Letter From New Zealand #6

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 sixth letter.

One of the pluses that New Zealand boasts, from a carbon capture perspective, are its forests, which cover 7.5 million hectares, or almost 30% of the land area. We've spent the past week up on Two Caravan Hill, our Coromandel property, working with a local team to add a few hundred native trees to the national total, countering some of our carbon emissions as well as restoring biodiversity. After several days of heavy rain - up to 10 inches in one deluge that precipitated huge mudslides on the twisting road over the steep Coromandel Range to our east - we struck a dry window of clear, still, warm days, and bone-chillingly cold nights with temperatures near freezing, that made clamoring up steep banks (sometimes chain-sawing giant gorse plants to gain access) a little easier and less uncomfortable.

Having sourced our plants – native species that included totora, rewarewa, puriri, matai, pohutukawa, hebe, pittosporum, flax, ti kouka, akeake, karaka, kowhai, tanekaha, horoeka and nikau to give them their Maori names - from local nurseries and Project Crimson, a national group which supplies free plants, we stockpiled compost, mulch and stakes around the property and got stuck in .

The crucial thing when attempting to reconstruct a forest is where you plant. Thus certain trees – the rewarewa and totara for instance – like free-draining areas and work on slopes. Others, including many grasses – planted as part of our ongoing stream restoration - and the cabbage trees, can tolerate wet feet. Indeed, cabbage trees would seem to grow anywhere: I’ve seen them on high slopes in dry limestone country in Hawke’s Bay. Others, like karaka, handle wind, no mean consideration on Two Caravan Hill, where gusts routinely box the compass. Soft-leafed plants, pace the puriri, do best with some cover. We solicited advice from experts, walking around the landscape to site specimens, and frequently consulted books as we tried to imagine what plants would look like in three, five, ten or twenty years. Podocarps like matai, totora or kauri (which we’ll plant later) live for centuries. The trick is not to give into temptation and overplant, although in severe wind areas we massed fast growers like pittosporums to break up gusts.

This was our second large-scale planting – Barbara was in charge of the first last August, when it rained – and we’re starting to see more bird life (attracted by plants that provide food in the form of berries). Fantails fluttered around as we spread mulch, they often follow people as we disturb insects when brushing through bush; California quail burst from cover when we approached; tuis, famous for their repertoire of grunts, coughs and chortles, sang nearby, as did bellbirds and one afternoon I watched a kahu, or hawk, ghost silently over the tree fern glade beneath our bach, using its wings to back and hover, as it searched for prey. I didn’t hear the morepork this time.

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.

Letter From New Zealand #3

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. I asked Peter to write a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the third letter.

The godwits are leaving. Driving up the coast road, past Miranda, at the bottom of the Firth of Thames, on a glittering morning the other week, I chanced upon a middle-aged lady unpacking a large telescope from the trunk of her car. I offered to help and we set off across a field, fringed by mangroves lapped by a “king” high tide, towards a silver strand where a handful of people stood outside a small hide, staring at several hundred long-beaked birds, massed on a sandbar some hundred or so feet distant.

“We think the first batch will take off this weekend,” my birder friend, a volunteer at the Miranda Shorebird Centre, told me as I gazed through the scope at the bar-tailed godwits, which mostly appeared to be sleeping while standing. She described the extraordinary feats of the migratory waders – an iconic New Zealand bird most famous to non-tweeters from Robin Hyde’s 1938 novel, The Godwits Fly that each year set out from several New Zealand sites, plus others in Australasia, on an epic return flight, via the North Korean-Chinese border, to tundra nesting sites in Alaska, a 18,330-mile round trip. The Antipodeans use the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Others godwits are found in Africa and Europe.

In 2007 a bar-tailed godwit, E7, tagged with a tiny satellite transmitter, flew 7,258 miles non-stop from Alaska across the Pacific back to Miranda in just nine days. I gleaned this from one of the world’s foremost godwit authorities, Keith Woodley, when I left the hide and stopped by the Centre, just down the road apiece.

Alas, the godwits’ future is clouded by uncertainly. Industrialization in the Yellow Sea region threatens ecosystems used as a major godwit pit stop, while in NZ environmentalists fear projected plans to mine gold tailings – and possibly release buried toxins, such as mercury - in the Firth of Thames will irrevocably damage a recovering habitat that godwits and other creatures depend on for their survival. 

Mining has become an emotive issue in New Zealand and nowhere more so than in the Coromandel, as reported by a protest group. The peninsula, where gold was found close to our rainforest block in 1852 [traces were noted in the 1820s], is an historic gold boom area – we recently found a shaft, probably an air vent, on our property, which lies several hundred yards distant from a scene of frenzied 19^th century activity, described in Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The Story of the New Zealand Gold Rushes, Steven Eldred-Grigg’s lively and lavishly illustrated 2008 history, as miners followed reefs in the quartz veins - where nine prospective gold mining sites were recently identified by the government.

The National Government, which began secret talks with mining companies in 2006, two years before it was elected, has downplayed rising fears of environmental impacts, insisting that only 17,440 acres of land on the country’s conservational estate, including possibly in national parks, would be mined, although oil and gas exploration could also impact marine reserves.

This development, plus concerns about over-fishing – the government has just upped its catch quota for the endangered Southern bluefin tuna – dairy methane emissions that contribute to climate change, and a controversial scheme, discussed at International Whaling Commission talks, to allow Japan to continue its farcical “scientific” whale hunt, provided they reduce their catch over the next decade, have roused fears the nation’s “100% Pure” tourism PR will be exposed as greenwash, a line taken by the Economist. 

Fortunately, plans to factory farm dairy cows in the Mackenzie Basin appear to have been abandoned – for now anyway. Given that NZ has an international reputation for grass feed meat – >NZ Cuisine food writer Ray McVinnie describes industrialized cattle farms, such as the feed lots on I-5 north of LA, as “bovine concentration camps” - this should have been a no-brainer. Ditto an emphasis on organically grown produce. However, this approach appears to be anathema to corporate farming, and there are disturbing signs, notably a court decision to reverse a previous judgement against plans to use animals to develop health and medical products - NZ may join the GM camp. Disturbingly, two corporations, including NZ dairy giant Fonterra, hope to release GE grasses, a potential tipping point as seed dispersal would be impossible to control.    

Back at the grassroots there are signs that the burgeoning grow-your-own vegetables movement – we supplement our own backyard efforts with produce from an Auckland collective and roadside honesty stalls – have blunted profits from commercial horticulture, even as the average price for fruit and vegetables in January rose 4.8% according to Statistics New Zealand. Maybe commercial growers should take note and investigate organic options.

We’ll be enjoying some of our homegrown greens – fennel, basil, parsley, lettuce and argula – with some king fish steaks, our share of a fish caught on a hand line by a Coromandel friend, tonight. We’ve just returned to Auckland from the peninsula, after installing a 180-watt PV panel on our sleep-out, powering up a small fridge and some lights last Saturday – energy from the sun via two batteries – even as New Zealand joined other nations by switching off lights for Earth Hour. The trick in the future will be getting rid of the batteries and hooking up to the grid. But that’s another story.

©2010 Peter Huck

Letter From New Zealand #2

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. I asked Peter to write a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the second letter.

It’s been a dry month in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud. Large cracks have appeared in the deep clay cap on our Coromandel block. We’ve spent much of the past month building a bach lean-to – three walls covered with salvaged tin (corrugated iron) and punctuated with louvers, plus a sloping tin roof to catch rainwater, and a floor made from eucalyptus planks – beside our caravan. But, as yet, we haven’t a gutter and a down pipe to catch water.

This precious commodity is in very short supply. Other than rare misty moisty moments – such as a squall that swept across the house site from the Hauraki Gulf last week, momentarily easing the humidity and perking up our plants, but hardly settling the dust – there has been no rain.

This makes washing, drinking and, of course, cooking a challenge. One of our daily tasks is to haul in water, either from the Driving Creek Café or the creek itself. We also lack power, so each day must swap a trio of ice packs [frozen in a neighbour’s freezer] to cool our Esky or icebox. Given that we’re also working dawn to dusk hours we’ve opted to prepare dishes – home-made dahl, hummus and Provencal-style fish stew, a kiwi bouillabaisse, are standards - in Auckland, tweaking them if necessary in Coromandel. This week’s onion, garlic, tomato and courgette stew base was augmented by gurnard, bought from the fish ‘n’ chip shop a stone’s throw from the Coromandel harbour, and prepared by flashlight as the cicadas buzzed, dusk fell and a glittering canopy of stars joined the moon to cast a magical, theatrical light across the darkening forest.

By LA standards New Zealand droughts are benign. But prolonged dry spells wreck havoc on this nation’s farm economy, not to mention our parched Auckland veggie patch, neglected while we were away. Northland, the area beyond Auckland, is threatening water restrictions. Yet, Central Hawke’s Bay, traditionally prone to long droughts – and best suited to dry country stock farming and grapes – has had a wet summer. There is much talk of El Nino and whether it is influenced by global warming, even as climate change deniers – delighted by the hacked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emails and other scandals, and a vociferous lobby in New Zealand - have had a field day.

Despite its ballyhooed “clean and green” tourist image, enhanced by epic scenery [Ian McCulloch, of Echo & The Bunnymen, once described New Zealand as a “psychedelic Yorkshire,” perhaps due to the extraordinary clarity of the atmosphere; gazing at our 360-degree Coromandel vista is like tumbling into the rabbit hole or stepping into an 18th century landscape by Cook’s artist Sydney Parkinson] and low greenhouse gas emissions, compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations, New Zealand isn’t nearly as pristine as it makes out. Efforts to turn Auckland into a “super city” by amalgamating local councils are seen by critics as a feint to privatise water, even as the right-wing National government ponders opening up protected land including, maybe, World Heritage status national parks, to mining, an issue that is red hot in the Coromandel Peninsula, site of the nation’s first gold strike at Driving Creek in 1852.

Meanwhile, dairying, a major export, squanders water [pumping from aquifers in Hawke’s Bay for instance to the consternation of non-dairy farmers] and is responsible for copious methane emissions, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change and estimated in 2007 by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research at 35.2% of the country’s output. And a new documentary, based on English journalist Charles Clover’s book The End of the Line, argues that New Zealand has torpedoed its status as a sustainable fishery, due to its destructive, bottom-trawled orange roughy – popular in the US – catch. Waitrose, the UK food chain, has banned orange roughy and hoki, another kiwi fish; a prime example of consumer-driven conservation that New Zealand would be wise to acknowledge. “The number one hole in your system,” Clover told the New Zealand Herald, “[is that] you don’t actually have a proper up-to-date assessment of the 600-odd species you have in your waters.”

I could go on, listing other holes in the “clean and green” PR line. New Zealand has much to be proud of as regards its farming prowess, such as getting food to markets thousands of miles away and surviving without government subsidies. But the colonial legacy in which finite resources, whether fish, timber or water, were commodities to be exploited no longer works. Diminishing resources worldwide have created a new paradigm, in which the world is divided between those who exploit resources for short-term economic gain, and those who see the economy as a subset of the environment, where sustainable use is the only viable long-term option.

©2010 Peter Huck

A Letter From Peter Huck in New Zealand

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 first of such entries.

Dateline: Auckland, New Zealand; January 20, 2010

Intrigued that I cook in an even smaller kitchen – a narrow, well-appointed galley betwixt a toilet and a shower; perhaps an eighth of the space in a 19.6 by 11.5 foot apartment, formally a motel room - than the one he graces in Los Feliz, Jonathan has invited me to file an occasional culinary piece from New Zealand, where I returned, after two decades working as a journalist in Los Angeles, to pursue an off-the-grid house project in the Coromandel Peninsula. This post is a tour d’horizon of my new life in Godzone; I’ll get into specifics down the road.

I interpret “culinary” in the widest sense. I am just as interested in learning where food comes from, how it is grown, and the sometimes controversial issues surrounding its production, as I am in cooking and eating. In some respects New Zealand is a huge farm. Agriculture is innovative and entrepreneurial – there are no subsidies – but surprisingly resistant, given the country’s pristine environmental hype, to sustainable, organic methods. Still, for those who look there are plenty of delights.

My life is split between Auckland and Coromandel, a three-hour drive around the rim of a spectacular maritime inlet, the Firth of Thames, then up the Pacific Coast Highway, the Antipodean version, a sometimes one-lane blacktop that twists from sea level to some 1,500 feet, then back again.

I’m now in Auckland, living with my girlfriend Barbara Drake (left, with "pet" Magpie) on the slopes of Mt Albert, one of 49 extinct volcanic “stumps” that litter the narrow isthmus between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is a maritime city with volatile sub-tropical weather and fertile soil; perfect for fresh sea fish and home grown vegetables - we can hardly keep up with the fecundity of our two tiny plots that keep on giving: silver beet, cabbage, lettuce, rocket [arugula], rhubarb, courgettes, tarragon, thyme, sorrel, nasturtiums, basil, oregano, cilantro and parsley.

Our life is lived in a series of boxes: our city flat, where cooking is a combination of cuisine and choreography; our ‘95 Subaru wagon; two packed-to-the-door storage facilities; and a pair of ancient caravans – one with an almost completed lean-to or sleep-out, largely built from recycled material sourced from community demo yards – on our 27-acre conservation block of regenerating rainforest.

It is a lifestyle – frequent journeys between tiny living spaces – that dictates what we eat. We live on a very cheap budget. Our homegrown veggies are supplemented by organic produce, including fruit, from highway honesty stalls and community gardens in Auckland and Coromandel. Eating well means hooking into food networks, where barter sometimes replaces payment. We also buy fresh fish more or less direct from the boat at various harbours between the city and our land, along with specialist items – cheese, honey, olive oil, wine, condiments or bread – from grassroots producers. We don’t shun supermarkets – rural life hasn’t dented my caffeine habit - but they’re peripheral.

Thus, the Tarakihi depicted in the picture taken in our caravan, as dusk falls on the Hauraki Gulf and a Morepork, or native owl, starts calling on our block, is that day’s catch, bought from the Coromandel fish ‘n’ chip shop. Our meal, cooked by Barbara on a two-ring gas stove in candlelight, included French beans from the weekly farmers’ market, organic chilli sauce from the sleepy community of Papa Aroha, olive oil from one of our neighbours, garlic from another, toasted kelp harvested from New Zealand’s beaches [five times the length of the US West Coast], plus new potatoes and a 2007 “cleanskin” [end-of-vintage wine, sans label] Gisborne merlot from the local store.

Like the US, New Zealand is rediscovering the delights of home grown produce. Gardening networks, including community gardens where some food is free, are emerging. Ironically, for a nation where farm produce is the major export [and sometimes cheaper in Trader Joe’s than it is in an Auckland supermarket], and “clean and green” a national catchphrase [and, as the Guardian pointed out, sometimes a hollow one; more on that at a later date], kiwis rank third on the 2009 OECD obesity list, after the US and Mexico, a consequence of a generation weaned on processed and fast foods. I’ll be exploring these themes, and local cuisine, on future posts.

©2010 Peter Huck