Our priceless natural heritage

By the late 1960s, there was growing awareness that human activity was inflicting significant damage on the natural environment, and the pace was accelerating in the name of ‘progress’. Prevailing beliefs – that nature was a resource to be exploited for human development, rivers should be dammed to generate electricity and native bush should be felled for timber or cleared to enable mining or pastoral farming – began to be questioned.  

In 1969, the Save Manapōuri campaign heralded ‘environmentalism’ in New Zealand. The campaign, to prevent Lake Manapōuri being raised by up to 30 m to provide electricity for an aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point, attracted huge support. In 1970, the Save Manapouri petition, signed by almost 10% of the New Zealand population (the largest petition yet) was presented to Parliament.

The successful campaign was led by older people, respected members of the establishment who had previously worked through the ‘proper’ channels to draw the Government’s attention to environmental issues and have policies and practices adopted to protect the environment.

By the early 1970s, direct action to protect the natural environment – environmental activism – was the name of the game. ‘Clutha Rescue’, campaigning to prevent Mata-Au (Clutha) river from being dammed, set up a camp site and information centre that was visited by 15,000 people over seven weeks.

Much environmental activism focused on protecting the remaining native forests. By the 1970s, around two thirds of all original forest was gone, and vast tracts at low altitudes on easy, fertile land were already decimated. What forests remained, especially those at risk of logging, were becoming recognised as a priceless natural heritage to be protected.

In 1971, the Forest Service proposed to protect only 60,700 ha of the 400,000 ha of lowland forest under its control in Nelson, Westland and Southland, and replace some 173,205 ha with radiata pine. About one tenth of all remaining South Island native forest would be logged. To oppose this, the Beech Forest Action Committee was formed in Auckland in 1973.

With native forests in many other locations also under threat of logging, the Committee drafted the Maruia Declaration. It stated emphatically: ‘The exploitation of our country’s native forests has gone too far’; ‘The protection of what remains of these forests is more important to us than further additions to our material affluence gained at their expense’;  ‘Native forests, wherever they remain, need recognition and protection in law’; ‘The wholesale burning of indigenous forests and wildlife has no place in a civilized country’; ‘The logging of virgin forests should be phased out by 1978’. The Maruia Declaration was launched in July 1975 and presented to Parliament as a 340,000-signature petition two years later.

Following the Nelson/Westland/Southland beech forest campaign, there were three decades of campaigning to protect forests at Pureora, Ōkārito, Paparoa, Whirinaki and Charleston.  In 1978, at Pureora, protesters led by Stephen King hoisted themselves onto platforms in the trees in the remnant podocarp forest. Logging was forced to stop and was eventually abandoned.

The environmental campaigns of the 1970s saw ‘Police [attend] clashes on roads, in forests and in public halls. Young women protest leaders faced up to all-male, misogynistic state officials and company executives. Corporates and Cabinet ministers hid behind secrecy and spin, while some in the environmental movement resorted to sitting in trees, or spying and subterfuge, taking jobs in private companies and government departments to steal confidential reports or convert the establishment from inside.’ (Paul Bensemman, Fight for the Forests, Potton & Burton, 2018)

What remains of our priceless natural heritage, and today’s environmentalism, owes much to these protesters.