Political parties threatening to pare back the conservation estate, even by 'bits and bobs,' do so at their electoral peril

By Chris Trotter*

Looking back I wish I had done a better job. Back in the days when Shane Jones was a Labour Party Cabinet Minister, I was minding my own business between sessions at a Labour Party conference, when the man himself approached me for an explanation. He wanted to know what made the Greens tick – why they are as they are.

I did my best.

Nature was a living presence for most Greens, I opined, something older and ultimately more significant than another of the millions of species that have appeared and disappeared from the planet’s face – no matter how clever and powerful the species in question, homo sapiens, might be.

Grasp that central proposition, I said, and you will understand everything that follows in terms of Green Party policy.

In recalling this incident from the distance of 20 years, I suspect I am offering something considerably more coherent than poor Shane Jones received from me on the day. Certainly, he was in no way convinced by my reply. Indeed, he stared at me quizzically for a few moments and then vouchsafed that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. With a shake of his head he disappeared back into the milling crowd of delegates.

Jones’s incomprehension of the Greens’ motivations continues to this day. For the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries, Associate Minister of Finance, and Associate Minister of Energy in Christopher Luxon’s Coalition Government, the Green Party’s political stance remains irresponsibly insubstantial.

“Ideological puff dragons” is the Deputy-Leader of NZ First’s latest description of his Green foes. It’s an apt metaphor, neatly capturing Jones’s disdain for a movement which, to his eyes at least, is all puff and no huff. 

Jones has made himself the champion of a world view that the Greens and just about every other member of the environmental movement repudiates with extreme prejudice. Hardly surprising, one might observe, when the man poses proudly in the gigantic bucket of a massive earth (ore?) moving machine, and has been known to march down provincial streets bellowing the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s immortal double entendre: “Drill, baby, drill!”

It’s a world view that goes back a long way in this country. Not only can the extractive principle at its core be traced to the very beginnings of New Zealand’s colonial history, but it was also present when the first waka landed here in the Fourteenth Century.

The Polynesian seafarers who jumped onto the sand at the Wairau’s mouth and surveyed the surrounding flora and fauna could scarcely have believed their luck. Here was space and resources in unprecedented abundance. Here, too, was ambulatory meat so utterly unfamiliar with human-beings that it would walk up to them in innocent curiosity – and be clubbed to death.

Vast native forests in the South Island were torched by these ruthlessly extractive newcomers – becoming the Central Otago tussock country made famous by Peter Jackson in his Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.

Conservationists the Māori most emphatically were not, as the Moa and the Haast Eagle would no doubt testify – had they not been driven to extinction.

Neither were my own ancestors. They settled large tracts of coastal and central Otago land between 1840 and 1900. Fire was their friend, too, as ancient stands of trees which had somehow survived the Moa-hunting Māori were laid waste by the dour efficiency of Lowland Scots.

It is easy for all those nature-loving urban-dwellers determined to “speak for the trees” to overlook the archaeological and historical fact that two thriving and highly creative cultures were constructed in these islands upon a foundation of exploitative extraction.

The Māori began the process and the Pakeha finished it. In the case of settlers from the British Isles, that exploitation and extraction was undertaken with all the ruthless efficiency and thoroughness for which the Victorian Age’s technologically-empowered purveyors of “progress” were in/famous.

Without all that exploitative extraction, however, the nation of New Zealand would not exist. This developmental miracle at the bottom of the world, with its ports and cities, roads and railways, farms and factories, dams and pylons, schools, hospitals, and universities, was born out of the entrails of Mother Earth. It was her desecration that made the peoples of New Zealand: from the destruction of the Moa’s forest habitat to the hydro-electric dams spanning her river-valleys.

And it was not made easily. There was blood among the ashes, bones in the mineshafts. My Mother’s father lost an arm digging coal out of his North Otago farm during the Great Depression. It was that sort of risk and effort that kept the children of hard-put farmers, and the nation, fed.

Greens weren’t created out of humanity’s heroic era of exertion, they are the product of a post-scarcity civilisation whose children sit at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Into their hands all manner of good things, from the contraceptive pill to the cellphone, have flowed upwards. And all the while, as these children of abundance contemplate and complain about the “soullessness” of their societies, the children of necessity, in the manner of the Greens’ own forebears, are toiling thanklessly in the extractive industries of Africa, Asia and South America. Working towards the day when their own children will be rich enough to weep over Nature’s wounds.

For those who cannot shake an awareness of how this ingenious world was made, the shock and horror prompted by the idea that if valuable resources are discovered in or under New Zealand’s vast conservation estate, then they should be extracted and exploited, is infuriating.

New Zealand’s prosperity has always depended on the gifts which Nature bestows: a temperate climate; plentiful rainfall; swift-flowing rivers; deposits of gold and coal. To forbid the exploitation of resources that are yet to be discovered, and all in the name of conservation, strikes Shane Jones and his supporters as self-defeating in the extreme.

And yet, as recent events have proved, the very possibility of resurrecting in the Twenty-First Century the extractive and exploitative development models that shaped the Nineteenth is politically unacceptable to the voters of metropolitan New Zealand.

Though only a relative handful of these voters ever actually venture forth into their country’s wild areas, the option of putting on some tramping boots, throwing a pack over their shoulders, and immersing themselves in the Conservation Estate’s spiritual hot-tub, must forever remain a live possibility. Political parties threatening to pare away that option, even by “bits and bobs,” do so at their electoral peril.

The Book of Genesis depicts the Almighty blessing Adam and Eve and instructing them to: “‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on earth.’”

What I should have explained to Shane Jones all those years ago is that, for the Greens, it’s the other way round.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.