The human impact on New Zealand revealed in captivating new book

Footprints on the Land
How Humans Changed New Zealand 

Richard Wolfe

It must have been a hell of a shock. After millions of years of isolation, New Zealand’s unique flora and fauna suddenly felt the stir of human footprints just over 800 years ago. 

In the blink of an eye in terms of the Earth’s history, the last large landmass to be settled by humans changed in ways impossible to reverse. 

 

Footprints on the Land narrates those changes, taking in the destruction of forests, draining and flooding land, building railways and roads, farming and mining, and the inexorable spread of towns and cities. 

Some of the more dramatic changes, carried out in the name of progress, appear very differently through a modern lens. 

 

Richard Wolfe accompanies his even-handed account of the effects of human settlement with an astute selection of paintings and photography befitting a curator and art writer. 

He also charts the growth of the environmental movement, with a number of high-profile national campaigns. 

That heightened awareness has helped to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, but Wolfe shows compellingly that we are not yet — as it were — out of the woods. 

Habitat destruction, pollution, species introductions and (above all) climate change threaten the short history of people on these islands. When will the shock be absorbed?

The Author

Richard Wolfe is a cultural historian and curator who has written or co-authored some 40 books on themes from the moa to New Zealand art, including Hellhole of the Pacific and New Zealand’s Lost Heritage. He was a display artist at the Auckland and Canterbury museums, and co-curated the first major exhibition of Kiwiana (a term he helped invent). Richard lives with his artist wife Pamela in Auckland.

Publication Date: 12 October 2022 |  ISBN: 978-1-99-004220-1 |  RRP $45

Paperback, 250 x 185 mm portrait, 184 pages, b/w with colour sections