It seems both ironic, yet at the same time intensely appropriate to me that New Zealand’s first major environmental publication was written by a farmer – one of the many who helped to so dramatically transform the land into the landscape we take for granted today.
Tutira: the story of a New Zealand sheep station (1921) was written by William Herbert Guthrie-Smith about his sheep station in the Hawkes Bay [click here to view location]. In particular, he chronicled – with meticulous detail – the way he developed the land, and the implications that these “improvements” had for the ecological, hydrological and geological systems that had functioned within the landscape for thousands of years.
Tutira became an internationally acclaimed classic of ecological writing, and is generally seen as New Zealand’s first major environmentalist publication. (more…)
December 10, 2011
A history of environmental history in New Zealand
Posted by envirohistorynz under commentary | Tags: arbor day, Donald Worster, environmental attitudes, Environmental History, Herbert Guthrie-Smith, New Zealand, Paul Star, Rangitikei, regional history, sheep |1 Comment
It is a great little article, written in Star’s characteristic reader-friendly, jargon-free style, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in this field. (more…)
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