Listen to nature, advocate says
IF there is one thing natural historian Jane Forsyth thinks people could do more, it is to listen to and observe what nature is telling us.
‘‘People are not very wellinformed about their surroundings. They just go ‘mountains!’ but they don’t care how the mountains got there.
‘‘And they go ‘birds!’ but they don’t know there are rare and unusual birds around here.
‘‘It’s good, I think, to have a voice for nature,’’ she said.
‘‘I was a science editor . . . That was with GNS [Crown Research Institute GNS Science Te Pu¯ Au], the earthquake and volcano people.
‘‘They put out quite a range, from client reports in the commercial sense, through to maps and charts and quite big volumes on particular topics.
‘‘The project I was involved in was QMap. That was updating the geological maps of New Zealand and each one of those has a map and an illustrated book to go with.’’
She worked for GNS for 35 years, starting in 1978 when it was called the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), and finishing in 2013.
‘‘I have always been a little science person. My mother saved a story I wrote in primary school about rocks. [I wrote] ‘you might think when you go to the beach there are no rocks but the sand is really very small rocks . . .’
‘‘But actually I did a degree in English literature. Maths was never my strong suit . . . so I did not pick up the geology till much later.’’
The most obvious career paths for her after graduating from the University of Otago were librarian or teacher, but they did not appeal.
Her passion for photography had led her to the job with the DSIR, so she worked her way up to science editor.
‘‘I was a darkroom technician, then a field assistant, which as a lifelong tramper, was a perfect fit forme...
‘‘It was a small enough organisation you could do different things and mix and match your job.
‘‘It wasn’t a monolithic thing, where you were thirdclass clerk and this was your desk for life.’’
She studied geology parttime in the late ’80s, graduating in 1993.
Her pathway to Lake Ha¯wea was ‘‘sheer good luck’’.
‘‘My husband’s parents [John and Nance Turnbull] built a house which we inherited when [they] died.
‘‘That was pretty bloody lucky. I don’t think we could afford to buy in Lake Ha¯wea now. It was pure fortune.’’
John Turnbull, who died in 2013, was a highly regarded highcountry farmer who got involved in tenure reviews and with Forest & Bird, the records of which are at the Hocken Library.
When Ms Forsyth and her husband Ian (Mo) Turnbull arrived at Lake Ha¯wea, they joined community organisations which matched their values for protecting nature.
Ms Forsyth has been with the Guardians of Lake Ha¯wea for several years and is the new
chairwoman this year.
Identifying the natural values of Lake Ha¯wea, grebes, dotterels, fish, lake water quality, pollutants, sampling and constant prodding of Otago Regional Council is on her agenda.
After the Guardians of Lake Wa¯naka successfully convinced the regional council to install a scientific monitoring buoy in the lake, they Ha¯wea guardians began advocating for one.
Last week, the environmental advocacy group noticed some unusual water weeds growing at the Lake Ha¯wea inlet.
With the help of online resources, Ms Forsyth identified one of them as Elodea canadensis.
‘‘It is not as bad as that Lagarosiphon thing that has taken over at Lake Wa¯naka and is a big
problem at Lake Dunstan [but] it is still an unwelcome intrusion into a lake we like to think of as pristine.
‘‘If you are using that word ‘pristine’, you would have to put that in inverted commas. Because of course, it isn’t.
‘‘People misuse it horribly, don’t they? . . . ‘Pristine’ doesn’t mean it looks pretty in the sunshine. Lake Ha¯wea has got umpteendozen pollutants and introduced species and it is no sense pristine.’’
Geology gives her a deep perspective on the impact humans have had on Earth compared with the passage of time.
‘‘The forces [of geology] are truly awesome . . . How high can the flood waters get? How big can the landslide be? The answer is
almost always ‘a hell of lot more than you think’.
‘‘We talk about deep time. That means further back than the last electoral cycle. It means further back than when we were born! . . .
‘‘In geological parlance many, many, many thousands of years — something like 500,000 — is called recent.’’
As a scifi fan, Ms Forsyth could visualise manufacturing facilities outside earth’s orbit but she had no hankering to collect rocks from Mars or the Moon.
‘‘Rather than trying to expand our activities everywhere, we should stay here and clean up the mess we have made . . .
‘‘Not every geologist agrees with me on thi,s of course. Many of them think ‘wouldn’t that be fantastic’.’’