terra incognita...second leg

The 'research roadie' so far has been through places I am well familiar with. Many a more minor road trip and camping extravaganza has taken place in the Far North and twelve great years were spent in the 'super' city of Auckland. The next leg of the journey is 54 days of going through areas I am almost completely unfamiliar with, and starts tomorrow.

The traverse of the west coast of the north island will precede a week in the windy city....and a ferry ride will then take me to the mainland in time for next month. Two weeks in the top of the south island will introduce me to one of the wine-making capitals of the world and all that that entails. A short deviation to Farewell Spit (predictable for a twitcher) is planned before heading south.

The bottom of the south promises the wildest of the weather and terrain and it's my hope to take a teensy break to beautiful Stewart Island. Such a protracted programme of field work is bound to see me earn a day or two away from the computer surely...! Its a huge programme and I only avoid fretting by thinking about it one region at a time.

Epic....here goes....

(image from www.teara.govt.nz)

...to save an ailing farm....

I was playing the part of the tumbleweed on the west coast today. Wandering high above the volatile shoreline along the beautful Te Henga walkway, I was reviewing matters related to development on coastal pasture. Scores of related discussions and case law revolve around the retention of 'rural coastal character'.

It occured to me today that the efforts we go to to preserve such character might just beg a deeper inquiry. Why are we pouring resources into maintaining the 'natural' look of degraded pasture atop extremely exposed shore-lines when it's anything but natural?

When New Zealand was discovered it wasn't marvelled for it's erosion-prone grassed slopes....it's haggard vistas of windswept gorse....nor it's many ailing fencelines. It was marvelled for its outstanding coastal vegetation, clinging resolutely to wild cliffs. It was marvelled for the fact that 40% of the worlds seabirds made their home there and left every year, always returning to their southern paradise. And marvelled still further for many beaches backed by towering dune systems.

And this wasn't thousands of years ago. The pastoral landscape has been a relatively new concept. We spent the past barely 200 years scuttling about with brushcutters and giant saws, pausing only to look at the great works of Constable for inspiration and technical reference. It is a mere blip in our natural history and the costly and unmoving troops marching to retain said degraded pasture, forsaking all other land uses (in this case including indigenous revegetation!)seem to be remiss in the way they direct their energies.

There is a time and place for retention of rural landscapes, but it would seem from my travels that said landscape (degraded, gorse cloaked pasture) seems to occupy a heck of a lot of our land area and its protection a little too much of our time...and perhaps it's value might be somewhat overstated...just putting it out there....

...you never suspect the little one....

I was sitting in the sun near an estuary area today, reviewing some notes before going on to a large industrial site. Despite the sudden cool of Auckland in the past few days, a few of the more reslient mosquitoes around these parts were out in force.

As the odd one zeroed in on my ankles and arms, I was reminded of a poem by Robert Frost. I think it was called 'A Considerable Mite'. It gave rare attention to the activities of a speck of a buzzing insect of some description. I remember thinking the teensy subject of the poem was really rather valiant despite it's demonstrable diminutive stature. Busy in it's toils (which in my case seemed to revolve fairly exclusively around biting me)you had to hand it to it. Providing 'it' was equally microscopic so as not to be an unreasonable burden.

Bitten into departure, I trudged off to the site to be met with typically affable environmental manager. Driving around the site, the extent of operations was quite a contrast to my own personal experience of (mostly) small-site environmental compliance. The detailed site management characteristics provided for some measure of comfort that the onsite natural features had some security of existence, some with management regimes (and resources most likely) superior to our own manager of our Crown conservation estate.

Experts at the helm, the levels of compliance with requirements and extent of ancillary contributions to conservation outcomes are often substantial. But the smaller sites might just be where our problem is nationally. The small scale matters that regularly chip away at our biodiversity...piece by piece....often well under thresholds for needing permission to do so too....whittling away our natural heritage entirely under the radar. I think that may just present the greatest conservation challenge for us yet....

places to flap arms

Auckland...in the wake of the (generally successful and positive) election outcomes is a nice place to be. Amongst the familiar, the challenge is to remember I'm here on field work and no to skylark as is typical when I invade these parts. Have a full programme of site visits to do over the next few days and hope I can cram them all in to the time! Add to that a lecture to deliver that needs to make some sense realistically, and the familiar anxiety is back.

PhDs are like babies....when they're born they're cute...and then stuff starts happening that sometimes makes you wonder why evolution never had a mechanism akin to a pause button or a robust returns policy/escape clause. But no matter what they are inevitably a reflection of you. The fluctations of energy and confidence are all part of the package, but they seem a lot more important when you, a car and three tons of field gear are sitting on a beach contemplating the data collection itself.

The volume of information I'm collecting on all the case studies is pretty decent and it's hard to imagine that I'll not leave at least some stones unturned. The comfort of the past few days has been that I can come back to all these places fairly easily if I do so. As the time wears on however, the location becomes more and more remote from my base and the 'no turning back' concept becomes a little more important.

It's all part of the journey I think. But at least I get to fret on the beaches of the far north....on kauri trails through Puketi forest....on coastal headlands in Pakiri....and amongst colourful travelling folk in friendly hostels... Worse places to panic and flap your arms....

muppets....the bad kind

My time in sunny Northland draws to a close tomorrow, and I trip my way down the coast via some case study sites to the rather more familiar territory of Auckland. The driving, map-checking, filling in forms has all become routine now and I for once can claim to be up to date with much-loathed paperwork (shock horror). Tomorrow is a momentous day however, for more than just the fact that I go from birthplace to what is my true hometown of North Shore City.

Tomorrow marks the end of local body elections...votes are due at midday at your local library (vote...some people would die for that right) and the new mayor/councillors of all the districts and the new 'super' city of Auckland will become known. Some will be no surprise, while others will no doubt engender community chants and hollers alike.

The past few days have, among many other things, illustrated to me the great importance of having a 'no-muppet' rule in local body politics. They really do have enormous control over our daily lives...illustrated in one particular instance where an un-named incumbant politician committed lock, stock and two smoking bean-counters to a large infrastructure project. The finances, the practical resource capacity and the consent/appreciation of iwi were noticeably absent...but on he went, missing only a kilt and a sword.

The outcome was, without going in to al that much detail, that precious little environmental mitigation could be demanded from the orchestrator of the actual project. The costs and benefits barely fell even, and any mention of offsetting of the potentially serious adverse environmental and cultural effects fell on deaf ears. The gateway tests of the relevant legislation somewhat overthrown by a dictatorial attitude and a pocket full of clipped responses.

No muppets rule...jolly good idea methinks...

a perpetual notion

I've often thought that the commitment to taking a stand for nature must be about the most noble thing you can do. This is because not only are you providing a voice for something which cannot speak for itself but, unlike human assistance, there is no prospect of it ever having a voice...so the commitment is perpetual. Whether or not that viewpoint sticks with the mainstream is besides the point I guess, but it makes sense in my head.

It did strike me as being of particular consequence these past two days. Clocking 12 hours in the council file room damn near drove me bananas, so I was very glad to be out on the road, enjoying the supreme Far North weather and chatting to actual people instead of mumbling discontentedly at chaotic files. I visited four large sites, subdivisions of coastal land which would appear to be the development style of choice in these parts.

The one thing they all had in common were assets of public significance wholly contained on the site. All had sites of Maori significance, 3 removed part of public access to coastline, 3 had significant tracts of endangered species habitat (kiwi mainly) and one in particular had some seriously critical sites of early European occupation on them.

In the case of some of the sites, it would seem a shame that they had ever been let to fall in the hands of private owners anyway. Some had been demonstrably degraded as a result (at least historically) and I guess we'll never know what had been lost in the intervening decades. Overall though, I was pleased to see that, without exception, the identified sites were beautifully maintained and clearly appreciated by their current owners. Probably, it's fair to say, to a higher stand than many in Crown ownership.

So I am hesitant to openly lament their private ownership status, but one does worry over intergenerational timescales what will become of them. Land ownership will inevitably change, if not over years, then certainly over decades. Covenants and titles are perpetual in effect, but is the will and the enthusiasm of the owners named on them? I suppose my grandchildren will find out....

Musings aside, I've loved my few hectic days in the Far North....whizzing around in the windom....and tomorrow I trudge a little further south to the town of my birth, Whangarei (which may well struggle to match the beauty of the Bay of Islands) and continue this marathon research effort which is only just warming up....

how eco is my development?

Any delusions that this trip might be a loosely disguised junket were categorically dismissed today, as I spent near-on five hours reading through a single application for development. Field research is always a steep learning curve in the early days in particular and today is no different...

In the interests of professionalism I dressed as a typical bureaucrat today, and spent the day fussing in a meeting room just off the foyer to council offices. In a collared shirt and dress trousers I fitted in comfortably with the swarm of local government bods buzzing around the premises. This turned to be somewhat negative as the odd aggrieved member of the public zeroed in on me. It came to pass that them not having recieved their CCC (building completion certificate) even after the plumber made a 'special trip' to fix the 'pipe' was entirely my fault. Today I learned that if you're a research student, dress like one and plead ignorance at any and all opportunity....

I've realised that animals and humans aren't all that different...we all function and behave better when there's a reward at the end. The way my fieldwork is structured means I plow through metric tons of documents, photocopy the slivers of paper that I actually need from the mountain and then skip off into the Far North spring to find/see the actual site where it happened (in like, real life!). Am glad it's structured that way...I fear if it were the reverse it just wouldn't work. The exit from the meeting room full of teetering piles of consent documentation would be one-way and the PhD would be further away in the end than in the beginning...

The range of developments is vast....the extent to which their designers are congnizant of environmental values is equally varied...but they all have one thing in common....they are all 'ecologically sensitive'. Well, at least so the application says. A miniscule few probably really qualify for the title, but the term is so calmly thrown around. It makes me think that a statutory definition of the term is probably necessary, so that those who strip every slope of the hundred acre lot of everything down to clay, dont claim the same as those who carefully set aside significant habitat and modify the rest with appropriate kid gloves...

But helter skelter, they seem to troop all over this region...leaving swathes of coastal forest chipped up in their wake, all claiming to be the next green Trump. The only thing green in most cases is the logo of the cheesily-named and likely quite ephemeral company in charge of the whole shooting match. However, all is not lost...a few green stalwarts do exist Im pleased to note, and once I wriggle out of the file room tomorrow I get to put foot to pasture and see them for myself....