The conservation areas I care most about are under threat

Tadhg is working on the beautiful West Coast on conservation land threatened by the Conservation Amendment Bill.

I’m lucky enough to be getting my hands dirty working for a Predator Free 2050 project. I work in an area where we get to hear birdsong that is literally deafening at times.  It never fails to put a smile on my face. 

Working on conservation land you’ll understand how worried I am about the threat of the proposed Conservation Amendment Bill.

Luxon’s Government wants to gut the Conservation Act to open up public conservation land to private commercial exploitation.

Companies with commercial projects that plan to utilise the new law are already scratching at the door. They’re ready to sidestep any hurdle that might get in the way like pesky community and iwi engagement or expert environmental impact assessments. 

This is a line that cannot be crossed. Public conservation land is supposed to be set aside for nature, a safe haven for wildlife to thrive and for the public to enjoy. It’s not a resource for corporations to exploit. Yet Minister Shane Jones has said it honestly a few times, this Government means to ‘exploit mother nature’. 

Companies with commercial projects that plan to utilise the new law are already scratching at the door. They’re ready to sidestep any hurdle that might get in the way like pesky community and iwi engagement or expert environmental impact assessments. 

I grew up tramping with my family in the Ruahine Ranges. I got to see more of our forest parks with my uni tramping club and have since added climbing and caving as more ways to explore the beautiful mountains and forests of Aotearoa.  

These forest parks I love are all now threatened by the Conservation Amendment Bill.

One of my favourite places is Bullock Creek Punungairo on Te Tai o Poutini, The West Coast. It out does itself above and below ground, and within its postcard West Coast forest. 

There are labyrinthine limestone passages below the valley floor, dense stands of nikau that look straight out of the Jurassic up the sides and busting out at the top.

Bullock Creek Punungairo is a part of Paparoa National Park. Under the Conservation Amendment Bill you could expect to see those flourishing nikau cleared out of the way for a luxury retreat.

I have gotten into caving and am blown away by the surprising and stunning landscapes below ground. They can be just as stunning (and often as muddy) as the landscapes above them!

Yet even these karst areas, limestone landscape with sinkholes, and fluted rocky outcrops are now threatened by the Conservation Amendment Bill.

This Coalition Government has waged a war on nature over the last two and a half years. They have pushed to expand mining, build new fossil fuel infrastructure, re-open oil and gas exploration, weaken climate action, shut people out of environmental decision-making and undermine Te Tiriti o Waitangi. 

Now they’re threatening the places we thought would always be protected. The Government has created this ugly piece of legislation that threatens public access to the incredible wild places of Aotearoa.

They want short sighted extractive projects such as gold mining in our forest parks. Projects that mean public access would no longer be guaranteed.

This is why I’m urging you to join the March for Nature, coordinated by Greenpeace and Forest and Bird, and a host of other groups. The more of us who turn up, the more we will show every politician in the country that people all around Aotearoa want nature protected, not exploited.

March for Nature 2026

Join us in Auckland on Saturday, September 19th 2026 at 1pm for a peaceful protest to defend conservation land.

Take Action

 Recently I was part of an action to highlight the efforts of previous generations to protect the podocarp forest of the West Coast. We re-enacted an iconic photo of a tree sit in by Native Forest Action in 1997. It was part of the campaign that successfully stopped all logging of native forest on public lands.

Generations before us have fought to protect their local forests and wilderness areas – and because they did, many of those places and ecosystems are still here today. 

Now it’s our turn. On 19 September, let’s fill the streets of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. 

You may not be based in Auckland, but all of us have friends or whānau in the big city, or within an hour or two drive. 

If you think they also care about the rivers we swim in, the forests we walk through, the beaches where we spend our summers and the native wildlife found nowhere else on Earth, reach out to them to invite them to join the march.