Our Damaged Environment

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 4

Our Damaged Environment

Man Against Nature. By R. M. Lockley. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 239 pp. At this threshold year of the decade whose theme is expected to be pollution and environmental despoliation, books at varying le/els of authority are starting to roll. This particular one. in a “Wildlife” series under English sponsorship, will attract attention on the shelves, because the format, topic arrangement and numerous illustrations by renowned photographers, all impress greatly. The author, an English naturalist and frequent visitor to New Zealand, is campaigning on our behalf, being impelled to expose aspects of our deplorable history and to warn us of consequences if depredations within our physical and natural resources are permitted to continue. With a panoramic view of our natural history and socio-economic development, Mr Lockley has written with a general measure of rapport on the evolution of disruptive forces in our habitat. He has moved from Moriori and moas: Maoris and Morioris; white men and Maori, to the taming of the tussocklands and hill-country bush, then on to the frenzy of importations of animals.

There may be advantage in having a book that can view the developments and issues in generality, but many will likely find the presentations to be insubstantial. This is exemplified in the sections on animal introductions and the consequential difficulties. Here readers will be much better served by the experts like Bull and Davidson respectively in the volume of the Natural History of Canterbury. There may be justification in alerting the community by the recital of our mistakes in. land and resource use, introduction of creatures that destroyed some of our gentle and unique indigenes, the social deterioration of the Maori, but this sort of amalgam cannot impress in the manner of substantial work based on the research of authorities.

Mr Lockley as a compiler of information, presented in a magazine journalese, has quoted extensively of others, but there is no listed documentation. There is netting plagiaristic, but many readers would want to know where the fuller information may be found. Mr Lockley’s book would have served many interests and causes admirably had his sutrmary of a situation been followed by an appendix of the tremendous numbers of sources of information that be searched. Mr Lockley also acknowledges that it was a problem to know how to end

the book. It would be quite easy to advise him where and when he should have stopped. Significant of the slackening of his earlier good grip of the issues is the discursive comment after he bad constructed bis legitimate chapters. Unfortunately there is a sudden onset of errors that tend to impair the good will he earlier engendered. One mentions his intimation that the three great Maoris Ngata. Pomare, Buck—were all knighted by Queen Victoria, and the remark that the weeping willow brought as a clone from St Helena seeds readily and naturally. Over-all, Mr Lockley is to be complimented on the form of his plea for every effort to be made to preserve the unique aspects of our environment and its inhabitants.