'World-leading’ salmon farming standards needed for forestry in Marlborough Sounds

Abstract

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” wrote the American forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold in 1949. Leopold saw the land and people as part of the same community, a concept familiar to tangata whenua too. He could also have been writing about the Pelorus/Te Hoiere River and Marlborough Sounds, when he asked, what do we love: ‘Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver”. It is 46 years since the first complaint about soil erosion and excessive sedimentation from forest harvesting on the Marlborough Sounds environment, and yet harvesting remains poorly regulated. In a paper recently published in the NZ Journal of Forestry, I reviewed the history of forestry regulation in the Sounds and identified opportunities for doing things better. More on that later.