Forest and Bird chief executive Nicola Toki. Photo / Supplied
“Really concerning “ and “sneaky” reforms by the coalition Government are stripping back protections for nature so fast that “no New Zealander can keep up”, Forest and Bird’s CEO says.
Nicola Toki raised the alarm in an interview on Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, saying she’s concerned Kiwis “might not have eyes on the things that we’re losing”.
It comes after Prime Minister Christopher Luxon earlier this year spoke in support of expanding mining on public conservation land, with Resources Minister Shane Jones expressing a desire to double mineral exports to $3 billion over the next decade.
In 2010, former Prime Minister John Key famously u-turned on a decision to make public conservation land available for mining after 40,000 people marched down Queen St to protest the proposal.
But Toki told Real Life that same land is at risk again, 15 years on.
“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.
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