The Hinemoa's men hauled 10 large, wooden crates from the steamship, dragged them through the shallows and onto the sand. There were six females and four males, all less than a year old, about a metre and a half in height at the shoulder. The animals stepped carefully into the dim light.
Read MoreLife hackers →
Gene editing has the potential to improve lab research, create new crop varieties, eradicate pests, wipe out pathogens, manage threatened species, and bring extinct ones back from the dead.
That’s the idea, anyway. The reality is we haven’t done much of this yet—and we’re still in the middle of asking ourselves if we should. New Zealand could be at the forefront of gene editing, or take a principled stance against it.
Cold Comfort →
“It was a tough night,” wrote a content John Key on November 26, 2007. “Roast chicken, lemon tart and heap’s of grog.” John Key had a recurring trouble with apostrophes. “It’s condition 3 so if I don’t make it out my team mate’s ate me.”
“Kiwi A-frame,” he concluded: “a national treasure.”
PHOTO: ©Mike White
Read MoreA tale of two currents →
For kayakers like Venable, it is the diminishment of wilderness that is the main reason for opposing Westpower’s plans for hydro on the Waitaha—not merely the loss of a kayaking opportunity. Although most of the river would be unaffected by the scheme, the loss of the final reach would mar the experience of the whole—like tearing the last chapter out of a thriller.
Read MoreI founded Happy Cow Milk to make a difference in dairying. I failed. →
I founded Happy Cow Milk to make a difference. But last week I had to admit to myself that I failed.
I made the decision to shut down the business and I faced the hard truth that I haven’t really made any difference at all. So what went wrong?
In a country awash with milk – with so much invested – you’d think a few small changes would be easy. And you’d be wrong.
Half a million hectares - sold →
"It's a completely ridiculous process," he says about tenure review.
"First of all, the land should be retained as public land, but if there's going to be huge profits made it should come back to the state, the people who own this land.
"This has happened behind closed doors, as far as I can see. They're not looking at the interests of the public or the wider country at large."
Read MoreNZ needs to plant more trees to combat climate change – but what kind and where? →
The deluge of logging waste at Loudon farm points to a massive weakness in the country’s plantation forestry system. The so-called “window of vulnerability” is a period of about six years after a radiata crop has been clear-felled, during which the land lies raw, unprotected and at the mercy of rainstorms and cyclones.
Read MoreGold rush →
To watch a beehive is to observe a city of 50,000 residents, a fast-moving portrait of time and life collapsed: birth, growth, work, breeding, death.
Read MoreMoney markets and global leaders (except Trump) front up to climate change →
When it came to climate change and the potential global supply of fossil fuels, “nobody had done the maths”, Campanale tells the Listener. But the new research on the total carbon budget made it possible to run the calculations. With financial backing from philanthropists, Carbon Tracker was able to hire the analytical brainpower needed to go through the published reserves of the world’s biggest publicly listed oil, coal and gas companies and figure out how much of those reserves could be burnt while remaining within the global carbon budget.
The conclusion was stunning: the world’s fossil-fuel companies owned reserves which, if burnt, would dump 2795 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, but the carbon budget showed there was room for only a further 565 gigatonnes.
Read MoreThe hunting of the Snipe →
Snipe are not one of the stars of New Zealand’s pantheon of threatened birds. Small, speckled brown, with a long probing beak like a kiwi, they look like a wading bird that’s gone bush. Their eyes seem set too far back in their heads, giving them a dopey expression. Perfect rat-bait, they’ve long been gone from the mainland, and most New Zealanders have never seen one.
But the story of snipe is one of tragedy and mystery, miraculous resurrection and myth. Almost flightless by day, the snipe’s terrifying alter-ego, the hākawai, haunts the night sky. Catching them involves prancing through the scrub with a butterfly net.
Read MoreThe last of the giants →
They counted their age in centuries, but it took them less than a decade to die. In kauri time that’s a sudden accident—a heart attack.
Kauri have suffered two great tragedies, and now a third is in progress. The first was logging, when more than 99 per cent of the forest giants were taken. The second was the arrival of agathidicida. The third is our failure to do anything about it.
Eaten alive →
"I thought by the time it gets to me, I'll be too old to really care. But in the last three years it's just happened so fast," says Gavin Sykes, who lives in Granity.
"People used to use our backyard to have 60th birthdays and all sorts of things. This was beautiful, this backyard. We had plants, nice grass... It was a beautiful area and the sea's just f...ed it.
"Right now, it could be all over for us in a year."
Snow birds →
Harrow, a pharmaceutical salesman by trade, is sunny and affable. He’s the sort of person who trusts in the kindness of strangers, has difficulty seeing anything as insurmountable, and describes a 12-hour tramp as an ideal Saturday. The mystery of the snow birds was exactly the type of challenge he relished.
Read MoreKiwi seed hunters travel the world so scientists can breed 'super-grass' →
In Palmerston North, the seeds go into a dry room, which looks like a supermarket’s walk-in beer chiller. There they can stay fresh for at least 20 years – and up to a century – before they need replanting. “We have some cultivars from 1940 that are still viable,” says Ghamkar.
The fridge that stores the seeds is locked, but it is not a fortress. On starting his job as director last year, Ghamkar was horrified to learn that New Zealand did not have a back-up collection in Svalbard, the doomsday vault on an island off Norway, which is built to withstand even nuclear winter. “Even North Korea has a deposit there,” he says.
In search of the grey ghost →
I start to wonder whether Buckingham sees himself as a kind of latter-day Charlie Douglas. With so much of New Zealand already explored, perhaps finding a bird believed to be extinct is the equivalent of discovering a new species, mapping a new valley, naming a mountain range.
“Charlie’s a cult hero for me; I would have been his best friend, I think!” Buckingham tells me later. They’re both a bit reclusive, both bushmen, both bird-lovers and bachelors. “We have so much in common,” he says. “I was just born 100 years too late.”
Buried treasure →
This is New Zealand’s third kauri bonanza: first the forests were felled, then the gum was dug up. What’s left is the swamp kauri, or ancient kauri, or sub-fossil kauri, depending on who you ask. And depending on who you ask, it’s a taonga, a precious and wonderful timber, a unique scientific resource and globally-significant record of climate change, a source of employment, the focus of illegal activity and the agent of destruction of Northland’s rare and vanishing wetlands.
Read MoreThe puzzle of pilot whales →
What kind of animal are these, which we rarely see except when they come to grief—increasingly a shared grief, theirs and ours. If we are so disposed, we might ask who these creatures are—warm-blooded like us, possessing brains of deep complexity and wondrous size. Who are these ocean minds?
Read MoreWithout a trace →
He told them what he was planning, and Karen started worrying. They’d been up Mt Owen several times, but the route Levy had in mind wasn’t something they would have attempted—and they had managed the distance from Courthouse Flat to the hut with no trouble. She said, “Do you realise how far that is?”
Levy’s route took him up the mountain, and across a marble boulderfield riddled with crevasses. He was walking into a minefield.
Read MoreRachel Stewart: the woman who turned on her own tribe →
There's any number of urban greenies who are rude about farmers, and who'll rail against agricultural pollution and animal cruelty and factory farming. But Stewart is one of them, or at least used to be. She was driving the tractor and the hay baler before she was 10. She can fix a chainsaw and string a fence. When the stock on her family's farm shat in the water she didn't think much of it. And from the mid-1990s she was a policy researcher, then treasurer, then president of the Whanganui chapter of Federated Farmers. Back then, she wasn't terribly fond of having greenies telling her and the farmers what they should be doing on their land.
Now, in print, online, on Twitter, in speeches to rooms full of blindsided farmers, she does just that. She has turned on her own tribe.
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The future of our forests →
King wants to take me to a lookout point to get a vista over the forest, but the rain has come, spreading across the hills like a cloak and blotting out the view. As I leave, I thank him for Pureora, for snatching the chiefly totara—the rakau rangatira—from the teeth of the chainsaws. King remarks that we have fewer tall totara standing today than we have MPs, and there are no reserves specifically set aside for totara. “Yet this is our national tree for eulogy,” he says. Kua hinga te totara. A totara has fallen.
He shakes his head. “It’s incredible what we have lost.”
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