The final frontier?

A message from the edge.

I’m out here in New Zealand. It’s the furthest remnant of what was once the British Empire. You can tell by the occasional appearance of bemused Royalty and their representatives. They pop up at polo games and those cavalcades that look so unavoidably like Hitler in Paris.

The optimistically named Ministry for the Environment just released: Our environment 2025 Tō tātou taiao.

The report is a largely unemotional, statistical exercise. It’s a bit like a mini-Doomsday book. Except it counts things that have gone, rather than the value of the landscape that’s been conquered. Maybe they’re trying to work out what’s left to plunder?

Hearteningly, it provides a passing mention of the country’s indigenous people. They're cited as a valuable source for perspective on our relationship with the natural world. Kind of like the King’s glance out of the bullet proof window.

It also warns of “risks to people, communities and places which, left unaddressed, threaten our livelihoods and quality of life for generations to come.” Which most people will skate over as they consider whether to put ‘thumb up’ or ‘lightbulb’ on LinkedIn.

It only really comes into focus when considered with a sense of our history and future. Because what it is, is the story of human colonisation.

These islands were among the last places on Earth to be breached by what should be called Ignis simiae, the Fire Ape.

The first wave was when the people we call Māori arrived here around the thirteenth century. That led, predictably, to the destruction of about half the forest. We also got to work on killing some of the larger and more majestic birds, the enormous, ostrich-like Moa and the Haast’s Eagle - the largest eagle ever to have lived. But this being a relatively small population of non-industrialised people, it took 500 years. A slow burn.

But by the 1800s rum-swilling seal and whale killers from Europe had found the place. They were followed by waves of colonists and missionaries. They cut down a lot of the rest of the forests. It makes me wonder if this was because their God was all the way over in the Middle Eastern deserts and so didn’t really care that much. The report states, baldly: “Before the arrival of humans, native forest covered more than 80% of the land. It now covers less than 30%.”

As of now, we’ve killed a lot of the creatures that lived here. “In 2022, 36% (1,433 of 3,961) of assessed terrestrial invertebrate species were threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened. In 2021, 91% of indigenous marine bird species (82 of 90) were threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.”

We’ve poisoned the water. Stats in the report suggest that about half of the groundwater probably has E. coli in it from time to time. And it all contains microplastics. About half the nation’s rivers aren’t really clean enough to swim in.

And the skies. In 2014, 97% of New Zealand’s population lived under light-pollution. And the streetlights continue their march ever further across the countryside. Gas pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide are decreasing. But in 2023 global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were 419.3 parts per million (ppm). That's higher than at any time in at least two million years. They’re now at 431.13 ppm and accelerating.

We’ve done all this to run a European-style parasitical industrial economy on a cluster of small islands marooned in the Pacific.

It’s interesting even, to consider the extent to which New Zealand really exists as a nation at all. To this day it’s controlled by a relatively small group of colonists and offshore interests. It couldn’t defend itself if it even bothered to try from any serious attack. We tend to see it as a bunch of settled farms, when in fact it’s more like a multi-generational ram raid. Ironically, a pastime that the kids of the dispossessed here are now most known for.

And the effort to continue to expand this is ongoing.

According to the report, urban areas and intensive farming are continuing to expand with the population. They give a 90% probability of population increasing to between 5.55 and 6.65 million by 2048. That means it is highly likely to grow by at least 400,000 by then, compared with 2022.

But like all projections of this type beyond about a decade, all bets are off. None of the expert assessors have published anything on the prospect of more than one billion global refugees being on the move by 2050. It’s likely that at least some of them will be heading our way in the chaos. They probably won’t be asking nicely to come in anymore. On the other hand, a lot of New Zealanders may well die before then, as the Earth spirals into climate chaos.

It’s unclear whether the figure includes Elon and the rest bringing their illegitimate children here and burrowing like fucking goffers.

The irony is that Kiwis are still seen around the world as a somewhat bucolic, sustainable bunch. In fact they exemplify much of late, or more likely terminal, colonial capitalism. We consistently generate among the highest rates of municipal waste per person in the developed world. We sent an average of 688 kilograms of waste per person to municipal landfills each year between 2021 and 2023. That’s the equivalent of everyone in the country burying a bunch of trash the size and weight of a large dairy cow each year. Maybe we should make that a public holiday, or corporate 'give back' day.

And in the age of recycling this average increased by nearly a third (32%) from 2012 through 2018, although this has now reduced a bit.

The orcs are firmly in control of Middle Earth.

We’re just doing what we did back home, and hoping for the best. It’s a long-winded version of Brits in Spain pointing at English Breakfast menus. We’ve just convinced some Vietnamese people to run all the cafes.

Per capita vehicle ownership is among the highest in the world. The outsized Ford Ranger ute is still regularly the most popular new car. The cars, along with almost all the complex consumer goods and tonnes of waste we can’t handle, are imported. They come vast distances down increasingly shaky supply lines.

The obvious conclusion is that we haven’t really ever bothered to learn to live here. That’s certainly what I thought when I saw the state of the nation’s huts, I mean housing, when I first arrived in 2006. I used to ask people: “Are you not really intending to stay?”

All in all, we’re probably in for some kind of a long-curve version of the way those Vikings vanished after 500 years in Greenland. All they left behind was some dried fish and a lot of questions. Meanwhile, suspiciously well-fed Inuits waved at the investigators from canoes with runes tattooed on them.

I have a similar vision of Australia. Once they’ve all finished mincing about in leathers, fishnets and old police cars, the last few whiteys leave on a boat pushed off by some grinning Aborigines. “65,000 years of us so far. You blew it after about 400. That was weird. Let’s get back to what we were doing…”

Of course, things are never that simple, but it’s good to take time to dream.

This far frontier of the great capitalist experiment raises a question. Is there a point at which we’re intending to stop, and maybe even turn this around? Or are we really all just waiting to be stopped by the limitations and consequences of our actions? Are we now like serial killers no longer caring about the clues?

Are we like the white South Africans who suddenly seem to really like it here, trying to get away with it for as long as possible before doing a runner with our pockets full of diamonds?

Maybe that old racist trope: “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” Was right after all. We just applied it to the wrong people.