Letter From New Zealand #5

My friend Peter Huck, journalist and windswept adventurer, recently moved away from Los Angeles with his other half, the lovely Barbara Drake, to beautiful New Zealand. They are living in a tiny apartment in Auckland with a very, very small kitchen. Since their excellent and mostly vegetarian dinner parties were such a feature of my social life here, and sadly missed, I asked Peter to think about writing a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the fifth letter.

The drought has broken. The weather map is dominated by "squally thunderstorms," near tropical downpours that drown speech, accompanied by violent wind gusts. In between cloudbursts the weather is surprisingly warm, good news for our nascent Coromandel rainforest: water plus warmth means excellent plant growth, especially as our ten-month old natives have spent the dry summer getting their roots down. It helped that the showers were preceded by "gardener's rain," steady, gentle precipitation that made the soil moist so that subsequent water didn't just run off.

Streams have reappeared, tricking through nurseries of tiny, vividly green native plants nurtured amid dead tree fern fronds in the crepuscular light beneath the canopy. Three weeks from the shortest day, the epic skies above Two Caravan Hill are a racing pageant of blue skies and massive cloud formations as squalls sweep in from the Tasman Sea.

Periodically, they engulf the steep, forested slopes of Coromandel Range, which looms to our east. Right behind us is the Tokotea Kapanaga block, headwaters of Driving Creek, our water source all summer. Charles Ring found gold there in 1852 and now the government wants more, fingering the block as a possible bonanza and triggering growing opposition both in New Zealand and abroad. Last week over 33,000 public submissions were handed into Parliament. One, from London Zoo, expressed concern about Archey's frog. The Zoological Society of London describes this rare creature from the dinosaur era, as "the most evolutionary distinct and globally endangered amphibian on the planet.”

Whether Archey’s frog – plus Hochstetter’s frog and the brown kiwi, both found in the range - would survive renewed mining in Coromandel, still recovering from the 19th century onslaught, is moot. New Zealand’s government continues to play its cards close to its chest. Originally, 467,000 hectares [1.15 million acres] of Schedule 4 conservation land were tabled as potential mining prospects. This shrank to 7000 hectares, then 3,500. The public outcry suggests the government has miscalculated and may seek a compromise.

Curiously, the US mining giant Newmont, which runs the Martha open pit gold mine at Waihi, sent in a submission opposing further mining on Schedule 4 land in the Coromandel - at least for now. Newmont’s operations include Kalgoorlie’s “Super Pit,” a vast 3.6km long by 1.6km wide and 650m deep open-cut gold mine in Western Australia.

The mining question is overlapping sniping about New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme, due to take effect in July. Critics blast the EMS, which is meant to reduce emissions 10-20% below 1990 levels by 2020, as either ineffective - agriculture, the country's biggest export earner and a major emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas, does not fully enter the scheme until 2015 - or a craven surrender to environmentalists. New Zealand projects a schizophrenic attitude towards climate change, prepared to enact the EMS even as it explores marine oil and gas deposits, the very fossil fuels that feed climate change.

Maybe the Gulf of Mexico spill, and US moves towards a moratorium on more off-shore drilling, given its inability to halt the environmental catastrophe, will dampen such efforts, although New Zealand has awarded an exploration permit to the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, infamous for a 2001 disaster when the world’s biggest floating oil platform sank in 1,300 metres off Brazil, killing nine.  Any spill off the North Island’s East coast in the Raukumara Basin exploration area, which dives to 3,000 metres [BP’s well is at 1,500 metres], could prove far worse.


Nonetheless, 19th century extractive impulses - when New Zealand was plundered for whales, seals, timber, gold and finally land, sometimes heavily eroded by farming – linger even as sustainable economies emerge, pace the fishing industry’s creation of a business model with a legal framework in which fish are treated as a finite resource.

New Zealand is a maritime nation. Besides determining much of our weather and sustaining commercial fishing, it provides the stage for another heated environmental debate, as New Zealand takes what feels like a U-turn on whaling. These beasts are a relatively common sight here. Standing on the verandah of a home near Papaaroha on Sunday, looking west across a sparkling Hauraki Gulf towards Motuwi, part of a small offshore archipelago, on a crystal clear early winter’s day, I watched a solitary orca, distinguished by its tall dorsal fin, repeatedly surface and dive. Migratory humpbacks also frequent the gulf, which has a resident population of Bryde’s whales and numerous dolphin pods.

For the past generation New Zealand has garnered international respect with its anti-whaling stance and efforts to stop Japan’s farcical “scientific” whaling program. More recently New Zealand, in line with the International Whaling Commission, has softened its stance, suggesting Japan phase out whaling, a controversial compromise with critics insisting this legitimises whaling.

Down in the Southern Ocean the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society harasses Japanese whalers, a dangerous strategy that saw the trimaran Ady Gill sunk by a whaler in January. Now the Ady Gil’s skipper, kiwi activist Peter Bethune, who boarded the Shonan Maru 2 to present a $3 million bill for his wrecked vessel, is on trial in Tokyo. He faces 15 years in jail. The New Zealand government, publicly at least, has adopted a hands-off approach to the trial. Across the ditch, Australia calls Japanese charges “bogus,” even as Canberra take Japans to the International Court of Justice for its continued whaling. New Zealand has said it may join the legal action if diplomatic efforts, via the IWC, fail.  Whether direct action or New Zealand’s pragmatic approach [and it is arguable if Japan’s subsidised fleet is economically viable] will prevail is anyone’s guess.

Back in the caravan we’re dealing with a far smaller, but very tenacious, animal, a rat that has moved in for the winter. Even as we try to banish this creature, closing cracks that appeared when we hoisted our ancient vehicle off its wheels onto wooden blocks, this insouciant rat has held its ground, gobbling poison to no apparent effect and lifting cheese – organic naturally - from, un-sprung, traps. We’re pondering whether to loan a terrier or a cat.

©2010 Peter Huck