The FreeRangers Movement - Beyond Left and Right Politics
- Gary Moller
- 4 hours ago
- 24 min read
What Happened to New Zealand's Environmental Movement?
Summary for busy people
I joined the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand in 1968, while still a teenager, at a time when environmental damage throughout much of New Zealand was confronting. Enormous areas of native forest had been cleared, further logging and land clearance were continuing, introduced browsing animals were ravaging what remained, and predators were devastating native wildlife. In 1972, while studying at Otago University, I became involved in the Save Manapouri campaign. That was also the year Tony Brunt founded the Values Party, a pioneering national environmental political parties.
I have therefore watched environmental politics develop in this country for almost 60 years. What follows is my personal recollection and opinion. Others, particularly members and supporters of the Green Party, may remember or interpret this history differently, and they are perfectly entitled to do so. My view is that, particularly from the 1990s onwards, the political Green movement became increasingly aligned with the socialist Left. Environmentalism remained important, but it became one part of a much broader political programme concerned with redistribution, taxation, collective provision, identity, ownership and the restructuring of economic and political power.
I do not think the answer is to abandon environmentalism. Quite the opposite. I think it is time to reclaim it as something that belongs to every New Zealander, regardless of political allegiance. This is one of the purposes of the FreeRangers movement. FreeRangers is not, and must never become, a political party or an appendage of one. Our objective is to help make New Zealand the best place in the world to live and raise a family. Healthy soil, clean water, nutritious food, thriving native forests, wildlife, productive farms, strong families, resilient communities, personal freedom and personal responsibility are all part of that vision.
The FreeRangers Movement is Beyond Left and Right Politics
As we approach the 2026 General Election, I believe New Zealanders should look beyond party colours and political labels and ask a much more fundamental question of every party seeking their vote: will your policies genuinely help make New Zealand the best place in the world to live and raise a family?
A note before I begin
This is an opinion piece. It is partly history, but it is also my recollection and interpretation of events I have personally watched unfold over nearly six decades. Where I make factual claims about political history or current Green Party policy, I have attempted to distinguish these from my own conclusions. Where I describe what I believe happened to the environmental movement, that is my opinion. People do not have to agree with me.
Indeed, I hope people who disagree will explain why. Political discussion would be considerably healthier if we could disagree robustly about ideas without immediately deciding that the person on the other side is stupid, evil or an enemy. The FreeRangers Code of Ethics requires us to verify facts, distinguish fact from opinion and speculation, and reject sensationalism and ideological manipulation.
It also contains a wonderfully useful rule for public debate: challenge ideas, not people, and be robust without becoming rude.
So this is my story, my recollection and my opinion. Make of it what you will.
I was green before there was a Green Party
I suppose I was green long before anybody thought of calling people like me Greens. In 1968, as a teenager, I joined the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand, as Forest & Bird was then known. I went on field trips, watched birds, tramped through forests and began learning about the plants, animals and landscapes that make New Zealand such an extraordinary country. Environmentalism was not a political ideology for me. I simply loved the natural world, and the more I saw of what was happening to it, the more concerned I became.
It is important to remember what New Zealand was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s because younger New Zealanders, looking at some of our recovering forests today, may have difficulty appreciating the scale of the devastation we were confronting. Enormous areas of native forest had already been cleared, and the destruction had by no means finished. Native forests continued to be logged into the 1970s, with logging particularly significant in parts of the South Island, including Westland, and the Deep South. The Forest Service sometimes cleared native forest and replaced it with faster-growing exotic species, and in 1971 the Government proposed large-scale utilisation of South Island lowland beech forests, including conversion of some areas to exotic forestry.
This was especially confronting to me in the deep south, including the remaining forests of places such as the Catlins, and later when travelling through the great forests of the West Coast. There was still a powerful assumption that standing bush was somehow unproductive land. Progress meant milling useful timber and converting land to another economic purpose. Looking back from 2026, when protection of remaining native forest is largely taken for granted, it can be difficult to appreciate just how recent this change in attitude has been.
What remained standing was not necessarily healthy either. Our forests were being eaten alive. Possums attacked favoured canopy species. Deer and goats hammered the understorey and regeneration. Pigs rooted through the forest floor. Rats, stoats, mice and feral cats preyed upon native birds and other creatures that had evolved in isolation from mammalian predators. These pressures accumulated upon one another. Introduced browsing mammals changed forest composition and interfered with regeneration, while mammalian predators had devastating effects upon native birds and other small animals.
I remember forests where the damage was shocking. Canopies had been chewed out, the understorey was depleted, and entire areas appeared dead or dying. A hillside might still look green from a distance, but when you entered the forest you could see that something was terribly wrong. A forest is not merely a collection of mature trees. It is a living system that must continually renew itself. When browsing animals consume the seedlings and saplings year after year, the old trees may remain standing while the next generation of forest is disappearing underneath them.
Then there were the birds. New Zealand had already lost many extraordinary species forever, while many others were under enormous pressure from habitat destruction and introduced predators. I had joined Forest & Bird partly because I wanted to see and understand our native birds, yet bird watching could sometimes be a rather sobering business. You could spend hours walking through what appeared to be suitable native forest and encounter surprisingly little birdlife. There were exceptions, of course, but the silence of badly damaged forests made a powerful impression upon me.
“My environmentalism did not begin with a political ideology. It began with walking through New Zealand's forests and seeing with my own eyes what we were losing.”
This was the environmentalism that shaped me. Nobody handed me a political manifesto and told me what to believe. I looked upwards at damaged forest canopies, searched for native birds that ought to have been there, and gradually understood that plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth could disappear forever if people did not care enough to protect them. Once something that evolved nowhere else on Earth is extinct, no government programme, scientific breakthrough or amount of money can bring it back.
Nor was my response that human beings were somehow the enemy and that New Zealand should be locked away from people. I have never believed that. People need farms, homes, roads, electricity, employment and productive industries. What was becoming obvious to me was that development without stewardship could become destruction. We were perfectly capable of taking something inherited over millions of years and eliminating it within a few decades. That understanding created in me a strong sense that enjoying this magnificent country carried obligations as well as rights.
Save Manapouri and an environmental awakening
In 1972 I went south to Otago University as a young physical education student. By then something important was happening throughout New Zealand. The Save Manapouri campaign had become one of the defining environmental battles of the era, and I became involved. It demonstrated that a major development proposal could be challenged successfully on environmental grounds when enough ordinary people cared sufficiently to make themselves heard.
For me, Manapouri fitted naturally with what I had already seen. The argument was never that New Zealand should stop developing. We needed electricity, farms, homes, roads, industries and employment. The deeper question was whether economic development automatically justified irreversible damage to something precious. Just because we could exploit a natural resource did not necessarily mean that we should.
That may sound almost commonplace today, but it represented an important change in thinking. Environmentalism was moving beyond naturalists, trampers, scientists and conservation societies and entering the consciousness of ordinary New Zealanders. We were beginning to question whether economic production and material consumption were sufficient measures of progress, and whether there might be some things whose value could not adequately be entered on a balance sheet.
Then came the Values Party
That same year, 1972, saw another fascinating development. Tony Brunt, then only 25, founded the Values Party in Wellington. Values became one of the pioneering national environmental political parties and challenged the conventional political emphasis upon economic growth and material consumption. Actually, I believe it was the first environmental political party anywhere in the world.
It would be convenient for the argument I am making today to portray Values as a purely conservationist organisation that was subsequently hijacked by socialists. It would also be historically wrong. Values contained broader progressive social and economic ideas from its beginnings. Environmental concern was central, but so were questions about materialism, growth, peace, social organisation and quality of life. I think it is important to acknowledge that because I do not want to manufacture a convenient history merely to make a political point today.
Nevertheless, I remember those times with considerable affection because there was optimism about them. We genuinely thought we could leave New Zealand better than we found it. We wanted to protect the forests, clean up the rivers and preserve our wildlife. We wanted people to think carefully before destroying something that could never be restored, and to question the assumption that consuming more every year necessarily made us happier or healthier. These ideas were not particularly Left or Right to me. They were common sense.
Sandals, mung beans and people who walked the talk
The environmental movement also had its characters. If I were to draw an affectionate caricature of an environmentalist of those days, there would probably be leather sandals with recycled tyre treads, knee-length socks, walk shorts and a hand-knitted waistcoat. There might be Morris dancing at the weekend, enthusiastically but not always expertly played folk music in the evening, and enough mung beans bubbling away in the kitchen to sustain a small commune.
I say that tongue-in-cheek because, broadly speaking, these were my people. They could be wonderfully eccentric, but many were deeply committed to protecting New Zealand's natural environment and, by extension, that of the planet. More importantly, they walked the talk. These were the people who went trapping, pulled weeds, planted native trees and restored patches of bush. Some bought a few acres of neglected New Zealand countryside and spent years nursing it back to health. They built modest homes, collected rainwater, grew vegetables, composted waste and experimented with solar and alternative energy long before sustainability became a fashionable word.
They got mud on their boots. There was something deeply admirable about that form of environmentalism because it imposed obligations upon yourself before imposing obligations upon everybody else. If you believed society consumed too much, you tried consuming less. If you worried about pollution, you produced less waste. If native forest was disappearing, you planted trees. If predators were destroying native wildlife, you went trapping. If you wanted greater self-sufficiency, you planted a garden and learned some practical skills. There were contradictions, of course, as there always are when human beings attempt to live according to ideals. Some of the home-built houses leaked, some of the alternative technologies worked considerably better in theory than in practice, and I suspect a fair number of those Morris dancers eventually discovered the pleasures of central heating. But I never doubted their sincerity.
“The environmentalists I knew imposed obligations upon themselves before demanding that everybody else change. They got mud on their boots and walked the talk.”
From Values to the Green Party
By the end of the 1980s the Values Party had largely run its course. In 1989 the remaining Values organisation moved towards becoming the Green Party, while regional Green groups were also emerging around the country. These strands came together in 1990 as the Green Party of New Zealand. Te Ara describes the new party as drawing members from the environmental movement, the defunct Values Party and “a smattering of other left-wing interests”. The international Green movement was also influential, particularly the success of the German Greens during the 1980s.
The New Zealand Greens subsequently became part of the Alliance alongside NewLabour, Mana Motuhake and the Democrats. The decision was strongly debated within Green circles because it raised a question that, in my opinion, has never entirely gone away: was Green politics something capable of standing independently of the conventional Left-Right divide, or did it naturally belong within the political Left?
I was watching all of this with interest because I still regarded myself as part of the environmental world from which Green politics had emerged. I was certainly not standing outside regarding Greens as some strange political species. I shared many of their concerns, mixed socially with people involved in the movement and felt sufficiently comfortable in that world to attend Green gatherings. One particular evening at the home of one of the party's co-leaders remains firmly lodged in my memory, although perhaps not for the reasons you might expect.
The great calamari incident
Alofa and I were invited to a Green Party social gathering at the home of one of the party's co-leaders. It was one of those very New Zealand occasions where everybody was asked to bring a plate, and, as might be expected, the resulting table reflected the Green culture of the time. The mandatory mung bean dishes were there in abundance, along with plenty of chickpeas and an impressive assortment of vegetarian creations.
Alofa, being Samoan and approaching hospitality from a rather different culinary tradition, had lovingly prepared a delicious seafood dish containing calamari. She was very proud of her most substantial contribution, and quite rightly so. It was only when we arrived and I saw Alofa's magnificent seafood contribution sitting proudly among the mung beans and chickpeas that the full implications suddenly dawned upon me. I became very, very anxious. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the uncomfortable knowledge that calamari was precisely the sort of seafood that might have arrived on our table courtesy of the large industrial fishing operations that environmentalists, with considerable justification, were criticising for the damage they could do to marine ecosystems.
Here we were, guests in the home of a Green Party co-leader, and my lovely Samoan partner had innocently deposited what I feared might be the greatest possible Green culinary faux pas right in the middle of the communal table, and it was too large to ignore. I genuinely wondered whether we might be banished from the Green Party on the spot. I could almost see our environmental credentials disappearing out the door with the serving dish. I certainly was not going to upset Alofa, who had gone to considerable trouble to prepare something delicious for everybody, so there was little I could do other than stand back nervously, hide, and await the calamari scandal.
To my enormous relief, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, quite the opposite. Alofa's calamari proved to be the most popular dish of the evening. People tucked into it enthusiastically, nobody complained, and the plate steadily emptied. I suspect most people did not enquire too closely into precisely what they were eating, much less contemplate the provenance of the squid or the industrial fishing practices that might have brought it ashore. Alofa was delighted that everybody enjoyed her cooking, my anxiety gradually subsided, and I began to enjoy myself. "Vegetarian sqid".
The evening then proceeded very much in the spirit of those times. After we had eaten our fill of mung beans, chickpeas, vegetables and, somewhat surreptitiously in my mind at least, calamari, out came a guitar and we spent part of the evening singing folk songs together. I remember it with considerable affection. There was something innocent, convivial and wonderfully human about those gatherings. People cared deeply about the environment and had strong opinions about how society ought to develop, but we could also sit around after a meal, strum a guitar, sing songs, laugh at ourselves and enjoy one another's company.
I do not tell this story to accuse anybody of hypocrisy. If there is somebody to laugh at, it is probably me, standing there in a state of considerable anxiety imagining our imminent expulsion from the environmental movement while everybody else was happily demolishing Alofa's calamari. Looking back, however, I think there is a small lesson in it. We were people from different backgrounds and undoubtedly disagreed about some things, yet friendship and fellowship came first. Nobody demanded an ideological purity test before sitting down together, and fortunately for Alofa and me, apparently nobody demanded one of the food either.
“There I was, terrified that Alofa and I might be banished from the Green Party over a plate of calamari, while everybody else was happily tucking in.”
That memory is worth including because I do not want readers to imagine that I have always been hostile towards the Green Party. I wasn't. I came from the environmental movement that helped give birth to Green politics, I shared many of its concerns, and I mixed socially with people within it. My disillusionment came later and gradually, as I watched what I believed was a change in the political centre of gravity of the movement.
Where I believe the political Greens changed direction
This is where I want to be particularly clear about the distinction between documented history and my interpretation of it. I cannot prove that somebody organised a formal takeover of the Green Party, and I am not alleging that such a meeting or conspiracy occurred. What I can say is that, from my perspective, I watched the centre of gravity of political environmentalism move increasingly towards activists of the socialist Left, some of whose political thinking appeared to me to have a distinctly communist flavour.
I use those words deliberately, but I also want to use them accurately. Communism has a specific historical meaning, and the contemporary Green Party is not proposing the abolition of all private property, markets or private enterprise. It participates fully in parliamentary democracy. Simply declaring today's Greens to be a communist party therefore allows an important discussion to deteriorate into an argument about terminology. Democratic socialist, eco-socialist, collectivist or strongly redistributionist are probably more precise descriptions of substantial elements of the modern Green political programme.
My deeper concern is not the label but the change in the centre of gravity. The environmental movement I knew began largely with stewardship and personal responsibility. Increasingly, political environmentalism appeared to me to begin with political power. The conversation became much more concerned with taxation, redistribution, ownership, inequality, marijuana, identity, gender politics, and using the machinery of the state to produce particular social and economic outcomes. Environmentalism remained, but it increasingly seemed to me to provide one part of a much larger ideological programme.
I sometimes joke that I am unlikely to bump into many of today's political Green activists several hours into a tramp or mountain-bike ride in the New Zealand back country, clearing weeds from regenerating bush or getting eaten alive by sandflies while planting trees. Perhaps that is unfair. I would be delighted to be proved wrong. The serious point is not whether a particular Green politician owns a pair of tramping boots. It is that the political culture no longer feels to me like the environmental movement I once knew.
“I did not leave environmentalism. I came to believe that political environmentalism had increasingly left people like me.”
Let us be fair to the modern Green Party
If I am going to criticise the Greens, I should also acknowledge what does not fit neatly into my argument. The Green Party of 2026 most certainly still has substantial environmental policies. Its current manifesto contains programmes covering conservation and biodiversity, environmental protection, freshwater, food and farming, forestry, climate policy, transport, waste and renewable energy. Its environmental commitment is real and should not be dismissed merely because I disagree with much of the wider political philosophy, or how they propose to "fix" the environment.
Its Charter retains Ecological Wisdom as one of its four principles and describes human beings as part of a finite natural world in which ecological sustainability is paramount. Alongside that, however, sits Social Responsibility, including a commitment to what the Charter describes as the just distribution of social and natural resources, both locally and globally.
That combination tells us something important. The contemporary Green Party makes no secret of the fact that its politics extends far beyond environmental conservation. Its 2026 programme encompasses taxation, welfare, housing, employment, health, education, energy, justice, constitutional arrangements, business and the distribution of economic power alongside its environmental programme.
That is perfectly legitimate in a democracy. It is also much more than environmentalism.
Follow the money and you see the philosophy
Taxation provides one of the clearest illustrations. The Greens' current programme proposes considerably greater taxation of high levels of wealth and income and large corporations while providing tax reductions and additional support further down the income distribution. Its economic argument is fundamentally redistributionist: wealth and economic power have become excessively concentrated, in the party's view, and government should deliberately redistribute some of both.
People are perfectly entitled to support that philosophy. Others are equally entitled to oppose it. Some of the policies may work well; others may produce unintended consequences. That is precisely what democratic argument and elections are for. My point is that voters attracted to the Green Party because they care deeply about clean rivers, native forests, wildlife or climate should understand that they are voting for a much broader social and economic programme as well.
That understanding becomes especially relevant in an election year. The Green label carries enormous emotional power for anybody who cares about the natural environment. Voters should therefore look beyond the colour of the logo and examine the complete philosophy and policy package they are being asked to support.
“Voters should look beyond the colour of the logo and ask what philosophy, and what complete package of policies, they are actually voting for.”
To be honest, I feel that the Green leadership and much of its support base could best be described as urban Greenies. For some, and I'm saying this harshly, but truthfully, they would not know the environment if they tripped over it.
I remain an environmentalist
None of this has made me less concerned about the environment. If anything, after almost 60 years my environmentalism has deepened because I now appreciate even more clearly the intimate relationship between the health of people and the health of the natural world.
Healthy people require nourishing food. Nourishing food ultimately requires healthy soils, plants and animals. Healthy communities require clean water, productive land, functioning ecosystems and people prepared to accept responsibility for caring for them. We are not separate from nature, standing above it and managing it from a distance. We are part of it.
This sits squarely within the FreeRangers philosophy. We regard human beings as part of nature and the natural world as teacher, provider and healer, but also as a responsibility. Stewardship of land, water, soil and ecosystems is inseparable from human wellbeing. This extends naturally into regenerative agriculture, soil health, nutrient density and strong local food systems.
That is environmentalism as I understand it, and it is also free-range living.
Perhaps it is time to reclaim environmentalism
New Zealand still needs a vigorous environmental movement. Perhaps we need one more than ever. What I do not believe we need is an environmental movement owned by the political Left or Right, wealthy benefactors, corporations, government departments or any other ideological interest.
This is one reason I am so enthusiastic about what we are building with FreeRangers. The objective is wonderfully straightforward: to help make New Zealand the best place in the world to live and raise a family.
Think about what follows naturally from that proposition. If New Zealand is to be the best place in the world to raise children, those children need clean water to drink and clean rivers and beaches in which to swim. They need nutritious food produced from healthy soils. They need forests, mountains, coastlines and wild places to explore. They need communities where they can climb trees, get muddy, learn practical skills, take reasonable risks and gradually develop independence.
We need healthy farms and healthy farmers. We need productive soils, abundant wildlife, healthy oceans and fisheries, resilient local food systems, reliable energy and an economy productive enough to support all of these things. We need strong families and capable communities rather than a population that becomes progressively more dependent upon distant institutions for the necessities of life.
Environmentalism and free-range living are not competing ideas. To me, they are inseparable.
“A healthy environment cannot be separated from healthy people, strong families, productive farms and resilient communities.”
The FreeRangers Movement Is Not a Political Party
There is an obvious lesson for us in the history I have described. If I believe environmental politics was progressively captured by a broader ideology, then FreeRangers must be extraordinarily careful never to repeat that mistake.
FreeRangers is not a political party. We do not endorse any party, politician or ideology, and we never should. Our role is to champion principles that strengthen health, civil society and the natural world. Individual FreeRangers remain entirely free as citizens to vote for, join or campaign for whoever they choose, but the movement itself must remain independent. That principle is already written into our ethos.
Nor should FreeRangers become a supposedly conservative environmental movement merely in reaction to what I believe happened to the Greens. That would repeat precisely the same mistake from the opposite direction. If we became the environmental wing of the political Right, we would have failed just as surely as if we became an appendage of the Left.
Our independence must be non-negotiable.
An invitation to every political leader
Political independence does not mean political irrelevance. Quite the opposite. I would like FreeRangers to put a very simple proposition before every person seeking political leadership in this country: will you commit yourself to helping make New Zealand the best place in the world to live and raise a family?
I do not care which party takes up that challenge. In fact, the greatest success for FreeRangers would be for every political party to steal the idea. Imagine an election campaign in which politicians competed with one another to demonstrate how their policies would make New Zealand a better place for families. How will young people afford a home? How will we improve children's health and education? How will we restore degraded rivers and soils? How will we protect productive farmland while building the homes we need? How will we produce better food? How will we strengthen families rather than inadvertently undermine them? How will we preserve sufficient freedom for people to innovate, work, produce and take responsibility for themselves? How will we build an economy productive enough to provide excellent healthcare, education and infrastructure without leaving an impossible burden of debt to our children?
Those are the arguments I would like our politicians having. If a policy is proposed, then it should be subject to the litmus test. Does that policy help make New Zealand a better place to live? If it does not, or if there are questions or uncertainties about that, then we should scrutinise that policy more closely and ensure that it is revised accordingly.
If the Greens produce an excellent policy for restoring waterways, we should applaud it. If National produces a policy that strengthens farming families while improving soil health, examine it on its merits. If Labour finds an effective way of improving children's health, good. If ACT advances freedom and personal responsibility in a way that strengthens communities, listen. If New Zealand First develops something that genuinely improves national resilience, examine that too. The same principle should apply to Te Pāti Māori, independents and any new political movement that emerges.
When any of them gets something badly wrong, we should be equally prepared to say so. Our Code of Ethics puts community wellbeing ahead of political allegiance and emphasises resilience, self-reliance and freedom.
A river does not become a Labour river when Labour is in government and a National river three years later. Soil fertility is not socialist or capitalist. A healthy child is not Left-wing or Right-wing. Strong families do not belong to a political party. Neither do native forests, productive farms, thriving communities, nutritious food, freedom or responsibility.
These things belong to all of us.
Political independence requires financial independence
Fine words about political independence are not enough. If FreeRangers is to remain genuinely independent over the long term, we also need to think carefully about who pays the bills.
History gives us plenty of examples of organisations that began with admirable principles and gradually became responsive to the people or institutions funding them. If a community organisation becomes heavily dependent upon government grants, there is an obvious danger that it becomes reluctant to criticise government. If it depends upon one or two wealthy benefactors, those benefactors may eventually expect influence. If its survival depends upon a political party, corporation, foundation or ideological organisation, independence can gradually become conditional even if nobody deliberately intended that to happen.
This is one of the reasons the FreeRangers Marketplace is so important. The Marketplace is not simply an online shop attached to a community movement. Properly developed, it can become the economic engine that helps fund the movement and therefore protect its independence.
The principle is straightforward. We bring together good producers, businesses and customers who broadly share our values around health, quality, responsible production, strong communities, nutritious food and stewardship of the natural world. People purchase products they genuinely want and need. Producers gain customers. The Marketplace earns revenue from normal commercial activity, and part of that economic activity supports the wider FreeRangers educational and community mission.
I much prefer that model to waiting for a billionaire, political organisation, government department or ideological foundation to write us a large cheque. I would rather see the FreeRangers movement sustained by thousands of ordinary transactions between willing buyers and sellers than become dependent upon a handful of powerful patrons. Nobody should ever be able to ring us and say, “We fund you, therefore this is what you must believe.”
“The FreeRangers Marketplace is not merely a shop. Properly developed, it can help pay for the independence of the movement itself.”
That independence must extend to the Marketplace as well. Businesses should not be able to purchase ideological influence merely because they sell through us or contribute substantially to our revenue. We should support producers and products because they meet appropriate standards and contribute to our wider vision, not because somebody has purchased our loyalty or silence. Independence is not something we declare once and then forget. It has to be designed into the structure of the organisation and defended as it grows.
If we can get this right, we may create something quite unusual: a grassroots community movement with a sustainable economic engine beneath it, accountable principally to its published values and the people participating in it rather than to political patrons.
Back to the grassroots
One of the things I like most about the FreeRangers ethos is its insistence that real change begins at grassroots level. Power does not reside exclusively in Parliament or government departments. It also resides in families, communities and in the choices millions of people make every day: what we eat, what we buy, how we raise our children, how we care for our neighbours and what we do with the patch of land entrusted to us.
This brings me almost full circle to those environmentalists I remember from my youth. The sandals may have disappeared. The knee-length socks are probably best left in the 1970s. I am not campaigning for a revival of Morris dancing, and after all these years I remain unconvinced that mung beans hold the answer to civilisation's problems.
But those people understood something important. They understood that beliefs ultimately mean very little unless they influence how we live. Plant the tree. Trap the rat. Restore the wetland. Look after your soil. Support the farmer who is trying to farm responsibly. Buy good New Zealand food. Grow some yourself if you can. Repair something rather than automatically throwing it away. Teach children where their food comes from. Take them into the bush. Let them climb trees and get dirty. Learn practical skills. Help your neighbours. Become a little less dependent and a little more capable.
That is environmentalism as I understand it. That is free-range living.
The question I will be asking before I vote
As New Zealand approaches another general election, we will inevitably be bombarded with promises, slogans, accusations, advertising and carefully manufactured political messages. Every party will tell us that the country's future depends upon voting for them. I would encourage people to stand back from the noise, look beyond the party colours and ask something simpler: which policies, regardless of which party proposes them, are most likely to help make New Zealand the best place in the world to live and raise a family?
Think beyond the next electoral cycle. Think about the children being born today and the country they will inherit when they are our age. Will they inherit healthy soils and productive farms, clean rivers and native forests alive with birds? Will ordinary working people be able to afford homes and nourishing food? Will families be strong? Will communities be safe and cohesive? Will people have meaningful work and sufficient freedom to build something for themselves? Will we still understand that freedom comes with responsibility? Will we have an economy capable of paying its way, or will we have passed enormous financial, social and environmental debts to generations not yet born?
Those are the questions I will be considering when I decide how to cast my vote.
I joined Forest & Bird in 1968. I became involved with Save Manapouri as a young university student in 1972. I watched the emergence of Values and later the Green Party. I shared meals with Greens, sang folk songs with them and once spent an unnecessarily anxious evening wondering whether Alofa and I were about to be expelled from polite Green society over a plate of calamari. I remember those times fondly.
I also watched environmental politics change and broaden until, in my opinion, it became increasingly entangled with a wider ideological programme quite different from the practical environmentalism that first inspired me. They lost the plot. Others will interpret that history differently, and that is fine. I have given you my recollection and my conclusions. Readers can make up their own minds.
Nearly 60 years later, I have changed in many ways, but I do not think the environmentalist in me has disappeared. If anything, he has become stronger. I still want clean rivers, healthy forests, abundant wildlife and productive soils. I want New Zealanders to have wild places where they can tramp, hunt, fish, cycle, camp and simply disappear into the hills for a while. I want our farmers producing some of the finest and most nutritious food in the world, regeneratively and ethically. I want children growing up knowing what mud feels like between their toes, where milk actually comes from and that food does not originate in a supermarket.
Most of all, I want us to hand the next generation a country that is healthier, more beautiful, more productive, freer and more resilient than the one we inherited.
FreeRangers will not tell people which political party to vote for. We should never do that. Instead, I hope we can help establish some of the principles against which politicians of every persuasion are judged, while protecting our independence through a strong grassroots community and an independent Marketplace rather than becoming beholden to political patrons, government funding or ideological benefactors.
Our task is not to capture politics, nor to allow politics to capture us. It is to encourage political leaders of every persuasion to compete to make this country better. If, one day, every serious political party in New Zealand is arguing about which of them has the best plan to strengthen families, restore the environment, improve our food, build resilient communities, preserve freedom and leave our children a better country, I will regard that as a tremendous victory.
They do not have to become FreeRangers, and we do not want them to. We simply want them to share the destination: New Zealand, the best place in the world to live and raise a family.
Be strong. Be free. Be a Freeranger.
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