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Eric Pawson, Tom Brooking, Eds, Environmental Histories of New Zealand, Oxford University Press,

Melbourne, 2002, xvii C 342 pages, AU$39.95 paperback.

New Zealand has long attracted international historical and geographical attention as a kind of

ecological and social laboratory. The Canadian historical geographer, Andrew Hill Clark, wrote a

pioneering book in 1949 about ‘revolutionary change’ called The Invasion of New Zealand by People,

Plants and Animals (Rutgers University Press), and Alfred Crosby devoted the longest chapter in his

Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1986) to a case study of New Zealand. The

remarkable memoir by the pastoralist, Herbert Guthrie-Smith, called Tutira: The Story of a New

Zealand Sheep Station, which was first published in 1921 and most recently republished in the United

States in 1999 (University of Washington Press), has introduced many distinguished outsiders (such as

the American historians William Cronon and Richard White) not only to New Zealand but also to

environmental history. The New Zealand historian, James Belich, observed in Paradise Reforged

(Penguin, 2001) that it is the speed, not the length, of New Zealand history that makes it remarkable—

and hence traumatic. This outstanding new collection of essays on the environmental history of New

Zealand pays tribute to this lineage of scholarship and reflection, but itself constitutes the first

comprehensive assessment of this dimension of the country’s past. Richard White, in his Foreword to

the book, states that ‘In its sweep, its curiosity, and its ambition, I do not know of an equivalent

for any other country in the world’ (p. iv). That is a strong claim for the book, and in my view, a

justified one.

The environmental transformation wrought by Maori and Pakeha over just hundreds of years has

been dramatic, and contradicts New Zealand’s current tourist image as harmoniously ‘clean and

green’. It was this national historical amnesia about the timelessness of ‘beautiful landscapes’ that

provoked one of the editors of this volume, historian Tom Brooking, to gather research about how

bush and scrub became farms, forests and gardens. The other editor, geographer Eric Pawson,

worked for 7 years as a contributing editor of the impressive New Zealand Historical Atlas (1997).

Their collaboration in this book has delivered a strong and sure editorial coherence with the result

that this collection of essays, many of which are very fine indeed, really is greater than the sum of its

parts. As a whole, it represents not just a stimulating series of New Zealand studies but also an

argument about the field of environmental history itself, a sub-discipline that is still self-consciously

emerging. The volume consistently tries, and mostly succeeds, in straddling culture and nature,

society and ecology. In its close attention to ecological perspectives it positions itself as an

intellectual descendant of Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira, but it also embraces some more traditional

geographical perspectives of space, place and landscape, as well as some postcolonial and

transnational politics. The collection also manages to cover subjects often neglected by

environmental history such as urban places and mining.

The chapters are uniformly of a high standard, but five will serve here to illustrate the range and

strength of the collection. Atholl Anderson offers a masterly summary of the environmental effect of

pre-European Maori since their colonisation of New Zealand in the 12th or 13th century. Anderson

describes the widespread vertebrate extinctions and deforestation promptly caused by human

settlement and the learning and adaptation that followed, and he also analyses the century-long

debates about the environmental impact of these first settlers as well as the political uses of such

arguments today. The scholarly consensus is now towards accepting more recent dates for first

settlement (600–800 years ago rather than 2000 years ago as once thought) and a greater initial

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 792–823798

environmental impact than previously recognised. For example, the effect of Maori burning was

‘to virtually eliminate the forests of the eastern South Island in a fairly brief pulse of burning, AD

1300–1450’ (p. 31).

Graeme Wynn’s analysis of ‘The forest 1840–1920’ is impressive for the way he weaves together an

account of forest destruction with a history of the moral and environmental questioning and justification

that accompanied such energetic intervention. One historian of New Zealand, writing in 1909, described

the assault on the forest as a ‘pitiful war’ (p. 100). Wynn shows a society—‘a wooden world’—that

was driven but doubting, one that sometimes asked the question Guthrie-Smith famously posed

after a lifetime of pastoralism: ‘Have I for sixty years desecrated God’s earth and dubbed it

improvement?’

Geoff Park writes evocatively and poetically about swamp drainage, and hopefully will encourage

readers to discover also his outstanding book, Nga Uruora (The Groves of Life): Ecology and History in

a New Zealand Landscape (Victoria University Press, 1995). There has been an 85% decline in wetlands

in New Zealand since European settlement. Park links fen drainage in eastern England between the

1760s and 1840s to the colonial project in faraway New Zealand, and draws attention to the irony that

Europeans considered useless and primeval the very landscapes (the lowland forests) that Maori

considered among their most productive.

Tom Brooking, Robin Hodge and Vaughan Wood write about ‘The Grasslands Revolution

Reconsidered’, and this essay builds beautifully on New Zealand’s renowned status as a privileged

laboratory for studying human environmental impacts of global relevance. The ‘grasslands

revolution’—the rapid transformation of bush to pasture, and the attendant partnership of science

and agriculture—offers a powerful case study in modern environmental history, and one that has

clear international parallels. The cultivation of grasslands is so fundamental a form of environmental

change that it has often been overlooked. In this way the chapter exemplifies another strength of this

collection, which is a sustained interest in the historical relationship of science, nature and the

economy.

My final example is Thomas Isern’s philosophical and practical reflection on what the history of New

Zealand’s introduced pests and weeds tells us about future environmental management. He overturns the

common expectation that land, if abandoned, will heal itself, and he brands this view as ‘a passive-green

approach to environmentalism’ (p. 244). He warns against a ‘bellicose, national-security rhetoric that

pits virtuous natives in moral contest against an evil empire of alien invaders’ (p. 245). Isern argues

instead for traditions of ‘moderate, responsible human engagement with nature’ (p. 240). The whole

book bristles with stimulating arguments that are ecological, moral and historical, and often seamlessly

all three.

Tom Griffiths

Research School of Social Sciences

Australian National University

Australia

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.12.001