Burning Ourselves Out

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 240, 28 January 1944, Page 5

Burning Ourselves Out

F Macaulay had seen New Zealand during the last three or four weeks he might have written a new version of his famous forecast. Instead of standing on a broken arch of London Bridge sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s his traveller from New Zealand might have reported "a vast solitude" in New Zealand itself where once there had been forests and farms. For it would not have occurred to Macaulay that a people who had not learnt to be careful with fire after a century of intermittent destruction would learn before it had burnt itself out. He would have assumed that we had been born with some defect in our make-up that robbed us of the power of adapting ourselves to our environment, and that we would survive about as long as the Australian aboriginals. Perhaps he would have been wrong. But it would be easier to laugh at his folly if we were less active in exhibiting our own-if we had learnt, for example, how to ward off erosion in a country that produces trees twice as fast as they become twice as numerous; how to protect bush and grass in forty inches of rain, or more; how to put manure into the soil instead of smoke into the air; and how to deal with people who threaten our existence every time they smoke a cigarette. On the very driest days of the past dry month some farmers were lighting fires to improve the pasture. Picnickers were boiling billies in the creek-beds and even in the bush. Holders of gorse-infested suburban sections were cleaning them up with a match. As it happened, disaster threatened but did not come. We suffered some loss, but not much. Our "luck held"-as it has held so often; and as we so fatuously suppose it will continue to hold. It is for example raining as this note is being written. But it did not rain in many places last week or the week before or the two weeks before that. The sun beat down, the trees wilted, the grass» became straw — but smoke rose somewhere nearly every day.