From the editor

To those few climate change deniers left (and no, this is not an invitation to write in), our parched summer has surely served as a challenge.

Anyone with a personal beach memory stretching back 30 years or more will have noticed warmer ocean swims as just one indicator that our environment is changing, and fast. Imagine how much more powerful it is to be able to draw on centuries of such intimate observations.

Ma¯tauranga, the body of knowledge about the world held by Ma¯ori, can reveal things about New Zealand (including its climate before Europeans arrived) that science alone cannot, reports Laura Goodall in this week’s cover story.

This wealth of information, like that held by indigenous populations around the world, is proving a powerful tool in the fight against ecological decline.

It is a hopeful development, but is it coming too late? Back in 1962, American conservationist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book credited with popularising the global environmental movement. She wrote with an urgency that, nearly 60 years later, is heartbreaking – because we did not heed it.

‘‘We stand now where two roads diverge… The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less travelled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the Earth.’’

Treading that less travelled road are people like Dr Pauline Harris ((Nga¯ti Kuhungunu, Rongomaiwahine), who leads a team of researchers collecting information from iwi and hapu¯ throughout the country.

"If you don’t look and you don’t know that something is being affected, then you can’t help it," she explains. "You’ve got to know about it to know what to do about it."