Fractured Reality

Before I get on to the main topic of this post, please allow me a moment to indulge in that most English of pastimes - talking about the weather.

The last month has been seasonally bizarre. I started this trip in spring in London and San Fransisco before moving to summer in Los Angeles and Fiji. New Zealand has added autumn and a few days of winter in Franz Josef and Queenstown. Now I'm back in a decidedly autumnal drizzle in Christchurch, and tomorrow will fly for the summer once again in Cairns and then Alice Springs.

New Zealand itself is home to more micro climates than the mind can comfortably conceive, and I've experienced the rather annoying four seasons in one day phenomenon on more than one occasion, including the drive through the Tongariro National Park during which the bus passed through dense fog, brilliant sunshine and pouring rain (in that order) inside of half an hour. In Greymouth a deluge began five minutes before the coach arrived at the hostel and lasted until just after we made it inside. Ten minutes after that the sun was shining from a bright blue sky once again.

But we were also incredibly lucky on occasions. The west coast of New Zealand's south island is one of the wettest places on earth, receiving an average of between 4 and 10 metres of rainfall per year, but we had perfect sunshine all the way from Greymouth to Queenstown.

The coach drivers and tour guides around New Zealand are full of useful facts like the rainfall stat above, and from them I have amassed a rather disturbing picture. While New Zealand is very proud of its green image and conservation efforts, much of this work began too late. New Zealand has been an island for somewhere between 130 and 85 million years, and as a result houses a number of unique species of flora and fauna. It has only four indigenous species of mammal - one mouse and three types of bat (one of which is now extinct) - and no indigenous predators, so many of the birds are flightless. When the Maori arrived they hunted 32 species of bird to extinction, included all the breeds of Mao, and the European settlers added 19 more. In total, almost 50% of New Zealand's indigenous birds are now extinct.

In addition the vast majority of New Zealand's native forest has been cut down, mostly to provide space for farmland, and with it went the habitats for a number of the surviving species. Strangely, New Zealand is currently home to some of the world's largest man made forests, but farming has apparently become more profitable than forestry again, and large portions of these are being cleared. They love to chop trees down here.

In short, New Zealand has already lost a staggering amount of its native life, and without ongoing conservation efforts there will be more extinctions. These efforts, incidentally, consist mostly of poisoning and trapping the introduced predators. Just like Australia, New Zealand has suffered greatly from the introduction of foreign creatures. Rabbits were imported for meat and fur trades, and unsurprisingly spread quickly across the country, munching as they went. In a moment of genius, farmers then decided that the rabbits could be controlled by the introduction of stoats, weasels and ferrets - none of whom read the script and instead preyed upon the eggs and young of the native flightless birds who had no means of defence or escape.

But New Zealand's biggest pest is the possum. Introduced once again for their fur, they escaped into the wild and now number around 60 million, eating both eggs and plants at a prodigious rate. It is common practice for drivers in New Zealand to go out of their way - literally - to run over possums crossing the road (a pastime confirmed by the common site of the resultant roadkill) and apparently not even Greenpeace protest, and when that is the case you know something has gone wrong.

The loss of indigenous species and the sheer stupidity displayed in the introduction of foreign ones upsets me greatly - humanity has destroyed so much of this planet with similar careless, wasteful and idiotic acts, and nothing we do from now on is going to be enough to properly restore it. From a personally selfish point of view, I would like to see as much of it as possible before further irreversible damage is done. So please humanity, for my sake (and yours), stop it now.