies and nearly one in four New Zealanders have borderline or unsatisfac tory water;
• more than 7000 sites could be contaminated with daingerous chemicals; • a fifth of all hazardous waste is dumped into public dips with no controls; and • air pollution from home fires and vehicles in sorme cites exceeds health safety guidelines.
As environment minister Simon Upton put it: “We’ve lost huge areas of indigenous habitat, placed many native animal amd plant species at risk, enriched our shallow lakes and lowland riveers with agricultural discharges and showered domestic and industrial waste around the landscape with gay abandon.
“Because there are only 3.6 million of us and quite a lot of land to go round, with plenty of wind and rain to dispose of the mess, it still feels a pretty clean place to live.
“We would be fools, however, to let that impression lull us into a false sense of security.”
The government released the report, the result of four years work to shock New Zealanders who have come to believe the clean and green myth into changing their lax attitudes to environ mental protection.
The report noted that since the first Polynesians settled here 700 to 800 years ago, 85 percent of the country’s lowland forests and wetlands have been wiped out. Farming, forestry, transport and urban development now occupy nearly two-thirds of New Zealand’s total land area.
What’s left is insufficient to guarantee the survival of many unique plants and animal, the report says.
Of the original 93 kinds of birds unique to New Zealand, 43 are extinct and 37 are now endangered. A total of about 1000 animals and plants are threatened, nearly double previous estimates.
Much of the damage has, of course, been done in the name of economic development and here again is a warning to the island states: “There is an environmental price to pay for progress.
Replacing forests with farms has led to serious soil erosion and some of the country’s best soils are being degraded through inten sive farming.”
Although New Zealand’s water quality is high by international standards, it is affected by sewage and factory effluent discharges direct into streams, rivers and the sea.
Contamination in rainwater runoff from farmland and roads is hard to control and, the report says, needs to be urgently addressed.
The status of more than half of New Zealand’s commercially exploited fish populations is unknown. Stocks of orange roughly, the most valuable fish on export markets and a species that can live for more than 100 years, have been driven below the maxi mum sustainable level in just 20 years.
A recurring theme throughout the report, and a worrying one, is that despite the 650 pages very little is actually known about the state of New Zealand’s environment. The report makes it clear that much more needs to be done in monitoring and collecting information.
Despite the battering to the country's postcard image, the report notes that New Zealand's population problems are in fact less severe than many other countries.
But it stresses that they are still serious and could worsen with out action.
It's a sobering thought that if New Zealand, with its small pop ulation and large land mass, cannot maintain a safe and clean envi ronment then no country can. ■
David Barber