The fastest things to lock up carbon are the floating plants. They clean up the water.
We can spend multi-millions of dollars worth on new surge plants
or we could incorporate all these sorts of things into our wetland plantings
and this stuff would take out monstrous amounts of nitrogen and all the other stuff.
My name is Jeff McCauley we're in Piha, West Auckland at my nursery.
I've grown native plants, mainly specialising in oddbods and threatened species, not just to supply
to the everyday people but for incorporating into projects of restoring land and on the holistic and
ecological level. I grow around about five to six hundred species. [chuckles] I suppose you could
say we because the cat's here as well, [chuckles] he does help sometimes. The intention is to
at least hold things on long enough in here that they're not going kaput. Shit I've got plants here
in the nursery which have gone extinct in the wild, either as a species or as a type specimen
which is really important for research purposes. That is tongue fern or Microsorum pustulatum.
Many of the weedy things I have on my tables I can't just throw out because I've got things
like that coming up in it. wWhen there's only two or so of the left in the country that we know of,
how can you throw the bloody things out when you find them coming up?
People just don't have any idea on what we are losing. We just don't support conservation
adequately in this country, we don't think it's an issue. 46% of the forests have been burnt down
before the europeans got to this country, we removed 95 of what was remaining, we've
introduced over 40,000 exotic species of plants, yet alone all of the bugs and animals and what not
and people do tend to think that our grassy green hills is what's supposed to be but they don't
understand the colours and the textures and all that sort of stuff that used to be there. Going
down through the South Island you're supposed to see all these amazing natural places and some but
nothing's pristine, there's always weeds, there's always pests, there's always something and a lot
of the time when we're looking at the native bush like around here in the Waitaks and very little of
it is virgin. We're looking at what we've created as a result of what we've done. The fact is we've
done so much to the wild, that so many things no longer can reproduce, they can't distribute
any more. A lot of the ecological requirements for these plants no longer exist. So, we have to
intervene and artificially put them back in as best to the natural way as possible. Otherwise,
we're not going to see these things recover. The plants aren't magic, no little magic wands.
It needs to be supported more because people people aren't going to be able to
appreciate what there is and become familiar with something if they're not going to be able to
see it for a start. And people get pretty excited when they see that detail and then they go out for
a walk for themselves and then they've come back so proud, 'I went in the bush and I saw those
things that you showed me last time and there were so many of them at the tracks.' And it's like
it's an entirely different world. When people refer to being in the fifth dimension
when people said it to me and it's like, 'Well I'm here with you guys ya know?'
But then I thought to myself one day, I am on a completely different planet
from most people in the world because most people have that kid's colouring-in book vision
and not necessarily their own fault but when you've seen the world of all the detail,
you've seeing all these things that don't exist to people and that literally does make it visually
an entirely separate planet. It's a bizarre way of thinking of it but it's, but it is true.
Art in general contributes a lot of waste to the environment,
so I was really conscious they didn't want to do that.
Art has so much power to be able to give a message or give a meaning to people,
there literally is no other more important topic at the moment.