Nga Uruora

I am part-listening to a radio programme talking about deforestation in New Zealand and the history of ecological change in New Zealand. It is a based on a book which I think has the name Nga Uruora (The grove of life).

There was a line, that I will paraphrase:

"When the new purchasers of the land found that the lush wet forest was not what it cracked up to be, quickly went about felling the trees... Naturally later, men saw the floods, erosion and landslides as anomalies for the land rather than their own occupation..."

We have had some devastating floods lately. In fact, in the history of my family, it was devastating Waikato floods in 1980 that caused massive losses of lambs on my father's farm that caused us to move to Helensville for market gardening.