While on a hunt for early accounts of acclimatisation societies in New Zealand, I found this gem – a letter to the editor of the Otago Daily Times in 1867.
How times have changed!
(And anyone know who a “Venator” is?)
Otago
In search of Arcadia?
A series of articles were recently published on Environment and Nature in New Zealand, all drawn from essays written between 1989 and 2000 by students in history at the University of Otago.
A prominent theme in the essays covering the colonial period is the disconnect between the expectations of immigrants and the reality of what they found, particularly in respect to the environment. Continue reading
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Vanishing forests: pre-European transformation of the South Island
When we encounter the extensive tussocklands of the eastern South Island [see below right], it is hard to imagine any other landscape in that place – so much a part of the “natural” New Zealand landscape have they become. Yet, as explored in a previous post What is natural? The tussocklands of Lindis Pass, this is in fact a human-induced landscape; the tussocklands have replaced podocarp and beech forest [see left] that once covered the South Island. However, this occurred long before any written history was established, and this environmental history has had to be pieced together through painstaking paleoenvironmental research.
New ground-breaking research, undertaken by an team of both New Zealand and international scientists, has determined how, to what extent, and over what time-frame large tracts of South Island forest were destroyed. Continue reading
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The attack of the killer bunny
Anyone with children under five will probably be cognisant of the fact that while rabbits can be very nice, they can also be very bad – Bunnytown’s “Little Bad Bunny” is undeniable evidence of this fact.
Also providing ample evidence that rabbits in the wrong place at the wrong time can have a devastating impact on the environment, the economy and peoples’ livelihoods is the rabbit’s history in New Zealand. Its history here began in the 1830s; the first certain record of its introduction dating to 1838. Continue reading
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What is natural? – the tussocklands of Otago
The dramatic tussock-lands of Lindis Pass are one the iconic landscapes of the South Island, and much admired by the traveler on their way from Canterbury to Queenstown or beyond. So iconic has this landscape become, it is hard to believe that while the tussock vegetation is “indigenous”, it is not “natural”. Rather, it is a human-induced landscape.
Lindis Pass is part of an extensive “dryland zone” which extends along much of the eastern part of the South Island [see map below right]. Continue reading
envirohistory NZ 