For how much longer will we have our bedrock natural inheritance, wonder two new books.
Wild Heart is a collection of 17 pieces traversing the concept of the Kiwi wilderness, past and present, and how it might evolve and survive. The writers are as varied a bunch as the outback itself and provide views to match, with a full-spectrum disregard for consensus or uniformity of approach.
The wilderness, it emerges, is above all a personal construct. Most commonly, it implies remoteness, but even this aspect is negotiable. Robin McNeil holds that some people “may enjoy a wilderness experience simply by driving along the Milford Road”. Other essayists reject such degeneracy, demanding vast expanses of isolation and the absence of all things human. But even Richard Reeve, as spartan a wilderness man as any, is willing to allow that when things get grim the specifications may change, and an authentic experience may be had by anyone “trapped on the far side of a Fiordland river, a mere six kilometres from a road”.
Jacinta Ruru, advancing a somewhat idiosyncratic “Maori viewpoint”, sweeps all such niceties aside. Wilderness, to her, is entirely a colonial construct with “little place in the twenty-first century”, and designated wilderness areas are merely “walled gardens” from which Maori have been denied the harvest of indigenous fauna and flora. These effete preserves, she maintains, are incompatible with the Treaty.
With the egregious exception of Ruru, all other contributors to Wild Heart, whatever their differences, accept the underlying premise of wild nature as a vital and permanent component of any world worth living in that humans might care to imagine. Civilisation itself may require the survival of wilderness, as an antidote, a spiritual retreat, a last reservoir of quiet and solitude.
New Zealand, so recently settled, still retains a lot of wild country, but we’re losing it fast to cheap travel, better roads and mass tourism, a process assisted, however ironically, by the schizoid ministrations of the Department of Conservation. With further economic growth, these agencies must continue to eat into the back country, until, as Owen Marshall conjectures, “wilderness will become a luxury”. Wild Heart should clarify and enrich the way we think about a vital component of the Kiwi identity.
Sam Mahon’s Franzi & The Great Terrain Robbery is not concerned specifically with wilderness, but addresses the same perennial human motivations that threaten the existence of all things still unexploited. Mahon’s focus lies east of the Alps, in lands long settled yet still comprising a bedrock natural inheritance. We are losing this now, says Mahon, to an organised cabal of corporate farmers and major landowners. The pastoral uplands are shifting from public to private hands, and access to the carved-up residual estate is uncertain.
This vast dispossession has happened with astonishing speed. In one generation, the great braided rivers have been reduced and polluted – their water appropriated (with due legal process) by dairy-farming irrigators. Yet even this rate of rendition has not satisfied the looters, who, with the complicity of central government, are now facilitating the completion of their heist by a hijack of democracy in Canterbury.
The futility of due process, of the normal mechanisms of consultation and compromise, is a familiar complaint among ordinary folk caught up in the snarls of so-called “development”. The dice are loaded, and the exploiters invariably win. Mahon shows how this has come about and, in chapters packed with anecdote and acute observation, reveals the casual, day-to-day corruption that permeates a significant sector of local government.
What has been happening in Canterbury is relevant to all of New Zealand, because the dairy industry foresees no limits to its expansion. The disputed factor will be publicly owned water – and, as Mahon so cogently alerts us, the battle for that water is likely to be dirty indeed.
WILD HEART: THE POSSIBILITY OF WILDERNESS IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve (Otago, $45); FRANZI & THE GREAT TERRAIN ROBBERY: THE DISINHERITANCE OF OUR CHILDREN, by Sam Mahon (Flying Brick, $30, available from www.thegreatterrainrobbery.com and selected bookstores).
Dave Witherow is a Southland environmentalist.