New worries for the Wairarapa

Abstract

This week I drove with my daughters through dry, summer-hard country to the Wairarapa coast. We make the trip several times a year, and each time the creeping darkness of tens of thousands of acres of pinus radiata has encroached a little further onto the once
prosperous farmland .

I was poignantly reminded of a conversation I'd just had with a friend, after she'd spent a day delivering census papers out to the coast. Census enumerators are supplied with demographic figures from five years earlier to ensure they miss no-one in these remote areas. She reckoned that the population of this particular part of rural Wairarapa had fallen by at least 30% since 1991. The farmers who have stayed hate the pine forests. Some of them now live in what amounts to forest clearings, without neighbours near at hand, going slowly mad with loneliness and claustrophobia . Pinus radiata has even changed the climate. At least one coastal farm has been experiencing winter frosts the last year or two - where no frost has lain since the beginning of time.