Our Parks: A Refuge From Urban Life

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32322, 13 June 1970, Page 5

Our Parks: A Refuge From Urban Life

by

ELSIE LOCKE)

One of the arguments that has entered into the Manapouri controversy is that people who have not personally seen the lake are not entitled to an opinion.

Another is that people who never go to such places are not affected by the decision, to raise or not to raise the lake level. What is a National Park to them, if they can’t be counted among the visitors?

It is possible to live a lifetime without directly requir-

ing the services of a policeman, a fireman or an ambulance- We readily pay taxes and rates, or give donations towards these services, and not only as an insurance in case we might require them. Unmarried citizens pay their share towards the education of children. We recognise the degeneration that would beset any society which did not protect the lives and homes of its members, or which failed to rear its youth in the possession of modern knowledge. So we see our personal benefit through the well-being of the community.

City dwellers are full of complaints about the vandals in their ; midst, the gatecrashers at parties, the motor-cycle gangs. Small symptoms of troubles which are magnified many times over in the great cities abroad. Urban life has become very artificial, and the most constructive aspects of it tend to be highly organised. This does not satisfy every need, of every kind of person, at every age. A crowded world is in need of uncrowded places. Space For People The wonders of technology and inventive sciences have held our attention for a long time. A welcome has been given to every new discovery which could go into production and meet a demand on the market. Man. as an animal with his own special needs, was rather lost in a welter of things. Only lately have newspaper readers come to familiar terms with words like habitat, environment, ecology. It is easy to forget that we all live on the bounties of nature and that we ourselves are a part of nature, subject to nature’s requirements. To the first European settlers, the resources of New Zealand appeared limitless. They threw out their rubbish and it disappeared into vast spaces. They burned off scrub year after year before noticing signs of damage. They ruined whole valleys by sluicing and gold-dredging, and turned away to new land. They drained off their domestic and industrial waste into rivers and lakes. We grew up acquiring these habits but without the fresh resources, until now we have to take deliberate, expensive steps to protect the eroded hillsides

and save the waters from pollution.

We don’t have to live in the Southern Alps or alongside Lake Rotorua to be affected by this. Our national parks represent a splendid means of preserving unspoiled or regenerating areas and at the same time caring for them, protecting them from fire and erosion and commercial exploitation. The land and all that it carries in vegetation and wildlife are there for our experience, observation and scientific study, in relation to those other areas where we make our hoiiies, our farms and our timber industries.

A Challenge There are practical values with an economic aspect, and so of course is tourism. But how about the mountaineers and the trampers, the botanisers and the bird watchers, the picnickers and the potterers who frequent the national parks? Good for them, but what good does it do the rest of us, and why should we worry if one or two lakes are disfigured within their vast stamping ground? The wanderers don’t have to produce reasons for being happy in the wilderness. They aren’t vandals or litterbugs; they aren't crippled by lack of adventure. Their expeditions set them effervescing with health and happiness, which spread around their city life like the baking powder in the flour, without which the scone would be noticeably duller. A city gives hardly any scope for decent devilment. It can't compare with the mountains for providing physical challenge or silent wonderment. As our urban lives grow more regimented, streamlined and artificial, the more we may feel the need to be our natural selves. The national parks are our refuge, saved for us from the pressures of monetary and short-lived greed. Or are they? Lake Manapouri is in a national park. Who knows where the next plum may be discovered and extracted, regardless of the undertaking to allow no interference? The future happiness of a nation can’t be measured as exactly as kilowatts and taxes and overseas exchange. This is all the more reason for nourishing it with foresight and care.