DIVIDED WE FALL

Forest and Bird, Issue 55, 1 February 1940, Page 6

DIVIDED WE FALL

By Waiatua.

WILD LIFE AND DEPARTMENTAL DISUNITY

THE most outstanding fact in Nature is that her main features are not independent units. Instead of being independent, they are inter-dependent to a degree amounting to unity. Look at that valley. In a sense it is a unit in itself. But that valley, as it exists, cannot continue to exist without the river that runs through it. The river nourishes the valley, yet the river can be converted from being a nourisher into a destroyer. Clearly, then, the valley and the river are not independent units. They serve (or, if wrongly treated, disserve) each other. They stand or fall together. That valley and that river are an illustration of what we refer to above— natural inter-dependence amounting to unity. Now look at that mountain range. It is lofty, proud and cold; but, notwithstanding its austere aloofness, it is not an independent unit. The mountain range is the backbone on which the valleys and rivers hang; it is the centrepiece that holds the whole together. Mountains Built to Endure.

Mountains were not built for the purpose of being dissolved by snow, ice and water, so that, in a short time, they should be transported by the rivers into harbours and river-mouths, filling up all harbourage and levelling the inland country. „ If that had been the intention of the Great Builder, then mountain ranges would be a rapidly disappearing feature of Nature—this century, gone next century exerting only a fleeting influence on Nature and on Nature’s wayward child, man. The Great Builder proclaimed his abhorrence of the idea of soluble mountain ranges by giving the mountains natural vegetable protections. Their higher parts are clothed with alpine and sub-alpine vegetation adapted to its protective purpose in a way known only to Nature. Their lower parts are clothed with forest— forest varied and adapted, in the course of centuries, to local requirements—and the forest, besides clothing the mountains, -once supported in this country a unique company of forest-living birds, some now extinct. Birds of the forest and the

swamp, with their respective habitats, represent another bit of evidence of natural inter-dedend-ence, of Nature’s essential unity. The moun-

tains are not armour-clad after the manner of a battleship, but are (or were) protected with this far more wonderful armour woven by Nature, permitting all the required give-and-take, so that water-flow was regulated and water-conquest of material from the mountains and hillside was not in excess of what the lower country could absorb. In short, Nature struck a balance as between mountain, valley, river, plain and sea. This balance is not a cast-iron stability, nor is it an instability. It represents the slow change which is progress, and of which the soul is unity. Is there anything in the whole world more worthy of our regard—more inspiring in its co-ordinated, symmetrical beauty—than this in-ter-dependence, this unity, of mountains, forest, river and valley, whereby the birds and all wild life flourish; a unity into which man could enter without destructive effect if he so willed it. What Carlyle calls “the ceaseless down-rushing of the universal world-fabric” is an inexorable natural process, but an ordered long-term process. Its essence is time. To man belongs the discredit of disturbing the tempo and of spoiling the tune.

New Zealand (in Liquidation). Nothing in Nature, either on this planet or on any other, is stable and eternal. Probably every day, in the rush, roar, and crash of the universe, some world is liquidated. But is this any excuse for speeding up the liquidation of our own planet—for cutting or burning all the forest we can get at, and for importing beasts to eat out the forest that is rather too difficult to get at, so that Nature’s balance of mountain and plant covering is upset, and the excessive floods are let loose to liquidate and level everything to a general uselessness? Samson may have had some excuse for pulling down the pillars of the building that fell not merely on himself but on his hated enemies. But what excuse have we for sordidly pulling at Nature’s buttresses and bringing down the floods on our own heads! How do we—the lucky finders of a country we did not create and hardly deserve—approach the unity which Nature presented to us

a hundred years ago, and which we have half destroyed? We approach this ordered unity with a disordered disunity. The Governments of New Zealand have taken hold of the forest as if it were a thing apart — part of a unity —and have put it into the hands of a Forestry Department whose chief business hitherto has been to cut and sell native forests and to plant exotics. Instead of wild life (wild plant life and wild animal life) being treated as one whole, the Governments of New Zealand have placed wild life— some aspects of itunder a department (Internal Affairs) whose writ runs throughout the country, but the other Department (Forestry) carries on a localised existence in accordance with the boundaries of State Forests (permanent or provisional) for the time being. In its main functions the Forestry Department is a territorial, not a nation-wide, activity; it is a sort of empire within an empire, but its influence on wild life is far greater than the influence of Internal Affairs, because the Forestry Department has been, and is, changing the whole face of the country, while Internal Affairs, which only in recent years has begun to have a limited field staff, is merely trying to stop a few leaks, as in the case of deer-culling. Here and there the Lands Department and a few other departments appear to fit into the wild life pattern, but fit in just sufficiently to spoil unity of Government policy and to bring Nature’s unity to naught.

Caricaturing Nature’s Unity. Under Nature’s jurisdiction, mountain, valley, river, plain, harbour, farm, bush, and birds hang together. Under the Government’s disunity plan, rivers and harbours find themselves under the Public Works Department, the Lands

Department, river boards, harbour boards, and local bodies of all sorts. The mountains, as pointed out, are interfered with by several departments, and all over the countryside cases will be found where un-co-ordinated official fingers are pushed into the same pie. The Cinderella, of course, is bird life, the concern only of Internal Affairs, and of little interest to anyone save the poacher. It is thus man caricatures the unity of Nature.

If, as he has implied, the Minister of Internal Affairs intends to create a section devoted to biological research, the biologists will inevitably be confronted with the unity of natural problems put before them; but how on earth, in the present divided counsels and multiplicity of controls, will they get anything done? They will go on seeing things unitedly, and the departments will go on seeing things separately. The only cure is real concentration of wild life control. Can it be hoped that this Minister, or any Minister, is strong enough to face departmentalism and win this victory?

As Nature is a co-ordinated unity it surely follows that as a matter of necessity the management of Nature’s works should be equally co-ordinated, and with this end in view it is suggested that the Department of Internal Affairs should be put in the position of being able to fill the position its name implies, i.e. in a position to over-ride all Departments administering internal matters. It would probably be necessary to strengthen the Department by the transfer of officers from other departments who are skilled in those avenues which would come within its scope. Such an adjustment would be at least an approach to unified management.