Kauri Tree Nazis

While we were on New Zealand’s north island, we took the opportunity to visit a few of a handful of remaining Kauri trees in the Waipoua Forest. Years of logging the forests severely reduced the numbers of these giants, which are among the most ancient in the world. In fact, the antecedents of the kauri appeared during the Jurassic period (between 190 and 135 million years ago). Anyway, the largest remaining tree is approximately 1200 years old and still growing.

Now, to state the obvious, this tree has been around for a very long time, long before the department of conservation was ever dreamed up. People have undoubtedly lived around, near or underneath the tree, walked and tramped around it, hugged it, danced around it, attempted to climb it and hunted in its vicinity for all this time and yet it still lives. Pretty tough and hardy I’d say. Not according to the DOC who some time ago, as soon as the Kauri Forest was promoted as a tourist attraction, put signs up declaring that “the feeding roots of Kauri trees are shallow and delicate. Walking off the formed protective paths and boardwalks can kill these giant trees.” So let me get this straight, for thousands of years this tree has happily co-existed with indigenous peoples and has miraculously been spared the blade of the logger’s saw, and now, after all this time, walking around it may kill it? Unreal. Just another example of controlling the masses. The nanny state comes out to play again.

 

This kind of bureaucracy is also applied to spring water, which has sat protected several metres below the ground for thousands of years. Filtered by mineral-rich rocks, and preserved in its own spring, it is usually the purest water known to man and the longer it is left, the more minerals it absorbs. That is until we extract it for commercial sale and slap an expiry date on it. Our water of choice in NZ was ‘Waiwera’, bottled spring water that was voted “the world’s best water” by Decanter Magazine, 2008. On the strip label at the back it states that “GOOD TASTE TAKES TIME…15,000 years, in this case (by carbon dating). The natural artesian water you are about to drink predates civilization in New Zealand, not to mention the last ice age. Which makes it about as pure as you could find anywhere on the planet.” The best before date on the mid-section of the bottle read “30 MAR 2013.”