Nga Uruora/the Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape

by Geoff Park

Nga The Groves of Life takes the study of New Zealand's natural environment in radical new directions. Part ecology, part history, part personal odyssey, this book offers a fresh perspective on our landscapes and our relationships with them. Geoff Parks' research focuses on New Zealand's fertile coastal plains, country of rich opportunity for both Maori and European inhabitants, but country whose natural character has vanished from the experience of New Zealanders today. Beginning with James Cook's Endeavour party on the Hauraki Plains, and then the New Zealand Company's arrival in the valley that became the Hutt, Park takes us through the river flatlands where the imperatives of colonial settlement transformed the original forests and swamps with ruthless efficiency. Nga Uruora 's primary journey, however, is to four auspicious places - Tauwhare on the Mokau River, Papaitonga in Horowhenua, Whanganui Inlet and Punakaiki on the South Island's West Coast - where small remnants of the plains forests' indigenous ecosystems of kahikatea and harakeke still survive. The histories of these places, what they mean to Maori, their ecological vulnerability and their significance for conservation are major concerns. Park ties these issues together through the experience of the places themselves, their magic, immediacy and beauty. Alert to how ecology and history interact, and with respect for different ways of knowledge, Park takes issue with those ecologists who say that by the time Europeans arrived the fertile coastal plains had already been ravaged by Maori. He believes that if the last survivors of nga uruora are to become part of the quest for more sustainable ways with the land, the vital part Maori played keeping them alive last century will have to become central, once again, to their care.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction

376 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

Reviews

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you search for New Zealand wilderness on Google Images, you will turn up, by and large, photos from the remote and dramatic terrain of the southwestern South Island: Milford Sound, Mitre Peak, Lake Hāwea, Great Walks across the Southern Alps, horse treks in the High Country. Even stock photos of "Endemic New Zealand Tree Fern Forest" have a certain quality of verticality, taken in Whirinaki Forest Park in the rugged and inaccessible Te Urewera.

The observation at the heart of Ngā Uruora is that despite our islands once being blanketed from coast to coast in it, lowland forest is no longer a feature either of the New Zealand landscape or of what we imagine as wild New Zealand. In the century after 1840, Geoff Park chronicles, European settlers stripped these islands of an entire ecological system: montane forests remained, in Te Urewera and the Waitākeres and Rimutakas and other places that would be difficult to farm; alpine ecosystems persisted, but the vast, species-rich, low-lying forests that characterised New Zealand for both tangata whenua and early settlers were utterly destroyed.

This isn't just a history of ecosystems, though. Ngā Uruora is ecological history at its wide-ranging finest, written by a poet laureate of natural history. Geoff Park was an ecologist by training and a historian by lifelong vocation: his ecological insights are complemented by a masterful grasp of sources reaching back to the late seventeenth century, and enriched by the judicious deployment of a storytelling flair that would make Zadie Smith blink. Ngā Uruora is at once illuminating, instructive, and intensely emotional. Park's ecological eye picks out the history coded into stands of karaka and kōwhai trees, his erudition binds it together with New Zealand's literary memory, and his extraordinary—for his time—cultural competence connects the whole to another, older New Zealand submerged but still persisting at the fringes of what's come after. Ngā Uruora captures and passes on a quiet, hopeful nostalgia for a New Zealand that was sedulously and unthinkingly destroyed before I was even born. It is a triumph among histories.

[Libby Brickell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ecology, history, storytelling. At once a devastating and thoroughly researched history of the disappearance of New Zealands's coastal and plains forrests/wetlands due to settlers desire for rich soil to turn to drained farmlands.... and a song of love to our beautiful land and the forrests which have so enriched our soil, to the way that Maori have understood the needs of the land and learned to live in harmony with it... and what we can do today to protect these places of wildness... by keeping our distance and by participating with nature in reciprocity. A wonderful and heady read.

[Kane Kvasnicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you care about newzealand , this is an essential read. One mans life works about the whenua of a country.