For a while now, the third floor at Te Papa has hosted an exhibition titled “Blood Earth Fire — The Transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand“. The exhibition looks at the effects that human settlement has had on New Zealand over time, and I think it’s one of the most insightful exhibitions I’ve seen. The whole thing is fascinating, but the small part I find most telling every time I visit is a display which shows three maps of New Zealand, side by side.
The first map shows native forest cover throughout New Zealand before humans arrived, which is effectively everywhere except for certain alpine locations where trees won’t grow. The second map displays native forest after Maori settlement, but before Europeans arrived, at which point several large areas of native forest had been cleared. The third map shows the cover of native forest as it is today, by which time the vast majority of the country had been cleared, leaving behind a few delicate islands of native forest. Most of what’s left surrounds mountain ranges, and wasn’t cleared due to the difficulty of farming there anyway. The display very effectively expresses just how much of New Zealand’s original environment has been destroyed to make way for human settlement. It wasn’t only when Europeans arrived in the 19th century, although the European settlement had a major impact.
The rest of this post documents a collection of thoughts that I’ve had over the last few years about the state of conservation in New Zealand. It’s a fairly wide topic and I’m not really sure where it’s going, but I’ll see how things go in writing it down.