Thia is a bit darker than the meme offers, but, its very hard to emphasize the shear scope of environmental destruction that was wrought upon New Zealand. This article might be a starting point for those interested, but it doesn’t even come remotely close to making clear what was lost, especially in the European period of colonization.

Its easy to think of a place like New Zealand in its current environmental context: sheep, cows, field crops, and a mix of European and North American species of timber selected for rapid growth and yield. A visit to the Kauri museum in Matehoke puts this history into stark relief, when you find out that prior to European colonization, even with the invasive species and environmental disturbance that the Māori had brought, NZ was effectively an in-tact time capsule of plant and animal evolution from almost 200 million years ago.

The scale and scope of the environmental destruction laid bare through the introduction of Europeans to NZ is simply unfathomable, to the point of being almost complete. So even though small in scale, these kinds of forests preserves hold some of the last remaining plant and animal species from the entire evolutionary legacy of the planet.