An Auckland conservationist who’s spent the past 30 years educating the Chinese community about New Zealand’s environment says when it comes to rock pool hunting, it’s time to rethink our approach.
Estella Lee founded the Chinese Conservation and Education Trust, and says when they learn what it’s all about, Chinese people want to take part in conservation activities.
But she says tourists and new immigrants need to be taught why they shouldn’t just take all they can from tidal waters – and to be motivated by the threat of penalties for doing so.
She’s reacting to increasingly heated confrontations mostly along Auckland coastlines, some of which have been racist in nature, with abuse hurled at Asian families.
The most intense have been centred around the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, where there is now a two-year ban on taking seaweed, shellfish or other rockpool sea life, including sponges, starfish, sea anemones and sea cucumbers.
The decision by Fisheries Minister Shane Jones came after extensive lobbying and an application by local iwi for a ban along the peninsula and also further north at Kawau Bay and Ōmaha Bay. Fines can be dished out between $5000 and $100,000, and in serious offences items including vehicles could be seized.
Residents in other coastline communities want similar moves, and the Government is currently considering four options for shore-based harvesting that would offer increased protections from Auckland to Coromandel. They include a full intertidal closure, a partial closure with daily limits on some shellfish species, and more harvesting limits outside of the closure area.
Estella Lee says the way to get through to new immigrants and Chinese tourists is both with education before they arrive here, and the threat of penalties such as instant fines or vehicle confiscation for breaching bans. She says even if there aren’t enough fisheries staff to police the coastlines, the knowledge that it’s not acceptable to strip the rocks of life and that there are consequences for doing so would help.
“They don’t know what they were doing is harmful to the environment,” she tells The Detail.
“We never had the chance to learn about marine animals. They see, ‘Wow the whole sea of cockles, why shouldn’t I harvest them all?’ They never had such a chance in their home country that they could do such a thing.
“First of all, it’s fun, and secondly, it’s a freebie. They don’t know they’re doing some damage to the sustainability of that area.”
Her belief is that bus loads of tourists are being taken to the beaches with buckets and tools provided as an extra activity they can do in New Zealand – it’s unlikely their tour companies know that the drivers are going off the itinerary to make some extra cash this way.
The answer, she says, is to confiscate those tour vehicles – and the threat of having to face up to their bosses afterwards would be a powerful disincentive.
Lee would also like to see increased educational opportunities in conjunction with the likes of the Department of Conservation, saying once Chinese Kiwis know about the New Zealand environment they’re keen to take part in helping to preserve it.
“I was very naive when I first came,” she says, “but New Zealand is very good; they try to educate people whenever possible. So I went walking in the Waitakere Ranges, and when I do the walk there is signage educating us.
“Gradually I learned that New Zealand is such a unique place, and what we can do to protect it.”
As the host of a Chinese language radio programme and author of a column in a Chinese newspaper, she researched more on the environment and developed a passion for it, and for spreading that passion into her community.
She says unfortunately those opportunities have fallen away.
Also on The Detail today, we travel to the North Shore’s Campbells Bay with Professor Andrew Jeffs, a marine scientist with the University of Auckland.
He explains the consequences of stripping the rocky shore of marine life, and says a mixture of education and legal restrictions are needed to stop it happening.
“When we were kids, we looked in rock pools and saw a lot of organisms there and as people are going, as they’ve grown older, they’ve looked in those rock pools and things have gone missing.
“I think that’s sort of resonated with a lot of people, and they’re feeling like something needs to be done about it.
“Younger people look in the rockpool and they don’t know any better, because where there should have been a starfish there’s no longer a starfish, but they don’t know that there was a starfish there previously.
“So I think it’s that older generation that’s got frustrated and wanted to see something done about it.”
Jeffs points out what is, and isn’t, left in those rock pools, and talks about the lives of the animals whose disappearance is affecting the ecosystem.
Listen right to the end of the podcast to find out which special creature he thought had disappeared – until we found one.
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