One ecosystem, one national park: a new vision for biodiversity conservation in New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The first New Zealand National Park was a gift from Māori, but subsequent management of National Parks has largely reflected a utilitarian European perspective. The Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 confers ‘legal personality’ on the entire Whanganui River catchment, recognising it as a ‘living whole’ that ‘supports and sustains’ the people. The Act is founded on holistic and long-term values shared by Māori and ecological science. During the three decades since the founding of the Department of Conservation in 1987, three major transformations in environmental thinking and practice are founded in similar values: (1) increased respect for nature as a community to which people belong; (2) cities as a major focus for ecological restoration; and (3) rapidly growing scale in landscape restoration. We build on these values and developments to propose the concept of National Park Aotearoa, a whole-of-nation vision for bicultural ecological restoration.

KEYWORDS:

• Biodiversity conservation
• ecological restoration
• ethos
• kaitiakitanga
• legal personality
• National Park Aotearoa
• environmental sustainability
• Te Awa Tupua Act 2017

Introduction

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanised man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

— Aldo Leopold, 1949, Foreword, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

About 125 years ago, Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) set aside a modest amount of land in the central North Island, as one of the world’s first national parks (Swarbrick 2015). This act arose from a gift of 26.4 km² to the Crown by Horonuku Te Heuheu, paramount chief of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi (tribe), in 1887. The Ngāti Tūwharetoa people understood the landscape of the central North Island as an ancestor, part of their whakapapa or genealogy. An 1894 Act of Parliament incorporated this landscape into Tongariro National Park, the first in NZ and one of the first in the world.

The Ngāti Tūwharetoa gift was intended to maintain the integrity of the landscape by protecting it from private speculators to be ‘co-owned and co-managed’ by Māori and Europeans (Ruru 2008). However, the National Parks Act 1980 placed all NZ national parks within a largely utilitarian framework, preserving the lands ‘for their intrinsic worth and for the benefit, use, and enjoyment of the public’. Ruru (2008) argued that the European utilitarian goals – economic development, especially tourism – subverted the Ngāti Tūwharetoa vision by placing them within a ‘totally monocultural’ legal and management framework. The Conservation Act 1987 lodged management of National Parks with the Department of Conservation (DOC), without co-management but obliging the Department to ‘to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’.

Over a century after the Tongariro bequest, the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 provided a different legal pathway for recognising a cherished landscape. This act conferred the status of ‘legal personality’ on Te Awa Tupua – ‘the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea’. The Act recognised the river as ‘an indivisible and living whole’ that ‘supports and sustains … the health and well-being of the iwi, hapū, and other communities of the River’. The people and the landscape are one, indivisible. The river is co-managed by the Crown and the many iwi historically associated with the river. Te Urewera National Park has been accorded the same status of legal personality, and negotiations are in progress for similar status for Egmont National Park (see Towns et al. 2019).

We write as Pākehā (non-Māori) New Zealanders from a Western scientific perspective. Conferring the legal status of personality on the Whanganui River rather than the status of a National Park once seemed surprising to us. But our perspective as ecologists mirrors Aldo Leopold’s ethos (1949), seeing ‘land as a community to which we belong’, genealogically linking humans to other living organisms and functionally connecting all through food chains, nutrient cycles, and energy flows. Without these complex interconnections, life would cease to exist. To us, these understandings differ little from the Ngāti Tūwharetoa belief that the Tongariro landscape provided both sustenance and identity (Ruru 2008).

Unexpected transformations in the DOC era

This Special Issue describes many developments in conservation management, practice and outcomes during the DOC era – 1987 to the present day. In this editorial, we identify three major transformations in public understanding and conservation actions that emerged from the contributions to the Special Issue: (1) Increasing respect for the natural world based in the understanding that people are part of rather than separate from nature and that bicultural values should guide restoration planning in NZ (Lyver et al. 2019); (2) a central role for cities in ecological restoration (Wallace and Clarkson 2019); and (3) rapidly increasing scale in conservation and ecological restoration programmes (Innes et al. 2019; Peltzer et al. 2019). All three reflect an ethos arising from both Māori and ecological knowledge. Here we explore how these emergent themes could help shape a better future in a world confronting urgent environmental challenges. We propose an all-of-New Zealand concept framed as National Park Aotearoa.

 Increasing respect for nature

Māori and ecological systems of knowledge share key values that respect the land. Both have a long-term perspective, as expressed through genealogical and evolutionary time frames. Both see the world from a unified holistic perspective. All parts are understood by their connections to other parts and their place in the larger whole. Viewing the Whanganui River ‘from the mountains to the sea’ captures an holistic perspective, which ecologists see in terms of the integrity of the catchment as an ecosystem – if the components of the system are to be maintained, the entire system must be respected.

Kaitiakitanga is a set of Māori practices often translated as stewardship (Royal 2007). Kaitiakitanga embodies a multi-faceted approach to management from holistic and long-term perspectives encompassing both the environment and people. Kaitiaki (stewards, broadly) fulfil their obligations with a sense of responsibility to future generations. Ecologists define conservation similarly as ‘wise use of resources’, including consideration of human use, preservation of resources, and the needs of future generations.

While sometimes advancing in fits and starts, DOC has committed to co-management as a principle for partnerships with Māori, far different from environmental management prior to 1987. In fact, some previous government environmental agencies avoided contact with citizens, including Māori, at all costs (Towns et al. 2019). The shared values of kaitiakitanga and ecological science may well be one pathway to a constructive partnership between cultures.

 Cities lead the way in ecological restoration

New Zealand is a highly urbanised society, but our national identity remains linked to natural symbols: our money, our national nickname Kiwi, and even the daily birdcall on the national radio station. But a few seconds of birdsong on the radio are no substitute for the dawn chorus in the garden. By the 1990s, the public no longer accepted that its most distinctive, rarest indigenous species need be permanently confined, largely out of sight, on offshore islands, a primary conservation methodology for the previous century.

Begun in the 1980s, the ecological restoration initiative on Tiritiri Matangi Island, near Auckland, demonstrated the public appetite for direct engagement in repairing damaged environments. Zealandia, an ecological restoration project in a 225 ha valley adjacent to central Wellington, began in 1995 with a 500 – year strategic plan. It demonstrated that native birdlife could be made safe in urban environments. The 60 ha Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park at the edge of Hamilton, initiated in 2004, focuses on restoration of forest, wetland and lake ecosystems. Rangitoto and Motutapu Islands (3900 ha) in Auckland Harbour have been cleared of ten species of invasive mammalian pests.

Most major cities now have fenced wildlife sanctuaries, predator control programmes, and revegetation initiatives, often with a clear intent to restore indigenous plant communities that were once present (Clarkson and Kirby 2016). They have succeeded as restoration sites and also as important tourist destinations. As a result, visitors directly experience native birds, reptiles, insects and recovering plant communities. The growing dawn chorus and returning birdlife long absent from cities have become ambassadors for continuing urban restoration (see Butler et al. (2014) for an overview of these and many other success stories).

Landscape scale ecological restoration

Projects such as Zealandia and Waiwhakareke demonstrate the feasibility of genuine ecological restoration on the mainland. Invasive mammalian pest species can be eradicated, and indigenous ecological communities and ecosystems restored. While the scale of these two sites is modest, within a decade much larger projects such as Cape Sanctuary (2500 ha) and Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari (3400 ha) were under restoration.

Ambitions for ecological restoration rapidly outgrew the capacity of Government alone to address. Tiritiri Matangi, Zealandia, and Waiwhakareke are community-led projects, with local authorities and philanthropists playing supporting roles. Larger projects such as Cape Sanctuary on Cape Kidnappers, Project Janszoon to restore Abel Tasman National Park (22,530 ha), and the Million Dollar Mouse project to eliminate mice on Antipodes Island (2000 ha) exemplify imaginative projects arising from generous philanthropic investments, often in partnership with DOC and supported by volunteer groups from local communities and beyond (Towns et al. 2019). DOC has welcomed the growing public engagement, developing policies that encourage engagement with both philanthropists and community-based environmental groups.

The Reconnecting Northland project, supported by philanthropy, conservation organisations, and DOC, focuses on the interdependence of people and nature and aims to restore and link local ecosystems for the benefit of the people of the far North. It is only a small step from a project to link regional ecosystems to thinking on national scale, and in 2016, the first truly national initiative to solve a major ecological problem was established. Predator Free 2050 (PF2050), a Crown-owned charitable company (https://pf2050.co.nz), works with co-funding partners to enable eradication of seven species of pest mammals from all NZ by 2050 (Clarke and Russell 2019).

Enormous challenges

The future for humans and nature has never been so uncertain. Global climate change poses unprecedented challenges as terrestrial and marine temperatures surge (IPCC 2018). The Sixth Mass Extinction event is underway, threatening life around the world (Kolbert 2014). Biodiversity and ecosystem services are deteriorating, and about 25% of plant and animal groups are at immediate risk. Over 1,000,000 species face extinction (IPBES 2019).

Factors driving the global extinction crisis threaten NZ biodiversity as well through growing human impacts on the environment, habitat modification, and invasive species. The picture is grim. At least 4000 species are declining and face possible extinction; almost two-thirds of indigenous ecosystems are threatened (Ministry for the Environment & Stats NZ 2019). Attempts to reduce extinction risks since 1987 have had only mixed success (Hare et al. 2019; Nelson et al. 2019; Wallis 2019). Rising temperatures, sea level rise, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will challenge indigenous species and ecosystems, just as they will threaten people. They will exacerbate existing problems such as polluted waterways, water shortages, and erosion. Our two major sources of national economic wealth, agriculture and tourism, will be forced to change and adapt if they are to continue to prosper.

By 2050, NZ environmental management practices will need to respond at a scale that will substantially exceed changes in the tumultuous years since DOC was founded. Addressing these will require a concerted national effort.

Is there hope? It’s the people … 

Of NZ’s Nuclear Free stance in the 1980s, Prime Minister David Lange said, ‘We are a small country and what we can do is limited. But in this as in every other great issue, we have to start somewhere’. Nuclear free is now a non-partisan national policy and a proud element of national identity. Similarly, in 2011, Paul Callaghan proposed a predator free future for NZ, noting how ambitious it seemed at the time – ‘a crazy idea’, he said. In less than a decade, Predator Free 2050 has become an agreed national goal, supported by local and national Government investment and leadership, philanthropists, and hundreds (maybe thousands) of community-based volunteer groups.

An inspiring common thread links the three transformations of the last 30 years: they were not driven by DOC or Government. Instead, they arose from actions by citizens who demonstrated that New Zealanders: (1) value nature by showing they accord the landscape the same respect they show people; (2) want nature in their daily lives (urban ecological restoration projects); and (3) are prepared to own the problem by donating time and energy to ensure success of local restoration projects (The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy 2000). Government has heard the desire of New Zealanders across the political spectrum to have our rivers clean again and to rid the landscape of predatory mammals that have destroyed so many native species. To their credit, Governments have been stepping up.

For most of the twentieth century, conservation management in NZ was anchored in the not unreasonable belief that humans pose the greatest threat to nature. In contrast, community-led ecological restoration initiatives in cities and at increasingly larger scales across landscapes over the course of a few decades reflect the desire among New Zealanders to reconnect with the country’s natural heritage on a daily basis and to experience both the pleasures and benefits that nature brings. Realising success from the substantial investments of DOC, local authorities, and philanthropists largely depends on public support and engagement. On a daily basis, New Zealanders express their belief that humans need not be nature’s greatest threat – we can become the solution rather than the problem.

A re-imagined place

The Te Awa Tupua Settlement Act provides a new model for conservation by re-framing the legal relationship of humans to nature. This Act removes humans from an ownership role, free to use nature for primarily utilitarian purposes. Instead, humans fill the role of kaitiaki, caring for nature as one would care for a relative. Kaitiaki must speak for nature, knowing that the health and wellbeing of present and future generations depend on their wisdom.

Writing from a cultural perspective, Jacinta Ruru (2008) postulated that ‘today’s narrative of reconciliation has not yet crystallised into a re-imagined place’. From our ecological perspective, we believe that the Te Awa Tupua Act is a big step in the right direction, but it can be be taken further. Like Te Awa Tupua, a re-imagined vision would be holistic, sustainable, and long-term, and it would express deep respect for an indivisible nature as the foundation of individual, social, cultural, and economic wellbeing. Also like Te Awa Tupua, it might be bicultural or co-managed if what Ruru (2008) calls ‘a more respectful reconciliation’ is to be achieved.

With those underpinning values, a re-imagining could take differing forms. Before considering NZ further, we note three (among, no doubt, many) international examples of societies trying to live sustainably with nature from which NZ could gain inspiration, wisdom and the benefit of experience.

1. The UNESCO Biosphere Reserve programme is a network of 701 reserves in 124 countries (UNESCO 2019). These use a layered approach to sustainability across varied landscapes, with a core set of highly protected ecosystems conserving landscapes, ecosystems, species and genetic resources. The core areas are surrounded by or adjacent to buffer zones used for research, training and education in sustainability. Transition areas allow sustainable economic and sociocultural activities, the highest level of human activity in the reserve. For reasons unknown to us, NZ does not participate in the Biosphere Reserve programme.

2. Cities are not included in Biosphere Reserves, but several international initiatives focus on major cities as sites for ecological restoration and connecting people to nature. The Biophilic Cities programme (https://www.biophiliccities.org) links at least 20 cities in Europe, North America, Central America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand (Wellington) to bring nature into cities and create nature-rich urban landscapes ‘as an element of a meaningful urban life’ that benefits city dwellers. Separately, London National Park City (http://www.nationalparkcity.london/about/about-find-out-more/what-is-the-london-national-park-city) was launched in July 2019 and joined with other initiatives to create the Universal Charter for National Park Cities (https://npc-universal-charter.netlify.com), aiming to bring nature into cities and benefit both nature and people.

3. By far the largest and oldest initiative is the Adirondack Park in northern New York State in the USA (https://apa.ny.gov/about_park/index.html). The forest reserve comprises over 24,000 km², the largest protected public lands in the contiguous United States, larger even than Yellowstone National Park. About half the land is privately owned and supports about 100 towns and villages, plus farms, villages, and a forestry industry. The remainder is constitutionally preserved in a wild state. Established in the late 1800s, Adirondack Park is an ongoing experiment in sustainable human occupation on landscape scale and is now classified as a National Historic Landmark.

National Park Aotearoa

Giving the legal rights of ‘personality’ to an element of the NZ landscape – the Whanganui River – raises an obvious question: Are we aiming too low? If nature really is ‘an indivisible and living whole’ that ‘supports and sustains … the health and well-being’ of all people, then why shouldn’t more of the landscape be respected? Why not all? Corporations have the same legal rights as people – should not the land on which they and we depend be respected in the same way? Why not Tongariro and all other present National Parks? Why not the agricultural lands that produce our foods and grow national wealth? Why not Queen Street in Auckland where income earned internationally benefits us all?

Prior to human arrival, NZ’s land and water ecosystems were coupled and interdependent in ways Leopold (1949) eloquently outlined in his essays about conservation esthetics. Today, NZ is a fragmented patchwork of urban, rural and forested landscapes, with hundreds of remnant indigenous ecosystems scattered among them. Many are at risk from continued human impacts or neglect and will disappear without urgent intervention to protect and restore them. Many of these isolated, diminished ecosystems can no longer support our wellbeing through high quality ecosystem services to clean our air, build soils, or clean the water. Their ability to support our agricultural economy is threatened, and farmers know that their practices will need to change in many ways to sustain productivity and national wealth. Restoring NZ’s ecosystems will require attention to elements of ecological pattern and process. How can this be achieved?

Let’s re-imagine the concept of a National Park. We propose a vision called National Park Aotearoa that builds on that of the Te Awa Tupua Act – an indivisible, living nature that nourishes and sustains the people – one ecosystem. Remediation efforts such as cleaning rivers and removing mammalian predators are first steps, but this vision would reconnect, restore and protect threatened indigenous ecosystems across the landscape. A unitary vision for a single national park rather than the present 13 would publicly acknowledge the ecological connections that once existed and must be the aspirational targets for a sustainable future for NZ.

The Te Awa Tupua Act has advanced national understanding of environmental management, but its higher purposes extend well beyond securing a treasured landscape in perpetuity. The Act aims to secure a meaningful future for the people of the Whanganui River and to resolve longstanding social and cultural grievances. A sustainable future for NZ requires this sort of cultural reconciliation for the entire country. Aldo Leopold (1949) understood this: ‘That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a culture harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten’.

A new model for a National Park might inspire internationally as well as within NZ. Respecting every part of our land within a sustainability framework respects the future of all. We know of no nation that has embraced a whole-of-country approach to ecological restoration and a sustainable future. National Park Aotearoa is an ethos and commitment needed to match the challenge of our times.

Acknowledgements

We thank our many colleagues who generously contributed their time and wisdom to review early versions of this editorial and help us to develop its ideas: Bruce Clarkson, Brendan Daugherty, Rina Douglas, Kelly Hare, Maryanne Horsfield, Phil Lyver, and the students of the 2019 Auckland University of Technology Class CONS 801 (International Conservation Biology).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.