My opinion of New Zealand

I like to regard the holiday period (ie the time between Christmas and the New Year) to be considered as one with family. It's nice to spend New Years as a family to clean the slate together, or perhaps to enjoy good food together at Christmas. Unfortunately I only enjoy the latter, although in hindsight I should be grateful to enjoy one in the first place. Last New Year's I was asleep with the family around, and I suppose I considered it much more enjoyable than spending one in New Zealand. As such I landed in New Zealand with a slight sour taste in my mouth. 

But it's hard to not enjoy New Zealand, at least initially. It's hard to disregard the beautiful scenery around you. I like to think of New Zealand of being "at the end of the world", it being so far away from civilisation and as such being the piece of land most untouched by humans. 

Lake Tekapo was one of my first stops on my New Zealand trip. This photo has been unfiltered, and the place looks as beautiful as what we see in the picture. 

At the same time I was reading a book called "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert, which features many of the things that humans have done to kill of the world around us, in effect the rate of which we are destroying species being equal to that of a Sixth Great Extinction. I suppose that at the time I considered all things natural beautiful, and I got to appreciate New Zealand a lot more. 

What was most saddening on the trip is what is no longer there. The ice caps on the mountains surrounding Lake Tekapo are no longer there or are only small ice caps at the tip. If you look hard enough you will be able to see rivers carved out by the flowing water from the ice that is melting as we look at it. We spent hours trying to find glaciers, only to find places where the glaciers has once been. Instead we see another river, collecting more water from the ice uphill that was once part of a huge glacier that expanded from the mountain top to our feet. Looking at the places carved out by the ice, it's not hard to imagine the mass sheet of ice that was once there.

New Zealand customs try its best to make sure that no new diseases or animals are introduced to this very fragile ecosystem, but the damage seems to already have been done. Almost immediately after humans have entered Moas, huge beautiful flightless birds, disappeared. 65% of the land masses were used up for a population less numbered and dense relative to that of Singapore. The first humans brought stouts, which roamed the areas and killed all the flightless birds and ate the eggs. We brought new diseases that killed ecosystems and introduced animals into an environment that they would otherwise have not touched for more than million years. Kolbert calls this the "New Pangea". I stand on top of a mountain expecting to see trees as far as the eye can see. Instead I see farmland upon farmland, eating up the nutrients that is part of the land. All the forest has been cut down, and very little of it used. 

I find it saddening that instead of travelling to look at what once was, we appreciate more what is now there instead. My dad used to say "look at where the ice once was!" and could only imagine another saying "look at all the species that were once on Earth" or "look at all the land that was once available to us humans". Humans find it incomprehensible to imagine a world where we have done so much damage and we often find dystopian worlds shocking. What we don't realise is that we already live in such a world. Everywhere on the news there are assassinations taking places, more murders done by ISIS, and more political instability in the world. The only difference is that we don't see it or that we are gradually eased into this dystopian world that we fail to see the world transforming before our very eyes. 

At that point I realised that no matter what, New Zealand found its worst intruder yet: us, and that the destruction of the place has already been inevitable. Humans are the most selfish, evil beings of the world. We destroy the world for money, only to realise that at the end of the day we cannot eat money. We do things for pleasure at the expense of other people and the worst of it all is that we do it to live. It is by looking at the 'beauty' of New Zealand that I see the sickness in humans. We as humans have done nothing to help the development of the Earth and our intrusion is only one of a paralytic nature. 

There were moments that I wanted to break down and cry, and even the closest of my friends would never see me cry. Yet while I looked on at the horror of the world, many others would point at the exhibit and say "Look! A Moa!". My opinion of New Zealand is: enjoy it while it lasts, because it will soon be gone like the rest of the world.

Cheers,

Matthew Tan