Thank you so much for your writing and the information here- it was heartening and beautiful to read (save the parts that occurred before the sheep). I'm a south islander who lives within the halo zone of Orokonui sanctuary. Personally, on our little farm we are rewilding and trapping heavily, and there's certainly some incredible souls who are working hard to make us predator free. Tīeke, or the SI Saddleback, was reintroduced just last week (cross your fingers for us! It's the second attempt after losing the entire crew from a single stoat incursion in the sanctuary fence in 2015).
As you already know the situation is heartbreaking (to say the least) and complex. One of the most challenging conversations / realities we come up against is the one around feral and uncontained domestic cats. For the most part, the "cat topic" sees people shut down, to the point where most organisations don't want to publicly confront it.
Regardless of the peaks and troughs, I'm so appreciative to read words of celebration when there seems little popping up that speaks to that organically of late. So thank you. Looking forward to reading more.
So good to have you join the conversation, Jane. Thank you for the SI perspective. I just read your wonderful Tieke piece and will be linking to it in my next post. I hope their mainland reintroduction is the first of many as the Predator Free 2050 work continues.
The "cat topic," indeed. That's something I'll touch on this week but have intended to do a full piece on someday. I have fairly strong feelings on the topic, and will likely lose some readers, but that's okay. I'd like to think that a large-scale agreement can be had about feral cats, at least. I remember glimpsing one far from human habitation on Stewart Island years ago and worrying about the damage it was doing. I'm hoping all the predator eradication work on that island, one of my favorite places in the world, will be successful.
I want to add also how happy I was to see some of Raymond Ching's work in your Tieke piece. We have two of his pencil sketches that I bought in a shop on Stewart Island.
And I am with you on the "cat topic" (I suspect). We can walk to the sanctuary from outside our back door, and yet are the only ones we can think of without a cat that lives in the halo zone. We also regularly see wildlings streak across the road, and do our bit to humanely contain them. It can be frustrating.
Stewart Island- I was a little heartbroken about the cats there, but like you, remain hopeful we can protect the beauty that remains.
Great post. Thanks, Jason. You may already read Melanie Newfield’s The Turnstone Substack, but if not, very related and excellent. She’s a NZ botanist specializing in invasive species.
Thank you for the reminder, Laura. I knew about the Turnstone but hadn't looked closely or subscribed. My inbox is already out of control, but your recommendation tells me I should take a closer look.
Thank you for this thoughtful look at NZ's work to remove at least some of the non-native predators. It's exciting to see it happening in a context of cooperation between NZ's Maori and the later-comers, and to see it continuing through different political administrations. I also very much appreciate your sensitivity to the issues of "killing for good," something I think about a lot as I work to limit invasive plant species and the havoc they wreak on the webs of living ecosystems here in the Rocky Mountain West. There's a lot to learn from what the efforts in NZ, and honestly, it's a source of hope to me to see the longevity and effectiveness of this work.
Thank you, Susan. I'll get into the thicket of ethics in the next post, but in general the NZ story is both hopeful and complicated. When we look to do similar work here on the transformed continents it gets even more complicated. The notion of "invasive" isn't always helpful, or blinds us to a reality that seems unlikely to change. And as for predators, here in the northeast coyotes are new arrivals but they're filling in where the larger predators once were, so what's the natural answer? And the barred owl/spotted owl nightmare in the west has no easy answers. Etc etc. But we do our best to find a better balance. Thanks for chiming in.
I agree that the term "invasive" isn't always helpful, but I haven't found a better one for cheatgrass, spotted knapweed, salt cedar and some of the other plants that have all-to-happily increased across the arid West, wreaking havoc on sagebrush communities and the hundreds of vertebrates and invertebrates they support and our region's waterways and riparian areas, which are so critical to all life. If you have a better term, I'd love to hear it. I'm a plant biologist, so I'm not going to weigh in on the barred owl/spotted owl debate or the coyote debate. (Colorado is reintroducing wolves, and that is a thorny issue in itself.) I'll look forward to the ethics post, and thanks again.
That's nicely said, Susan. The language around invasives isn't as important as the assessments we make of transformed ecologies and the decisions we take to cope with them. But Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume here on Substack focuses on that question and might be of interest (https://kollibri.substack.com/t/invasive-plants-5ee). Otherwise, thanks for doing the good work.
I appreciate Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume's points about xenophobia and blaming the messenger, but as someone who has been intimately involved with giving the community of the land help with reweaving itself in healthy ways, and seen how given a bit of space, indigenous plant communities flourish and with them the other species they support, I politely disagree. I wrote a chapter called "Weeds" in one of my books some thirty years ago about labels and how toxic they can be, so I am well aware of those issues. I just don't agree that it's okay to introduce species that create havoc and then just stand back and say, oh well, they're part of the "ecology" now. I think it's great to talk about these issues, but it's also important to ground truth our theories by working on the land.
Sorry--I'm thinking out loud and shouldn't burden you with all of my thoughts! Anyway, your post was an inspiration and I've clearly got this whole issue on my mind. Probably for another book after the one I"m writing now. Again, much appreciation to you.
No apology necessary, Susan. I think you make excellent points. I especially appreciate your idea that ideas are secondary to the work that can and should be done. I wasn't suggesting you had to agree with all of Kollibri's thinking, just that you might find his work worth reading. Thanks so much for bringing your expertise and experience to the conversation.
I highly recommend the book Wild Souls by Emma Marris. She dives right into the ethics of these predator free programs in NZ and Australia. One thing that I took away- even if you decide it's ethical to kill animals to save others, how you do it matters. Anticoagulant rat poison, the method of choice in most cases, kills in days and weeks by internal bleeding and in my opinion is unethical and extremely cruel.
Thank you, Moshe. I do need to read Wild Souls. It's been on my list for a while. And yes, I'll get into the ethics next week. There's no clean way out. How we kill matters, but when we kill matters too. Waiting decades to develop a similarly effective tool for rat eradication would have been a death-knell for those native species. It's the logic of war, but in the context of a tragedy that we created out of our species-wide refusal, over recent centuries, to consider our impacts. Stay tuned...
I have never been to New Zealand at all and I keep thinking about it and its stories of extinction and conservation from my comfortable chair in the colonizing nation.
I have a strong memory of sitting in the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge, watching a video of a helicopter scattering pellets of warfarin-laced bait from two huge hoppers all over the moors of Chatham island. This was after we'd heard the incredible story of its surviving snipe. The presenter, a senior conservationist, was triumphal and so was I, in half of my brain. I can remember thinking 'it's actually possible, we can actually win here, we can get rid of every last rat.' And *at the same time* thinking 'how can we possibly support this - I mean just look at it.' I have a dim idea what warfarin does, and really a dim idea is enough.
I didn't want to say it and I still don't but I was thinking 'is this really all that different to doing this kind of thing to humans?' And, after all, the reason conservationists don't do that kind of thing to humans isn't because it wouldn't be good for biodiversity.
And then, another cause of cognitive dissonance, there's the massive extinctions caused by the arrival of the ancestors of the Maori. At the same time, the Maori are cast in the role of the bearers of an indigenous wisdom about the relationship between man and nature which can save us. I'm not saying that is bad or inappropriate. As I say, I have never even been to Aotearoa and have never spoken about these things to a Maori person. What do I know? I can see ways that both of those things can be true, but stories are needed to explain how they can both be true and it doesn't seem like we're telling those stories.
All this makes me doubt that we really do need to prioritize simple messages and images and repeat them relentlessly like the right do. After all, Trump - and also Musk now, I think - don't seem to actually care whether their simple messages are in any sense true. They can talk *only* about things that are going to cause the biggest reactions because they just need to harness emotions in a way that will give them power.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Thank you, Nicholas. This is all very well said. I'm especially happy to hear Yeats being invoked. And you get to the heart of the cruel-to-be-kind ethical dilemma. I'll have more to say about that in the next post, but for now I'll just add that doing nothing is its own ethical failure. Like so many Anthropocene decisions, we're trapped between a host of difficult outcomes.
And yes, the Maori history is a big part of the extinction story. I'm not inside that conversation either, but my sense is that awareness of that history includes acknowledgement of the harms. They'd love to have the land healthy enough again that they can hunt/forage/fish for the species that fed their ancestors, but they're increasingly aware that they have to actively help heal the land.
As for the political messaging around rewilding and conservation, the simple truths are that nearly everybody wants a healthier, more vibrant and biodiverse landscape. What that looks like and how we get there is more complicated, but mostly the hard part is pushing past the deep-pocketed resource-extraction entities and their political lackeys.
Yeah, I'm not saying we should do nothing, I'm just saying I don't know what to do. And I worry that's just an excuse to do nothing... and I imagine that naming that worry gets me off the hook.
I got tired.
But I do think that we ecological 'experts' can be too prescriptive and I think there is a backlash to that. We absolutely do need to cut people off who imagine we can just let the rats alone and the birds will probably somehow be fine. We have to be clear that is factually wrong. But I think we have to be careful of going from there to 'it is a fact that we have to kill the rats.' Everyone wants a healthier, more vibrant and more biodiverse landscape if they can have it for free and with no hard choices, but we can't give it to them on those terms.
Really well said, Nicholas. In the end, I think, much of human reality and societal shifts are always going to amount to muddling along, hopefully in the right direction. The arc of the moral universe and all that... And the more clarity and unity in the effort to explain the difficult decisions of the Anthropocene rather than offering simple screeds, the better it will go. But there's so much (deliberate and otherwise) working against both clarity and unity these days that it's hard to see the path. More specifically, this discussion on what constitutes a healthy, biodiverse landscape is made infinitely harder by the increasing torque from rising temps, by the species-specific nature of nearly every aspect of Anthropocene culture, and by the ecological amnesia that increases by the year. Still, though, there are plenty of examples of generational projects to talk a community through the process of reversing some of our harms and partially rebuilding biodiverse places. I'm not sure what we can do other than keep doing more of those and try to create space at the top of societies to support or at least not get in the way of the good work.
I just read your beautiful piece "A civilization isn't what is ending" and want to add this: Uncertainty is the truest path, and you're on it. Thank you for that.
What is the true future for some of these flightless birds that have undergone such extreme genetic bottling that they are suffering terrible congenital diseases?
My hope is that they find a way through and can have the population be self sustaining without human intervention but a more realistic view is that unless they manage to add some genetic diversity through hybridisation (or something else) the species will remain human-managed.
Excellent question. The DOC article you offer here provides the scale of the problem and the range of possible solutions for the kakapo and other species on the brink. I don't have any insight into this, though, and can only hope that the slow, long-term breeding work they're doing will pay off until multiple populations are established. Human-managed for the foreseeable future, yes.
Thank you so much for your writing and the information here- it was heartening and beautiful to read (save the parts that occurred before the sheep). I'm a south islander who lives within the halo zone of Orokonui sanctuary. Personally, on our little farm we are rewilding and trapping heavily, and there's certainly some incredible souls who are working hard to make us predator free. Tīeke, or the SI Saddleback, was reintroduced just last week (cross your fingers for us! It's the second attempt after losing the entire crew from a single stoat incursion in the sanctuary fence in 2015).
As you already know the situation is heartbreaking (to say the least) and complex. One of the most challenging conversations / realities we come up against is the one around feral and uncontained domestic cats. For the most part, the "cat topic" sees people shut down, to the point where most organisations don't want to publicly confront it.
Regardless of the peaks and troughs, I'm so appreciative to read words of celebration when there seems little popping up that speaks to that organically of late. So thank you. Looking forward to reading more.
So good to have you join the conversation, Jane. Thank you for the SI perspective. I just read your wonderful Tieke piece and will be linking to it in my next post. I hope their mainland reintroduction is the first of many as the Predator Free 2050 work continues.
The "cat topic," indeed. That's something I'll touch on this week but have intended to do a full piece on someday. I have fairly strong feelings on the topic, and will likely lose some readers, but that's okay. I'd like to think that a large-scale agreement can be had about feral cats, at least. I remember glimpsing one far from human habitation on Stewart Island years ago and worrying about the damage it was doing. I'm hoping all the predator eradication work on that island, one of my favorite places in the world, will be successful.
I want to add also how happy I was to see some of Raymond Ching's work in your Tieke piece. We have two of his pencil sketches that I bought in a shop on Stewart Island.
Oh! Thank you- that is really kind.
And I am with you on the "cat topic" (I suspect). We can walk to the sanctuary from outside our back door, and yet are the only ones we can think of without a cat that lives in the halo zone. We also regularly see wildlings streak across the road, and do our bit to humanely contain them. It can be frustrating.
Stewart Island- I was a little heartbroken about the cats there, but like you, remain hopeful we can protect the beauty that remains.
Thank you for all your work, it's so appreciated.
Great post. Thanks, Jason. You may already read Melanie Newfield’s The Turnstone Substack, but if not, very related and excellent. She’s a NZ botanist specializing in invasive species.
Thank you for the reminder, Laura. I knew about the Turnstone but hadn't looked closely or subscribed. My inbox is already out of control, but your recommendation tells me I should take a closer look.
Appreciate the post and all the excellent comments.
Thank, Lori.
Thank you for this thoughtful look at NZ's work to remove at least some of the non-native predators. It's exciting to see it happening in a context of cooperation between NZ's Maori and the later-comers, and to see it continuing through different political administrations. I also very much appreciate your sensitivity to the issues of "killing for good," something I think about a lot as I work to limit invasive plant species and the havoc they wreak on the webs of living ecosystems here in the Rocky Mountain West. There's a lot to learn from what the efforts in NZ, and honestly, it's a source of hope to me to see the longevity and effectiveness of this work.
Thank you, Susan. I'll get into the thicket of ethics in the next post, but in general the NZ story is both hopeful and complicated. When we look to do similar work here on the transformed continents it gets even more complicated. The notion of "invasive" isn't always helpful, or blinds us to a reality that seems unlikely to change. And as for predators, here in the northeast coyotes are new arrivals but they're filling in where the larger predators once were, so what's the natural answer? And the barred owl/spotted owl nightmare in the west has no easy answers. Etc etc. But we do our best to find a better balance. Thanks for chiming in.
I agree that the term "invasive" isn't always helpful, but I haven't found a better one for cheatgrass, spotted knapweed, salt cedar and some of the other plants that have all-to-happily increased across the arid West, wreaking havoc on sagebrush communities and the hundreds of vertebrates and invertebrates they support and our region's waterways and riparian areas, which are so critical to all life. If you have a better term, I'd love to hear it. I'm a plant biologist, so I'm not going to weigh in on the barred owl/spotted owl debate or the coyote debate. (Colorado is reintroducing wolves, and that is a thorny issue in itself.) I'll look forward to the ethics post, and thanks again.
That's nicely said, Susan. The language around invasives isn't as important as the assessments we make of transformed ecologies and the decisions we take to cope with them. But Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume here on Substack focuses on that question and might be of interest (https://kollibri.substack.com/t/invasive-plants-5ee). Otherwise, thanks for doing the good work.
I appreciate Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume's points about xenophobia and blaming the messenger, but as someone who has been intimately involved with giving the community of the land help with reweaving itself in healthy ways, and seen how given a bit of space, indigenous plant communities flourish and with them the other species they support, I politely disagree. I wrote a chapter called "Weeds" in one of my books some thirty years ago about labels and how toxic they can be, so I am well aware of those issues. I just don't agree that it's okay to introduce species that create havoc and then just stand back and say, oh well, they're part of the "ecology" now. I think it's great to talk about these issues, but it's also important to ground truth our theories by working on the land.
Sorry--I'm thinking out loud and shouldn't burden you with all of my thoughts! Anyway, your post was an inspiration and I've clearly got this whole issue on my mind. Probably for another book after the one I"m writing now. Again, much appreciation to you.
No apology necessary, Susan. I think you make excellent points. I especially appreciate your idea that ideas are secondary to the work that can and should be done. I wasn't suggesting you had to agree with all of Kollibri's thinking, just that you might find his work worth reading. Thanks so much for bringing your expertise and experience to the conversation.
I highly recommend the book Wild Souls by Emma Marris. She dives right into the ethics of these predator free programs in NZ and Australia. One thing that I took away- even if you decide it's ethical to kill animals to save others, how you do it matters. Anticoagulant rat poison, the method of choice in most cases, kills in days and weeks by internal bleeding and in my opinion is unethical and extremely cruel.
Thank you, Moshe. I do need to read Wild Souls. It's been on my list for a while. And yes, I'll get into the ethics next week. There's no clean way out. How we kill matters, but when we kill matters too. Waiting decades to develop a similarly effective tool for rat eradication would have been a death-knell for those native species. It's the logic of war, but in the context of a tragedy that we created out of our species-wide refusal, over recent centuries, to consider our impacts. Stay tuned...
I have never been to New Zealand at all and I keep thinking about it and its stories of extinction and conservation from my comfortable chair in the colonizing nation.
I have a strong memory of sitting in the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge, watching a video of a helicopter scattering pellets of warfarin-laced bait from two huge hoppers all over the moors of Chatham island. This was after we'd heard the incredible story of its surviving snipe. The presenter, a senior conservationist, was triumphal and so was I, in half of my brain. I can remember thinking 'it's actually possible, we can actually win here, we can get rid of every last rat.' And *at the same time* thinking 'how can we possibly support this - I mean just look at it.' I have a dim idea what warfarin does, and really a dim idea is enough.
I didn't want to say it and I still don't but I was thinking 'is this really all that different to doing this kind of thing to humans?' And, after all, the reason conservationists don't do that kind of thing to humans isn't because it wouldn't be good for biodiversity.
And then, another cause of cognitive dissonance, there's the massive extinctions caused by the arrival of the ancestors of the Maori. At the same time, the Maori are cast in the role of the bearers of an indigenous wisdom about the relationship between man and nature which can save us. I'm not saying that is bad or inappropriate. As I say, I have never even been to Aotearoa and have never spoken about these things to a Maori person. What do I know? I can see ways that both of those things can be true, but stories are needed to explain how they can both be true and it doesn't seem like we're telling those stories.
All this makes me doubt that we really do need to prioritize simple messages and images and repeat them relentlessly like the right do. After all, Trump - and also Musk now, I think - don't seem to actually care whether their simple messages are in any sense true. They can talk *only* about things that are going to cause the biggest reactions because they just need to harness emotions in a way that will give them power.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Thank you, Nicholas. This is all very well said. I'm especially happy to hear Yeats being invoked. And you get to the heart of the cruel-to-be-kind ethical dilemma. I'll have more to say about that in the next post, but for now I'll just add that doing nothing is its own ethical failure. Like so many Anthropocene decisions, we're trapped between a host of difficult outcomes.
And yes, the Maori history is a big part of the extinction story. I'm not inside that conversation either, but my sense is that awareness of that history includes acknowledgement of the harms. They'd love to have the land healthy enough again that they can hunt/forage/fish for the species that fed their ancestors, but they're increasingly aware that they have to actively help heal the land.
As for the political messaging around rewilding and conservation, the simple truths are that nearly everybody wants a healthier, more vibrant and biodiverse landscape. What that looks like and how we get there is more complicated, but mostly the hard part is pushing past the deep-pocketed resource-extraction entities and their political lackeys.
Yeah, I'm not saying we should do nothing, I'm just saying I don't know what to do. And I worry that's just an excuse to do nothing... and I imagine that naming that worry gets me off the hook.
I got tired.
But I do think that we ecological 'experts' can be too prescriptive and I think there is a backlash to that. We absolutely do need to cut people off who imagine we can just let the rats alone and the birds will probably somehow be fine. We have to be clear that is factually wrong. But I think we have to be careful of going from there to 'it is a fact that we have to kill the rats.' Everyone wants a healthier, more vibrant and more biodiverse landscape if they can have it for free and with no hard choices, but we can't give it to them on those terms.
Really well said, Nicholas. In the end, I think, much of human reality and societal shifts are always going to amount to muddling along, hopefully in the right direction. The arc of the moral universe and all that... And the more clarity and unity in the effort to explain the difficult decisions of the Anthropocene rather than offering simple screeds, the better it will go. But there's so much (deliberate and otherwise) working against both clarity and unity these days that it's hard to see the path. More specifically, this discussion on what constitutes a healthy, biodiverse landscape is made infinitely harder by the increasing torque from rising temps, by the species-specific nature of nearly every aspect of Anthropocene culture, and by the ecological amnesia that increases by the year. Still, though, there are plenty of examples of generational projects to talk a community through the process of reversing some of our harms and partially rebuilding biodiverse places. I'm not sure what we can do other than keep doing more of those and try to create space at the top of societies to support or at least not get in the way of the good work.
I just read your beautiful piece "A civilization isn't what is ending" and want to add this: Uncertainty is the truest path, and you're on it. Thank you for that.
What is the true future for some of these flightless birds that have undergone such extreme genetic bottling that they are suffering terrible congenital diseases?
I did a little research myself on this and found this article https://www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/kakapo-recovery/what-we-do/research-for-the-future/
My hope is that they find a way through and can have the population be self sustaining without human intervention but a more realistic view is that unless they manage to add some genetic diversity through hybridisation (or something else) the species will remain human-managed.
Excellent question. The DOC article you offer here provides the scale of the problem and the range of possible solutions for the kakapo and other species on the brink. I don't have any insight into this, though, and can only hope that the slow, long-term breeding work they're doing will pay off until multiple populations are established. Human-managed for the foreseeable future, yes.