“What are we doing? We’re back to trying to dig up conservation land in the very places John Key backtracked on. That’s silly. People don’t have that short a memory,” she said.
“It’s really concerning, and we’re back there in a really sneaky way because of the avalanche of regulatory and legislative reform at the moment.
“The scale and speed of regulatory reforms being stripped back, in terms of protections for nature, is so fast and massive that no New Zealander can keep up, let alone [Forest and Bird]... it’s like drinking Coke from a fire hose just trying to keep on top of all that reform.
“I’m worried that New Zealanders out there, who may live in cities and not get out in nature as much but really like knowing that it’s being protected, might not have eyes on the things that we’re losing.”
Toki told Cowan she meets regularly with Cabinet to “find a common way forward for the things that New Zealanders love”, and last week attended the Primary Industries conference at the invitation of Federated Farmers, who she says have historically been “duking it out in court” with Forest and Bird.
“We increasingly have worked on [finding] the middle of the Venn diagram and how can we work together for these things that both farmers and conservationists love?”
Toki says the greatest conservation challenge NZ faces at the moment is that Kiwis increasingly believe our wildlife is doing OK, when it’s actually in “massive decline”.
She points out that despite New Zealanders considering themselves people of nature, 87% of us live in towns, creating a “real disconnect” between the reality of environmental decline and the story we tell ourselves.
“NZ has the highest proportion of threatened species of any country in the world. We love to be number one – we’re the first to give a woman the vote, we were the first to get a man on Everest, and we’re the worst at threatened species,” she told Cowan.
“What worries me at the moment is the cumulative impact of death by 1000 cuts, of just, ‘we’ll just take a little bit more over here’ and ‘we’ll just destroy this little piece over here’, and ‘it’s okay that we wreck this bit because there’s some more over there’,” she says.
“It means actually we’re losing all of our collective ownership and responsibility and future generations’ access to these places that we love.”
Elsewhere in the interview with Real Life, Toki spoke about the awkwardness of being a conservationist who hates tramping, how living in Aoraki as a child inspired a love for nature, and how an unlikely trifecta of study in law, zoology and film-making has set her up for career success.
- Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7:30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
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