WAIPOUA FOREST PRESERVATION

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25537, 3 July 1948, Page 2

WAIPOUA FOREST PRESERVATION

REPLY TO RECENT CRITICISMS

“Shall the kauri forest of Waipoua be preserved for the people of New Zealand for the delight, instruction, and inspiration of generations as yet unborn, or shall it be sacrificed to a policy of commercial exploitation? The State Forest Service obviously maintains that it can do both, but there can be no compromise. The two policies are mutually exclusive,” states the president of the Waipoua Forest Preservation Society (Mr Gilbert Archey) replying to criticisms made recently by the State Forest Service of the society’s attempts to preserve the forest. Waipoua could not be a natural forest and a cultivated plantation, said Mr Archey. Forest service use of land and national park protection were sharply divergent, as the service had recently conceded. “Choice must be made Between the doubtfully attainable ideal of the service (a crowded* monotony of rickers, to be felled as soon as possible) an' 1 , the ideal of a national park of unmodified native forest. Under exploitation Waipoua must cease to exist as a natural forest: its distinctive features must be totally destroyed. Even if new forests arise from its ruins, and there is no guarantee that they will, they will bear not the slightest resemblance to the original,” he says.