Opinion Archives | New Zealand Geographic

This is why

My inbox is a world of hurt. Eels dead on beaches. Seabirds starving. Ice, melting faster than we thought. There are microplastics in our brains, my emails advise me, and in the breath of dolphins. This morning, an ordinary, terrifying line in a press release: “The climate crisis is a threat to civilisation.” No time to think about it, not really. Back to trying to write a coverline that’s cool and intriguing but also true. Now the phone’s ringing; a writer with field-work plans gone awry… I’ve found that it helps to have a sense of mission. To understand your “why”. For me, it’s the hope that documenting our world might help save it; even on the most stressful days, this idea feels like a flying-fox zipping us over the trees. I see a similar, singular focus in the seaweed scientists and entrepreneurs Kate Evans and Richard Robinson meet in their cover story on page 78. “For me personally, seaweed provides a sense of hope,” says Coromandel CEO Lucas Evans, who, because of that hope, slid down a rabbit hole of seaweed science eight years ago and is now permanently ensconced. I think about the moment the tight-knit team of Plant & Food Research scientists confirmed that their seaweed spray can help defend some of our most important crops from diseases. I even find myself identifying with the tech-bro of the piece, entrepreneur Steve Meller, who could have settled for a “nice little 20- or 30-million-dollar business” selling methane-busting seaweed supplements to farmers, but is aiming higher—as in, he wants to help save the world. Move fast and fix things, is the vibe. Maybe miracles can happen, if we work hard enough—and don’t get distracted. I got a great gust of that energy, too, from Coromandel conservationist Sara Smerdon. She talks fast and hard; replies to emails within moments. We’ve been hammering out the finer points of how pigs and other pests go about scoffing native frogs in the ecologically rich forest to which Smerdon is devoted (see Naomi Arnold and Rob Suisted’s story on page 36). Every call, I had a notepad to hand just in case, and it ended up covered in shorthand. Smerdon talked about the incredible critters that live in this spot. How she felt when she found pig sign all through rooted-up frog habitat—and then saw the same devastation again, and again. How she and others pushed for the evidence that might prompt action. And how hard it is, always but especially now, to get money to fight for our forests. “These frogs have so little protection anyway,” she told me. “This is why we do what we do.” Last summer, we asked readers for feedback on this magazine. We’ve printed out all the responses and sometimes, when the to-do list gets on top of me, I pull out the stack and read through it all again. “Continue to explain the why,” you told us. Someone else: “It is great to see passion in the writing and photography.” Others: “I want to hear the awesome stories of people doing good and interesting work in these dark times.” “Be brave. Stand up for science and scientists.” “Follow your gut always.” One person told us they wept over our feature about red-billed seagulls (Issue 187). “However, I accept that we need to know about these things and I don’t want you to stop covering them.” Often, the stories we tell in New Zealand Geographic are bleak. But in every story, we strive to show you that there are people like Sara and Lucas and Steve—clever, ambitious, stubborn people—who are getting stuck in because they care just as much as you do. We hope it might help you hold on to your why.

Editorial

Up time

There are many ways to escape. Every morning, early, I sneak out to the kitchen, open the doors to the garden, and listen to the blackbirds and tūī chortle themselves awake. For half an hour, I am somewhere else. The American poet Mary Oliver was a kindred spirit. She wrote over and over again of the dawn, what she called “the opening of the door of the day”. “This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight,” she wrote in her 2016 book, Upstream. “Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift.” (After Oliver’s death, in 2019, Kennedy Warne wrote a piece entirely about her—perhaps the only poet to get such a run in this magazine. See Issue 156.) Oliver was deeply religious and I am not, but in that liminal beat before the light I find reverence, at least; the crickets and the cicadas are all singing at once; it seems that the big willow in our garden is bowing; it feels like the moment before you breathe out. After a little while, about the time it takes to drink a cup of Earl Grey, the sun jumps the back fence and I pivot to lunchboxes, sunscreen, the doing of the day. I am always, already, looking forward to the next morning. When I read Anna Yeoman’s story about harlequin geckos (page 94) what threw me most, of all their strange habits, was that unlike most lizards they tie their activities to weather, not the rising or setting of the sun. They’ll just as happily hunt at midnight as noon, so long as it’s warm enough. When my boy was tiny he woke every day at 5.30am on the button. Our house was uninsulated then, with cold wooden floors. So after a quick breakfast we’d just get dressed and leave. The ruru in the gully over the road would be hooting and we’d hoot back as I fiddled with the car seat. We’d be first in the doors when Pak ‘nSave opened at 7am. The bakery guys would be singing; they’d give my boy a bread roll to chew on and a paper bag to wear as a hat. We would take 40 minutes to buy frozen peas and yoghurt. We were so unbelievably tired. We had everything we could possibly want. Reporting the kingfish feature on page 32, I decided to trek out to Cornwallis wharf at 5am on a public holiday, to catch a fishy tide and the people trying their luck. My early-bird boy, now 10, didn’t have to come with me but he desperately wanted to, and so we drove through the dark with a podcast and a Thermos of Milo. At the beach he curled up on the grass with a book while I wandered the hushed, busy wharf. The first people I talked with, while the gulls were still sharp black shapes in the sky, were Cecile and Alan from the North Shore. Alan was fishing but Cecile was just looking at the sea. The couple work all week but every weekend they’re here at dawn, Cecile told me. The rising sun was pink on her face. She pointed out their favourite spot on the rocks. Alan, she said, learned to fish in the Philippines and had been praying for a kingfish. Then she leaned closer. “We don’t really think that we can get any,” she said. “We’re only just here to feel free.”

Editorial

Perception & reality

The other morning I set a deeply unimpressive personal record. The drive to work, which usually takes 45 minutes, stretched out to an interminable 77. I sat at one intersection for more than half an hour, listening to my emails ping and wondering how I fell into this trap. So, I suspect, did everyone around me. Going car-free is the single most powerful thing a person can do to mitigate climate change, according to data published by global research company Ipsos for Earth Day 2024. That, for my family, feels impossible. Likewise, we can’t afford to switch to an electric vehicle—the second-most powerful lever on the list. (The third, though, is a cinch. Ditch one long-haul flight? Done. I hate flying.) It’s a bad feeling, to know what is right and that you’re not able to do it. Or, worse, to know in a small corner of your mind that you could do it, if you absolutely had to, but to choose instead what US climate writer David Wallace-Wells calls a “creamily frictionless life”. In keeping our one car, we’re certainly avoiding bumps: we have two young kids, weirdly timed shifts, and lives that criss-cross the Harbour Bridge. Does that make our choice okay? Maybe. I often wonder what our kids will think of our decisions, down the track. According to the same data, many New Zealanders put too much faith in tweaks that are easy to do. When 1000 of us were asked to pick the three most impactful actions from a list of 60, it was recycling, food-growing, switching to renewable energy, and buying less packaging that came out top. In fact, recycling is the 59th most helpful thing for the environment, growing your own food 23rd. (See the graphic on page 76.) Our perception doesn’t align with reality, and at an individual level this is understandable. But it’s something else entirely to be in charge of population-level systems change—the type of jolt we urgently need—and to make things worse. Such as ushering extractive industries past legislative red tape, as per the pending Fast-track Approvals Bill. Or fumbling a much-anticipated global treaty on plastic pollution, as happened in South Korea this month. As we go to press, news is breaking that the government is cutting humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund—New Zealand’s premier funding source for cutting-edge fundamental research across all disciplines, the cornerstone of transformational science for three decades. The focus is now on science linked directly to economic growth. As we have outlined in the past month, New Zealand Geographic takes an apolitical stance, but rarely misses an opportunity to point out the consequences of policy. It doesn’t take a Marsden-level scientist to see the problem in defunding public health right now,—that’s on the hit list. Nursing, too. Māori and Indigenous studies. Urban design and environmental studies; community and health psychology. Research from the physical sciences will also be defunded if not directly connected to economic growth. The decision prompted some of the strongest language I’ve ever heard from scientists, including those who stand to benefit from a greater share of the pot. “Dire,” they said. “An outrageous indictment.” “Horrified.” “Absolutely disgusted.” Science, like societies and ecosystems everywhere, is interconnected. Pull out enough bricks and watch the tower fall. Troy Baisden, co-president of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, said the association “deplores key aspects” of the decision. “Climate change is an area where we know half the challenge is social science and that humanities can be vastly important to support public understanding and communication.” In other words, the gulf between perception and reality just got even bigger.

Opinion

A matter of principles

Misinformation about the Treaty of Waitangi, its language and its intent is at the centre of the Treaty Principles Bill introduced to Parliament this week.

Editorial

Cards on the table

The glowering duck on the cover only just made it. As we put this issue together, we were leaning toward a foreboding shot of the Bounties: black cliffs, albatrosses wheeling in a sepia sky. The cover story in that case would have been about the new variant of avian flu, which is worse than you think and headed our way. That cover would have died on the newsstand, of course. Nobody wants to read about COVID-19, and nobody wants to read about bird flu. (Or, they do, but only in a “bird flu is a government conspiracy to keep us all under control,” kind of way.) Many readers are exhausted by coverage of climate change, too, or biodiversity loss. So what do you do, when your magazine specialises in telling those stories with richness and context—and at a moment when not telling them is unconscionable? Well, sometimes you lead with the duck. This one’s making great eye contact, he’s in an appealing strop, he’s beautifully shot by one of our Photographer of the Year winners, Simon Runting. He’s a wee bit dark, which doesn’t typically bode well sales-wise, but if you’re reading this, I trust he’s charmed you anyway. As James Frankham, New Zealand Geographic’s former editor and now publisher, points out, this is another way to get important stories in front of audiences: get ‘em in the door with a grumpy duck and then clobber ‘em with the bird flu (see Bill Morris’s feature on page 34—and do brace yourself; the first draft had me in tears). Every issue, we have this sort of back-and-forth over the cover. It’s a sales tool, a beautiful glossy flag we wave every two months. It’s also a privilege. Years ago, I worked at a newspaper where we figured out putting the word “mother” on the front page reliably bumped sales. We went for it, of course. It made for some wild choices: weird headlines; insignificant stories getting the plum spot. Similar strategies are now in play every day in our biggest media companies, but the stakes are dizzying: it’s not “edge out the competition”, but simply “exist”. Tactics have escalated accordingly, most obviously online, where you can post hundreds of headlines a day. Every one a little flag, waving for dear life. I’ve started deliberately tuning it out. So this month I was unsurprised to see a Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington study that found 60 per cent of New Zealanders now avoid the news, at least some of the time. That figure was higher than any other country in similar surveys. “Perhaps most significantly,” said lead author Alex Beattie, “there is immense commercial pressure on our news industry to retain its audiences. New Zealand media’s use of clickbait and alarming headlines to engage their audiences may ironically be driving them away in the competitive attention economy.” At New Zealand Geographic we take a different approach, one that aligns with our values and, we think, those of our readers (see James’s letter, over the page). Yeah, sometimes we’ll put a cute bird on the cover—Issue 179, featuring two fluffy ducklings my kids dubbed Schnuckler and Schnuckler, was a top seller—but we will never trick you. When we do go hard with a headline it’s because we know it to be true and consequential. We make sure that our journalism—our writing and photography, the meat of the mag—holds up, issue after issue. Most of all, we hope that it makes a difference.

Viewpoint

What is the hullabaloo about the Hauraki Gulf, and what on Earth is ring-net fishing?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Turns out the answer to both of these questions is complicated.

Editorial

Better living

It is impossible to write an editorial before the rest of the magazine is finished. That last week is like being stuck in a small room with 17 radios all nattering away on different stations. But now, it’s ten to seven on the night we go to press. Everything else is done; the designer is tucking the magazine into bed. In the hush, I sit down to write. The best thing the kids and I did in the school holidays was visit a bead shop. The two of them got their own special seats and trays and spent 90 minutes in a transcendent state of immersion. My five-year-old, who is learning to add, whispered under her breath as she arranged her beads in groups. My son, almost 10, chose beads stamped with letters and set about threading them upside down and back to front, so the names scan properly for anyone looking at him. (Everyone looks at him; his necklace is spectacular.) It had been a frenetic couple of weeks in our family—holidays are busy, with two parents working. Leaning against a wall, I watched the kids’ breathing change, and mine did, too. At one point, Ben sighed happily and announced that “making” was his favourite thing to do, apart from watching Bondi Rescue. The rest of the day was delightful. And the necklaces they made are their most prized possessions—they both wore them to school this morning, for photo day. I see a similar magic at work in those who love bonsai (page 52). The trees are little but they’re super high maintenance: fertilising and watering is an always-job, then there are the occasional tasks such as pest control and mixing substrate and repotting and carving and shaping… One practitioner, Rossco Phillips, told me he could happily spend hours wiring his trees, a repetitive, productive task that he has to think about, but only a little bit. Fellow bonsai devotee Zianne van Zyl agrees: “I think that’s a drug people chase, when they do bonsai, is that flow state. And the good feeling after you’ve done it, looking back and seeing this tree and going, ‘Man, this is awesome.’” Flow is everywhere in this magazine. See: John Hollows sinking himself into cold, shallow ponds, watching his beloved kōura for hours (page 34), and Terressa Shandley Kollat slipping into the bush or the sea at any opportunity (page 26). I suspect many scientists drop into a state of flow when they’re in the field, getting face time with whichever little cog of the world most fascinates them. Where do New Zealand Geographic contributors go for flow? Water’s a theme, unsurprisingly. Writers Kate Evans and Michelle Duff (a senior journalist who makes her feature debut with us in this issue, on page 92) like to surf, sometimes together. Photojournalist Richard Robinson gets underwater. Publisher James Frankham sails. Journalist Bill Morris also writes and performs country music. Rebekah White, who edited this magazine for seven years and is now at large, chucks a tent on her back and goes tramping. Writer Asia Martusia King’s first feature for us is the cover story on bonsai. She loves drawing. “You forget to eat or pee or move and you are in actual physical pain afterwards,” she texted me. “You get such a rush when you’re lost in the shapes and movements of a good sketch.” What’s yours, she asked? Oh. Um. My noise-cancelling headphones? Reading half a New Yorker feature in bed each night? Getting up early to get the lunchboxes done? These do not at all meet the threshold for flow, I realised: they’re blips of peace, not full, focused immersion. Two years ago, to squeeze this job into my week, I gave up karate. I hate group exercise, but karate felt different—something about the ritual and patterns, the balance, the absence of stupid gym music, snicked my brain into another gear. I remember walking out of those weekly sessions elated. I only got to do it for a few months. I think it's time to go back.

Editorial

Stump up

The pōhutukawa boomed last summer. Thousands of trees blooming their hearts out, ridiculous masses of flowers, a red wave cloaking the battered coastlines, playgrounds, suburbs. It was the first pōhutukawa mast in 20 years. But something uglier was flourishing in those old-man branches, too: myrtle rust, a fungal disease that blew in seven years ago and spread rapidly. The long, wet summer, heralded by all that red, left pōhutukawa choked with spores. It’ll be a few years before the really big trees start to topple, scientists expect, but the rust is working on it. Can you imagine the North Island without pōhutukawa? Rangitoto, stripped back to hot black rock? Pōhutukawa shaded my first date with my husband, our wedding, and our first little house together. It was the first tree my son climbed, with a branch slung so low he could simply toddle up. Travelling home over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, other bus passengers swivel to check out the sea. I turn to the land and the receiving line of giants at Northcote Point, inspecting the damage from last summer’s storms, clocking whether any more trees have slipped or been cut back. From the office window we can see a pōhutukawa on Stanley Point that’s been in the act of falling off a cliff ever since Gabrielle. Hanging in there, as if by its toes. To the extent that myrtle rust has had media attention, pōhutukawa has, unsurprisingly, been the poster child. But other species are going under, too. And with them go the ecosystems they support. “Inside three years, hundreds of thousands of ramarama have vanished,” says Ngāti Porou kaitiaki Graeme Atkins, in a 2021 documentary that functions as a requiem for the species in his rohe, Tairāwhiti. Ramarama, he points out, fruits in the winter—without it, the birds and bats that depend on that foodsource will likely starve. When an unassuming understorey sort of plant like ramarama blinks out, what fills the ecological niche? Privet? As I read Ellen Rykers’ feature story on the rust and our truncated response to it, I started to wish that the trees would become sentient, that they’d rise up like Tolkien’s Ents, rip their feet from the ground and march on Parliament. Much of the journalism resource of New Zealand Geographic now goes into documenting environmental catastrophes. We try to get in early enough to make a difference, but repeated and unnecessary official failings loom large. For me, the decision not to renew funding to fight myrtle rust and safeguard precious genetic material from species in its sights sits near the top of that list. Importantly, the ngahere does have an army on its side: teams of scientists and kaitiaki have been working with urgency to understand myrtle rust—and combat it. They’ve come up with promising weapons, too: fungi and insects with a taste for myrtle rust; seed-banking and resistance-testing programmes; antifungal spraying; and a high-tech new spray from Aussie that (in the lab, at least) not only protects plants, but also cleans up rust in plants already struggling. All of this innovation is about to hit the wall. Funding for the optimistically named umbrella programme “Beyond Myrtle Rust” ends this month. Likewise, the Jobs for Nature teams that spent years monitoring the rust and developing ways to fight it are about to be left in the financial wilderness. And so we are left with a pressing choice. Move on, push the rust from our minds, picnic under the pōhutukawa before those big swooping branches start crashing down. Or consider that blazing red summer a call for help.

Editorial

Political science

There’s a dead end we run into again and again while documenting natural science in New Zealand—a wall of “We don’t know.” “Nobody’s working on that, sorry.” It floors me, the scale of what we simply do not know. I have always hoped that politicians are driven to base their decisions on evidence, and where it is lacking, to look closer. This month the government announced it would not renew the contract for the longitudinal study Growing Up in New Zealand, which was 16 years into a planned 21-year-plus run. (A second longitudinal study of our children, Living in Aotearoa, run by Stats NZ, has just been halted at the six-year mark.) Growing Up documented more than 6000 children and their families, beginning when the mothers were pregnant. The list of topics includes: family structure, ethnicity, income, childcare, te reo, hunger, mental health, immunisations, breastfeeding, screen time, first words, smoke alarms, disabilities, tantrums, allergies, accidents, sleep, bullying, dental care, domestic violence, class size, puberty, truancy, COVID-19, sexuality, gender identity, relationships. Life. The researchers watched how these factors tangled and clustered and influenced one another. They saw poverty playing out over time, for example, in areas such as school achievement and mental health. They were stunned to discover how often children moved house, especially between private rentals. The team also briefed media and politicians as to how we could most efficiently make our children’s lives better—introducing a rental tenure system, for example. Expanding the free school lunch programme. The most effective way to get more kids in school more often, the researchers said last year, was to make school a better place to be, and meaningfully help young people improve their mental health. It’s not yet clear what the future holds for Growing Up. The University of Auckland, which runs the study, told RNZ it is “exploring options” to plug the sudden $30 million shortfall. But universities, too, are doing it tough. Sometimes, good science takes just one person seeing a need and getting stuck in. See: Jim Mills. For more than half a century he has been studying red-billed gulls at Kaikōura; clocking nests and chicks, life and death—much of it unfunded. Each season he’s come out with a new brick of data and slotted it on top of the last, up and up into a project that makes sense of the gulls’ world and their sharp decline. Now 83, he can’t find a way to keep the work going. But other projects are just getting started. In Otago, palaeontologists Daphne Lee and Uwe Kaulfuss are fossicking for amber—and the fossils suspended inside it. The task is immense but it has great momentum: in just 15 years we’ve gone from thinking New Zealand amber was empty, to amassing a library of 200-plus exquisitely preserved insects. New Zealand Geographic is cracking into a new project, too—we’re working with the Cawthron Institute and dozens of sailors to sample seawater across huge swathes of the South Pacific. Cutting-edge eDNA technology will show us how the myriad organisms in that water ebb and flow across the ocean, the roles they play in the ecosystem, and how they react under pressure. In the great machinery of the seas these are the tiniest of cogs. So are we, of course. But humans have the responsibility of trying, at least, to see the big picture.

Viewpoint

Day of the dolphin

SailGP wanted to run a yacht race in a marine mammal sanctuary. They made a plan in the event of dolphins swimming into the course. Dolphins happened. They stuck to the plan. The racing was wildly successful. Is it just me, or does this seem like a good outcome for New Zealand?

Editorial

Gone fishing

Mum and Dad’s first date was in a dinghy. As soon as my brothers and I could hold a handline they had us dangling for spotties off the Picton wharf. We adored it. The jostle for the best spot. The smell of sunscreen and squid bait. Tug. “A monster!” Mum and Dad would exclaim, as we pulled up fish no longer than a finger. Fishing brought its own list of firsts, little markers of independence: the first time you baited up a hook by yourself. The first time you grabbed hold of a flipping, spiky body, held it still, eased the hook out. First time you hooked yourself. As we got older, we hauled up blue cod and flouncing, barking gurnard from Wellington’s Red Rocks. We helped grind pāua for fritters. We trawled for trout on Lake Taupō, wandered up ice-clear streams and learned to cast a fly. As teenagers we built hīnaki, baiting the traps with dog bones before dropping them into the stream over the road. My last fishing trip was also my Dad’s last one: as the dementia set in, we chartered a boat and he pulled in a decent snapper, managing to keep his feet at sea even though he staggered on land. Lately, my four-year-old has been begging us to take her fishing. She’d love it just as much as I do. I want to watch her face when she feels that first bite, when she sees her fish skitter to the surface, furious. I keep saying no. Recreational fishing, I’m told, is the third rail. You don’t touch it unless you want to hack off a large and vocal demographic: the people who, like me, grew up catching anything and everything. They will fight to maintain the status quo. But in the Hauraki Gulf, my home patch of sea, the status quo is dead penguins and snapper with weird, milky flesh—a sign of starvation. It’s kina barrens and the ghosts of scallop beds and crays; it’s the age of that destructive, smothering new seaweed, Caulerpa. And yet still, we hammer this ecosystem: it endures one million recreational fishing trips every year, according to the Ministry for Primary Industries’ national survey of recreational fishers. In August, if scientific agencies tick the box they’re widely tipped to, we’ll officially enter a new epoch: the Anthropocene, an age defined by the impact of humans on the Earth. Translation: it’s all about us. Our systems and choices and activities—our weekend fishing trips—aggregated. Many of the choices we’re faced with now cut close to the bone. Fishing is a literal line between a person and the vast natural world beneath the sea. For many it’s a rope, woven generations strong. But the graphic on page 18 shows the way we’re fishing now—at scale. Everywhere. Notably, it doesn’t provide the whole picture, missing vessels that stick close to shore, and those smaller than about 15 metres. That is, it’s missing most recreational fishers. But they’re there. For me, it’s time to find new ways of engaging with the sea. I’ve been tossing up buying a little dinghy. We could potter from beach to beach, swim, explore rock pools. And I’ve been thinking about the very best day of my blessed, fishy childhood. Because it was not spent pulling fish out of water. Instead, we went to them: snorkelling, on the Great Barrier Reef. I remember the shock when I put my face in—the colour, the coral. I felt like I’d swum into my favourite jigsaw puzzle, a place of swarming life and diversity and abundance, and I never wanted it to end.

Editorial

Forward march

Acquiesce. It’s the name of an anaesthetic used to knock out tank-reared kingfish so that the people farming these apex predators for food can handle them. A disquieting word. Margaret Atwood would love it. But it’s not science fiction: it’s happening now. We’re farming kingies—and we’re farming pāua, hāpuku and whitebait, too. It’s uncanny to grow big, dynamic kingfish in tanks on land. To strip eggs from kōkupu in tanks up north, and fly them to Bluff to conceive whitebait. It was a jolt when Richard Robinson filed his photographs of tame pāua, which shine turquoise on the outside. But if we’re to tame the climate and biodiversity crises we’ve created, we’re going to have to get used to such change—and strangeness. What I admire about the aquaculture industry is the way it’s harnessing science and trying new ways of tackling sprawling, tangled problems (in this case, how to feed us, given the seas can’t keep up). I see the same innovative energy in Jordana Whyte and Lisa Argilla, who saw a need for a wildlife hospital—and set one up. Recently they realised huge numbers of hoiho chicks were dying within a week or so of hatching. So the hospital adapted, pulling hundreds of chicks into intensive care. Some of the stories we publish at New Zealand Geographic set out to celebrate such projects—to show what’s possible, what’s working, and why. Like this, we want to say. Others try to call attention to where it’s needed most. Quickly, over here! In this moment of stinging urgency, the environmental policy inferno proposed by the new coalition government is anathema. What’s been signalled so far is a series of repeals, a stamping out of attempts at evidence-based change. The walk-backs will likely make circumstances worse for the environment, removing modern checks and balances that attempt to write sustainability into our economy and society, and safeguard the ecosystems on which both depend. The Natural and Built Environment Act, the Spatial Planning Act, freshwater standards, public transport overhauls—for all the weaknesses of these instruments, they represented a step in the right direction. The government has also signalled it will restart offshore exploration for oil and gas and consider new seabed mining. Minister for resources and fisheries Shane Jones said the other day that the “stigmatisation and demonisation” of mineral and fishing companies ends with him. Before the election National said it would cut $46 million—6.5 per cent of funding—from the chronically squeezed Department of Conservation. “Unless reconsidered,” wrote Gary Taylor, chair and chief executive of the Environmental Defence Society for Newsroom recently, “the policy mix will lead to more freshwater pollution, loss of significant indigenous habitat, an increase in damaging pests, and species extinctions.” Taylor calls it “revenge politics” and “a profound retreat” from the environmental stewardship of previous governments, both Labour and National-led. Voters could be forgiven for feeling stunned by this package. Little of it was in National’s environmental policy. What happened during those 41 days of coalition negotiations was a chaotic alchemy, in which some of the most destructive strategies somehow floated to the top. But we do not have to acquiesce. For a lesson in meaningful dissent, look to tangata whenua, who as we went to press were protesting similarly regressive moves around Te Tiriti, te reo, and tino rangatiratanga. In Auckland hundreds of vehicles in convoy drove at five kilometres an hour through rush-hour traffic. Hazards on. Commuters banked up. Status quo: disrupted. You could see the hikoi as a hassle. Or you could see it as a vanguard. Atwood would coin a good phrase for this moment. Maybe we could nick one from Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi. He calls it “an activation of the people”.

Editorial

Into the blue

Of all the penguins and forests and fire and ice, the horses and high wires and aerial shots in our Photographer of the Year finalists, my favourite frames are both portraits. First, Joe Harrison’s shot of a boy on a campground seesaw. Just look at the light. Look at that boy, looking straight through you. Expecting better. Then there’s Brian Turner, fading like old tussock, like the light, shot by Alden Williams. A classical portrait through and through. Every time I look at it tears come to my eyes. This is partly because Brian has Alzheimer’s. His brain, he’s said, feels like a shower of asteroids coming at him. My dad had dementia, and he died last year, just after his 65th birthday, and it doesn’t take much to make me cry for him. But when I look at this photograph I’m also deeply moved by the way Brian has lived. He is a poet and an environmental activist—has been since Save Manapouri in the late 60s—and he lives in Central Otago, and it lives in him. “Before the dusk / mellows and fails / the light is like honey / on the stems of tussock grass…” Turner’s partner, fellow activist and writer Jillian Sullivan, puts it this way: “Whether it sang for him or he to it, his words now paint the land and hold it sacrosanct.” This was not a cost of living election, it was a climate election. We just didn’t talk about it. About the fact that Antarctica is melting, corals are cooking, and the world has just experienced the hottest July on record. Also the hottest August. And September. National’s full environmental policy seems to have been quietly published the day before the election. No poetry here, and it’s fairly broad-brush. “New Zealand faces major environmental challenges from climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity,” the opening pages of the document assert. “A cohesive, integrated approach to environmental regulation is crucial.” Yes and yes, please. Throughout, there is an emphasis on data. Targets. New tech. New wetlands. There are words that let me hope this next government will share my sense of urgency: turbo-charge; unleash; fast-track. But there is a mountain to climb to “get our country back on track”. New Zealand has committed under the Paris Agreement to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions 50 per cent by 2030 to limit warming to less than 1.5ºC. The science is unequivocal: we can’t honour that commitment and restart oil and gas exploration too. Or defer pricing on agricultural emissions. Or prioritise new roads over public transport. And the fiscal penalties for failing to decrease emissions or pulling out of the agreement would be catastrophic for the economy. The new coalition must find a way to rehabilitate both our economy and environment at the same time. As this next government steps from rhetoric to the real-world work of making change, promises may prove very hard to keep. Many of our leading environmental scientists have become accustomed to difficult compromises. Kelsey Miller, who spent days on the bottom of the Hauraki Gulf culling emaciated kina with a hammer, was trying to find a solution to the barrens the urchins are creating. She hated it, cringed every time, but she kept going, trying to strike a balance between our new context and a restored ecology. As with kina, the new government’s approach to our twin crises—climate, biodiversity—needs to evolve as the challenge does (it will). But the science to underpin it is already there for the taking. We just need the will. The political weather. It’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Editorial

There is only one story

The other day I watched a man walk onto the bus, put down his laptop and blazer, and sneeze a streak of snot on his arm. He looked at it. Made a decision. And wiped his arm on the seat. Of all the bad things happening in the world, my immediate worry is COVID-19. Partly because we don’t understand it properly—especially long COVID, and the cumulative damage caused even by mild infections—but also because I keep getting it. Five times! This is a loopy bit of anecdata; it says nothing about my inclination to follow rules or avoid risk. I’ve been wearing an N95—a good snug one, with a Darth Vader filter—in crowded indoor spaces, and some outdoor ones, since the pandemic began. (It’s not the kids bringing it home, either: four of those times, I’ve been the only person in the house to get hit.) You might be more worried about the cost of living. Flood cleanup. Our broken housing market, the recession, ram raids. Cooked coral. Melting ice. Canada on fire. Maui on fire. Whichever place catches fire next. But zoom out and we are all worrying about the same thing. “A delusion of separation”, a colleague called it today: the idea that all of these things are just happening, that they have nothing to do with environmental policy, and that surface-level tweaks like removing GST or fixing potholes will make any difference at all to the terrifying downhill slide. We try to publish stories that have different trajectories. But time after time, all paths lead to loss—we’re either documenting the imminent prospect of loss, or the throes of it, or the ghosts left behind. Even in a story about people righting wrongs, like killing all the rats on a tiny Tongan island, that bigger, scarier narrative hangs over everything. Our stories are also stories of entanglement. Of repercussions, ripple effects. Wipe burrowing seabirds out of your forests—change the chemistry of the country—and the trees “run out of juice”. Send sediment down the rivers and the sea turns to soup, teeming with a parasite that’s killing endangered dolphins. Ratchet up the heat and watch new, ravenous caterpillars munch through your vege gardens. This is a catalogue of our screw-ups. But it’s also a lesson: the way we use our environment matters. The way we eat, and get from A to B, and orient ourselves around other species—it all matters. And we can change it. But right now, instead of making any real change, we’re barely coping with each symptom, each shock. Two weeks ago Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told Toby Manhire on the Gone by Lunchtime podcast that he felt his government had only really achieved one term’s worth of work, because COVID had been such a time suck. That’s going to keep happening. And it’s going to get worse. (Watch what happens to the cost of living if we blow past two degrees of warming.) We urgently need to focus on the causes. We can’t continue to be blinded by the flurry of effects. Yet in this election campaign, meaningful environmental policy is being treated as frivolous. Something separate and out of reach. Again. My vote goes to whoever shows me that they understand. That they see the stories we’re telling here—there’s only one story, really— and that they’re ready, finally, to rewrite it. So far it’s a pretty short list.

Viewpoint

A toe on the start line

After 23 years, we have made the first tangible step towards recovery of the Hauraki Gulf.

Editorial

An unbroken line

Down in southern Te Waipounamu where I’m from, before European contact the fishing grounds had names. Tau-o-te-kāeaea, a reef where rays congregated. Hāpuka, off Ōraka where, well, hāpuka were caught. We fished from waka and earned mana serving abundant catches. Access was managed via whānau and hapū rights; in some areas these wakawaka, or allocations, stand today. We told stories about fishing, and at times fought wars over fishing rights. Later generations went to sea in sealing and whaling boats. Parties traversed Fiordland in ‘Maori boats’—big enough to pull up the beach and sleep under. From the 1940s, Ōtākou Fisheries ran 50 boats out of every port from Tīmaru to Jackson’s Bay. We were there in the southern crayfish boom of the 50s and 60s. My cousins ran cray boats in Fiordland more recently. Customary harvests overlapped with commercial activities throughout. This unbroken whakapapa of fishing only exists thanks to endless fights to preserve small scraps of the exclusive and undisturbed access to fisheries all iwi were promised under the Treaty. It’s a shadow of the rich fishing that should have been guaranteed. But the fishing grounds still have their names. The biggest recent fight was the Māori Fisheries Settlement. Local rights mutated into something more abstract: tribal entities ended up owning quota atomised across all of Aotearoa’s waters—though the end goal of providing for the people remains the same. Proceeds help capitalise other iwi businesses, and fund programmes promoting health, wellbeing and culture. That’s the kai that fisheries put on Māori tables today. So, when proposals for marine sanctuaries arrive that bear no resemblance to Māori concepts, or undermine connections to place, or are announced unilaterally at the UN to score political points, or seen as further eroding Treaty rights, or walking back previous commitments, it’s not surprising they’re rejected by iwi. That’s what just happened to the latest Government offer for a Kermadecs Ocean Sanctuary—a complex story we explore. But that isn’t the end of the conversation. It can’t be. There is overwhelming evidence that our oceans are in serious decline, that environmental disasters disproportionately affect indigenous communities, and that marine protection works—scientifically. What’s needed is to figure out how it can work culturally, and be co-designed in a way that doesn’t further dispossess indigenous peoples. From what we can understand from the outside, the iwi representatives who rejected the Crown’s Kermadecs proposal didn’t see it as an ending either. There was general support for marine protection, and another hui is in the works to begin figuring out what that might look like, starting from Māori first principles. We can only guess at some of the ideas that will be on the table, but they could include concepts of Papatūānuku or Tangaroa rather than ‘the environment’. It could include restraining fishing using time-based, reviewable rāhui rather than perpetual closures, or buying out and retiring quota to honour the Fisheries Settlement. It could mean prioritising rangatiratanga and connection to place, customary harvesting, or whānau involvement in monitoring and ranger jobs. It could involve scientific research and partnerships, and make use of decades of hard-won knowledge about what’s worked elsewhere—including the fact that protected areas boost overall fish stocks and catch rates. Whatever form this takes, it has to enhance the mana of our oceans, and all peoples. It also has to be done urgently. While no new rāhui or protected areas are implemented, oceans remain in freefall. We hope the Māori fisheries representatives who gathered in Wellington in June use their rangatiratanga to drive this forward, take on the best science, and figure it out.

Editorial

Teen magazine

What would lockdown have been like when you were a teen? In trying to fathom the gap between today’s adolescents and all who have gone before, it’s a useful thought experiment. For me, a Hawke’s Bay teen in the late 90s, I suspect a lockdown would have been extremely chill. Lots of books and baking and runs around the orchard with our dog. I guess there would have been homework? Posted-out worksheets or something? But no smartphone, no TikTok or Instagram or chaotic class Zooms, or streamed TV to hand 24/7. My brothers and I would have fought over the landline, made eel traps and played cricket on the lawn. I’d have spent a lot of afternoons up trees. Also: COVID would have been pretty much the only hard thing we had to deal with. I don’t think lockdown circa 2020/2021 felt like that for our kids, or for many teens in New Zealand. Our young people are now part of the pressure cooker. They exist in this busy, uncertain world with us—but they’re also online, and in that world the sun never sets. Lockdown at our place, in Auckland with two working parents and two young kids, meant that every moment from 5am was parcelled out, consumed by either childcare or work. My husband and I were both working in digital journalism so even when we weren’t technically on shift we were still responding to Slack messages and tweets. There was no way around it and no way to hide it from the kids. By necessity, they had their own screens: the TV in the lounge, streaming endless Bluey and Octonauts while I tapped away on the laptop beside them. The iPad stuffed with e-books and primary-school maths programs. We got outside when we could. Hunted for fungi, walked endlessly around the block, planted silverbeet. But on the whole it sucked, for everyone. I still worry about what those months did to our kids—and the fact that their future will likely be full of similar, extraordinarily anxious times. What will the world be like in 10 years, 15, 20? My three-year-old is obsessed with babies. She chatters with happy certainty about having a real one of her own. She will teach her baby to make kawakawa tea, to swim at the beach, turn over stones to look for pinchy crabs. It has recently become an act of self-preservation to smile and slam a door on the thoughts that bloom when she talks like this. Our parents can’t help us parent in this moment. Nothing they faced compares. Their experience of thinking about their kids’ futures is so far removed from our own that sometimes when I broach the topic, I come away feeling slightly unhinged. But then another news story drops into my feed: an Antarctic ice shelf sets melt records. Millions of dead fish clog an Australian river. This morning, economists updated their predictions of recession—it will be twice as deep as first thought. In grappling with all this, I think it’s helpful to acknowledge that the gap between teens and adults today is more like a gulf, a parallel universe—in a world in flux every adolescence, from now on, will be profoundly out of whack with our own. It already is. Yet we never hear from teenagers—they exist on different platforms, they don’t get to vote, they’re often ignored in data collection, and too often what they say in public is misunderstood or disregarded. So this edition of New Zealand Geographic is a special one. With funding from NZ On Air, we’ve spent nearly a year documenting nine teenagers from all around Aotearoa. We want to know what the world looks like from their perspective. What it feels like. How they cope. This project is not about chronicling the quirks of youth or the evils of screens, or how to be a better parent. There is no tutting or throwing-up of hands. It is simply an exercise in listening. If you’re a teen reading this magazine, we hope you see something of yourself in it.

Editorial

To higher ground

It’s 8pm in Auckland on February 13 and Cyclone Gabrielle is winding up. Over the hill from us families are being evacuated—the old-man pines that hold the cliffs up are falling. We’re fine, but it’s weird. Sirens in the background. I’m getting up every two minutes to check the trampoline, the willow, the kids. During lockdown, if the kids or I were feeling anxious, we’d head for the weedy bush gully at the bottom of our street. There’s a bridge to drop sticks off, dragonflies. The kids discovered a cluster of baby ponga and came back each day to watch the fronds unfurl. When we found a ruru dead on the road, we carried it to that special spot by the stream, and buried it. The gully was squashed under a slip in the floods that came a fortnight ago. This is what climate change feels like to me: a convergence of new and startling happenings, once-in-a-lifespan events that now shunt into one another and overlap, a state of ambient emergency. And hunger, if you’re a rockhopper penguin on the Antipodes. “We should use the list of NZ’s biggest climate polluters to rename this year’s climate disasters,” someone tweeted the other day, snapshotting a top-10 chart compiled by the Environmental Protection Authority. Cyclone Fonterra? Cyclone Z Energy? As the American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said in a speech at Princeton University last year: “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else... A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes who is actually responsible for climate chaos.” It’s not individuals making bad choices as consumers, Solnit argues. It’s the fossil fuel industry and the fact that, given the stakes, there are still bad choices available. I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. Why not demand change on both fronts? We should expect the people who can make sustainable choices to do so—to go solar, take the bus, cut back on meat and milkshakes. At the same time, we should push the system to change, fast—true systemic change is not a pipe dream. Look at cigarette smoking, seatbelts, smacking kids, free-range eggs, plastic shopping bags. (Aucklanders, one way to effect real change is to make a submission, this March, on Auckland Council’s 2023/24 annual budget proposals—Search ‘AK Have Your Say’). Meanwhile, we need to wrap our arms around the people whose choices are limited and those who, like our baby ponga, face being hammered and hammered again. Too often, these two groups overlap. The RSE orchard workers left stranded on their rooftops for 10 hours out the back of Taradale. The people of Rānui, west Auckland, who dragged their sodden couches and carpets out to the kerb just in time to catch the next wallop of weather. Wairoa. Gisborne. Northland. Muriwai. And most of all, everywhere: our kids. As the wind picked up tonight, my eldest asked for a bedtime story, for the first time in months. He chose one called Kōwhai and the Giants, about a Lorax-like little girl desperate to save New Zealand’s trees. “I cannot do it alone,” says Kōwhai. “And when I speak, my voice is not heard.” He lay awake for a long time after that.

Editorial

Grappling with the octopus

This year, the book that won New Zealand’s richest literary prize, the $60,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, was in fact two stories woven together. It’s called Kurangaituku. One cover is light. The other is dark. You choose which side to start reading from but either way, they meet in the middle. Here’s the really cool thing: this new sort of novel, this hybrid, is about a hybrid, too: Kurangaituku, the magnificent, terrible bird-woman much maligned by boiled-down versions of a pūrākau, legend. (She ends up cooked in a thermal pool by brave warrior Hatupatu.) Whiti Hereaka spent 10 years enthralled by Kura, writing and rewriting a richer version of the story. She dressed as the bird-woman herself for the award ceremony—wicked neon and black makeup, ostrich-feather wings. A champion of hybrids. Judging by Bill Morris’s story, they could do with one. Some of the most pressing science stories today seem simple but turn out to be, like Kura’s, a tangle of perspectives and interests. Trying to pin them down is like grappling with an octopus. Kate Evans was up against one of these when she decided to write about the future of trawling. It’s not nearly as simple as “we should just stop”. But we can’t keep decimating the seafloor, either—not least because, as we’re learning, trawling messes with the ocean’s carbon cycle. If Hereaka’s a champion of hybrids, Karl Warr is a champion of our seas. He trawls, but on a small scale, and he winces every time. He’s also deeply sceptical of the new net set-up touted by Big Fishing as the sustainable way forward. So he’s come up with his own—and it seems to be working better. How does this story end? Cliffhanger: Warr needs an injection of funding and support to progress his project. Meanwhile, the fishing industry, with millions of public dollars in tow, is pressing on with incremental changes to its own net. “The tūī sings a different song to that of the kākā,” Hereaka writes in Kurangaituku. “But both sing the truth.” It’s not true, though, that there are two sides to every story. Sometimes there is one clear and obvious reality and to pretend otherwise is to obfuscate. This is why most journalists no longer give precious newsprint or airtime to climate-change deniers. It’s why New Zealand Geographic makes no bones about issues such as ecological collapse in the Hauraki Gulf, and the urgent need to protect the crayfish that could bring things back into balance. In October, we ventured out of the fourth estate and into the High Court as part of a group arguing that a ministerial decision about crayfish quota in Northland was based on advice that was “inaccurate, misleading, and unsupported by peer-reviewed and published literature”. We won. Ten years ago, I’d have fretted about journalistic ethics—we’re meant to stand on the sidelines, not actually get things done—but now I’m just very proud to work here, and relieved that good science still matters. As do our stories.

Editorial

Give me space

Fifteen years ago, I reported on a family who had lived off the grid for decades. As a young, idealistic couple, the parents had set up on a 100-hectare block of bush north of Auckland. They made their first home out of nīkau fronds and mattresses out of raupō and had 10 children, homeschooling them all. They got by on goats and sacks of sugar and rice. The woman, Inge, knitted all their clothes. They shunned plastic, electricity, running hot water, contraception, and medical care. When I entered their property, I was met by the teenaged boys carrying .22 rifles. The little kids were splashing in the creek, riding on their big sisters’ backs, while Inge stirred peach jam over an open fire. The dad—the one who’d driven this lifestyle—had died the year before. After seven years of pain, he had hitchhiked to hospital, accompanied by Inge. He was riddled with so many tumours that doctors couldn’t tell where the cancer had started. “He had a lump as big as a passionfruit in his thigh,” Inge told me. “He must have been in a horrific sort of pain. It just ate him up.” We headlined the piece, which appeared in the Herald on Sunday, “Living the good life”. Inge was proud of her kids and her lot, and happy. She’d built a safe space, and spent 35 years utterly immersed in it. Is that a good life? Maybe. But I thought of Inge often during Auckland’s last, long lockdown, and wondered how she’d endured the isolation. The grind. The preppers (survivalists, preparing for disasters of various stripes) in Tom Doig’s feature on page 38 would likely argue they’re just being pragmatic in trying to build a safe space to weather whatever collapse—and ensuing grind—may come. Certainly there’s an appealing primal logic to it: we should all have the basics of life covered, just in case. But I wonder whether there’s also self-soothing in play. We all seek to control what we can, especially when we’re a bit freaked—I pack and repack my bags whenever I have to fly. Shuffling through the photo options for this issue, I came across a shot of shelves piled neatly with gear, and thought: that’s a psyche trying desperately to stay cool. And good on them. It’s increasingly tempting to follow suit, especially after the past couple of years. There are lessons to be learned, too, from our Viewfinder feature on page 10. Trans women of colour are a group with more reason than most to be anxious. They face discrimination and physical danger, and it starts young: New Zealand statistics show being transgender means kids are five times more likely to be bullied at school. The Counting Ourselves survey, which started in 2018, showed this group are also much more likely to be sexually abused. Further, it found an alarming 79 per cent of trans and non-binary (those who identify as neither male nor female) people in New Zealand have seriously contemplated suicide, and two out of five had self-harmed in the previous year. It’s the ballroom community’s response to fear and uncertainty that I find the most inspiring: instead of retreating, this group of femme queens worked together and built themselves a safe and enduring space in society. Walk through the doors of a vogue ball and you enter a bunker where outside rules do not apply: here, queerness is a badge of honour. Being trans makes you top of the heap. In an increasingly crowded, frenetic world, perhaps the moral here is simply that we need to learn to give each other space. Like Nelson’s cave spiders hiding in the velvet dark, like Inge and her family, like the preppers and the femme queens, we’re all wired differently. We need room to move, grow and follow the path we choose—it’s the great privilege of living in Aotearoa.

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