Call me late to the party, but I was 22 and had a biology degree before I was struck by what wasn’t in front of me. I was standing on a Coromandel beach and realised in a flash how glorious our country must have been in centuries past. It felt like a Big Moment. Then I drove home flatly across the ditch-drained former wetlands of the Hauraki Plains.
There’s much still to love. In A Land Before Humans, A Land After Humans, Mark Fisher contemplates how to retain what we still have of plants and animals that are unique on this planet. He travails the changes that created our oddly shaped islands, going back to the huge geological and climatic shifts of the past 80 million years. Plants and animals colonised, were flooded, died off – oh to see the freshwater crocodile and land turtle! – but some survived and new ones arrived.
Evolution went rogue, as it tends to on islands, and particularly so here because the only predators to stay clear of were flesh-eating birds. The resulting peculiarities generally manifest as large, long-lived and flightless. The mind flutters to moa, kākāpō and kiwi, but Fisher is clear we should also care about less obvious creatures such as the giant land snail that lives for 20 years and the Robust grasshopper, an odorous insect of the South Island’s gravelly riverbeds.
There’s the tragedy of dear Richard Henry, who began by hunting birds known to be heading for extinction. They were more valuable to collectors that way, which reminds me of people flying to see coral reefs before they all bleach. Henry, however, saw the light and rowed hundreds of kākāpō to an island he thought would be a safe haven. All was well until 1900, when stoats swam over and began to eat them. Henry died dispirited and senile.
There are myriad stories that highlight the Kiwi sport of saving species – and it’s one we excel at internationally. Fisher, a retired scientist, presents an incredible breadth of facts that must have taken years to accumulate, as much of it social as scientific. Along with accounts of today’s debates between hunters and ecologists are newspaper quotes of who said what in the vigorous debate over whether to import stoats for rabbit control: “Of course, if the newcomers [stoats and weasels] could be laid under a binding obligation to confine their attention to rabbits there could be no objection,” wrote one correspondent in 1878. Stoats arrived the following year. In 1916, someone wrote, “Will the native birds of the dominion shortly be but a memory, consequent on the murderous proclivities of stoats, weasels and ferrets?”
The many jewels of this book are, however, somewhat swamped. I felt as if I’d arrived at the first lecture of a course I’d looked forward to all summer, wanting verve and rigour but not getting it. Hearty editing could have sharpened sentences, slashed repetition and carved up exceptionally long paragraphs. Fisher uses ecological terms such as irruption, sympatric and commensals and doesn’t define them. Today’s readers don’t need reminders that hapū means kinship group. And some might like references in full so they can track them down.
One of the most-repeated themes is the very sticky dilemma of differing views on which pest animals we should kill and which deserve to live – perhaps protected by law – for cultural reasons such as hunting (deer, tahr, pigs) or companionship (cats). Fisher explores this at length and asks many questions, but I didn’t feel he shone much light on a way forward. There are hints he might rather like a “land with humans” to always include some destructive pests – and there is a school of thought that we should accept our invasive species, perhaps with some control measures such as hunting. He writes, “It is suggested [it’s not clear by whom] that New Zealand would be poorer without pig hunting for food, recreation and even an ‘almost indispensable episode in fiction and memoirs’ [that quote comes from a dictionary of New Zealand English]. Once we were all immigrants, perhaps we are all indigenous having a ‘right’ to be here.” I don’t think he was referring only to people.
Fisher’s prose is scattered with other people’s pithy writing, and he has unearthed some gems. This country has been “shorn of its fleece”, wrote farmer Herbert Guthrie-Smith early last century. “At one time there were on Tutira [his sheep station] many hundreds of acres alive with forest birds; not one single individual now exists on many of these localities, because not one single tree remains,” and “Have I then for 60 years desecrated God’s Earth and dubbed it improvement?”
A Land Before Humans, a Land After Humans, by Mark Fisher (5M Books, $35), is out now.
