NICOLA TOKI
Forest & Bird’s ‘greenie down the street’
As a kid growing up in the shadow of Aoraki Mt Cook, Nicola Toki remembers no lake at the bottom of the Tasman Glacier.
Thirty-five years later, there’s a body of water so vast a commercial boating operation takes people across it, weaving through the icebergs with the click of tourist cameras perforating the dull drone of the engine.
Toki has spent much of her life in the outdoors. The new head of Forest & Bird took the reins in April, coming from a background of conservation in advocacy, operations and project management roles at the likes of the Department of Conservation (DOC), charity boards, even Fonterra.
She was born in Invercargill, and her family moved between small South Island towns for most of her childhood. Chasing her dad’s dream of working as a ski plane pilot, the family moved to Aoraki Mt Cook, in the Mackenzie District, when she was still a child.
They spent two years there, and Toki has fond memories of camping in the 1975 Sprite Monroe poptop caravan, resplendent in orange and green.
The very same camper now sits on her property in Waipara, north Canterbury, waiting for an outing up the Kaikō ura coast with Toki, her husband and 9-year-old son Hunter.
She enjoys the peace and pace of the small rural community of only 200 households. ‘‘A traffic jam in our street, of which there is pretty much only one, is when the local farmer moves his sheep down the road,’’ she laughs.
She’s something of a local personality, not because of her conservation work – something the neighbours perhaps roll their eyes at, a quirk of the ‘‘greenie down the street’’ – but because she’s the woman who walks her miniature pony Topaz and bearded collie Bess along the streets of Waipara.
‘‘Because the job is noisy and rowdy, I suspect part of the counter to that is coming home and being in the quiet.’’
The top job at New Zealand’s largest independent conservation organisation is ‘‘never boring’’, she says.
Coming from three years as DOC’s director of operations for eastern South Island, a role with responsibility for all the rangers on that side of the island, two national parks and boots-on-theground work preserving them, the timing just felt right.
‘‘If New Zealand is having a conversation right now about who we are, and we are staring down the barrel of both a biodiversity and a climate change crisis, both of which are impacting on each other, Forest & Bird needs to be at the table for that conversation.’’ Toki wanted to be there.
‘‘Forest & Bird is most well known for its advocacy and lobbying and campaigns in media. But what it’s not so well known for is managing 137 reserves around the country. We own many of those, and we have over 100,000 members, supporters and volunteers, running complex pest control operations and engaging directly with communities.’’
Recently on the Hibiscus Coast, north of Auckland, Forest & Bird rallied communities to carry out pest control in suburban settings. And near Whanganui, they’ve built a fence around Bushy Park Tarapuruhi to enable pest eradication, creating a stronghold for New Zealand’s hihi population which has been absent from the mainland for years.
It announced plans on Wednesday to rid all 180,000 hectares of Rakiura Stewart Island of introduced predators, a global game-changer of an endeavour, in partnership with Manaaki Whenua (Landcare Research) and Predator Free Rakiura, set to cost $2.8m. It will be the largest island-based predator eradication attempt ever made, anywhere.
It was heartwarming to see how invested and passionate people became about their natural environment. ‘‘At least every week I receive an update from my team about some member of the public who has become concerned about an issue and sent us a cheque for eyewatering amounts,’’ she says. ‘‘That makes me proud, but then immediately makes me anxious to be responsible for that.’’
Forest & Bird has remained independent ‘‘very deliberately’’, she says. Its government counterpart, DOC, is bound by different constraints, and Toki has experience on both sides of the fence.
She spent three years as DOC’s threatened species ambassador, working to build partnerships and encourage membership of conservation efforts around the country.
‘‘The Department of Conservation, for decades, has been the best in the world in terms of invasive species stuff, and particularly island eradications,’’ she says.
‘‘There’s no shortage of passion and hearts.’’
In many ways the two organisations are similar. ‘‘There’s no shortage of passion and hearts. There’s no shortage of expertise.’’ Over the past few years, DOC has probably suffered from trying to be ‘‘all things to all people’’.
‘‘Where it gets stuck is sometimes political. Conservation isn’t a very highly rated portfolio. What I would love to see is a prime minister or a deputy prime minister grab conservation as a portfolio and hold it up high.’’
Currently, it doesn’t have the budget to do much more than partner with groups already at work. ‘‘I think in many situations that’s resulted in a bit of the tail wagging the dog.
And so what they should really be saying at the moment is, look, what are our biggest priorities?’’
DOC’s latest directorgeneral, Penny Nelson, will bring ‘‘new focus’’, Toki says. There are parallels between them, too, with Nelson the first woman director-general, and Toki Forest & Bird’s first woman chief executive.
Front of mind for any organisation involved in protecting the environment needs to be engagement with mana whenua, Toki says.
Her husband is Ngā puhi, Ngā ti Hau – his top-of-the-north to her bottom-ofthe-south – and Toki has made engaging with local iwi an integral part of how she works. ‘‘I think it’s been really challenging for iwi to see themselves in conservation organisations,’’ she says. ‘‘They don’t, or haven’t, necessarily felt like a place that iwi or hapū could connect to naturally. And that was my goal coming in, to sort of smash that down.’’
Forest & Bird turns 100 next year, which Toki sees as an opportunity to take it back to its roots. It turns out this tree is planted on a bedrock of te ao Mā ori.
To celebrate the milestone, one of its members funded a history project, hiring a researcher who’s been busy burying himself in the archives, and every other day finds some other treasure from its past.
Among these was a series of posters, embroidered on calico (see example on the left), commissioned by Forest & Bird’s founder, Captain Ernest ‘‘Val’’ Sanderson, in 1923.
‘‘He was already engaging with iwi leaders, and he was really annoyed with what he described as the ‘European vandals’ – the communities and citizens – were doing and it was the destruction on Kā piti Island that pushed him to start Forest & Bird.’’
Toki had the posters translated. ‘‘My worry was that it was going to be some sort of colonial, over-the-top sort of thing.’’ She was blown away. The posters contained old stories and wisdoms straight from te ao Mā ori, which remain pertinent to this day.
Among them was a whakataukī (proverb) that had been part of the Mā ori community for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived: ‘‘Kia kore e rite ki te moa.’’ It translates to: ‘‘Don’t let anything else go the way of the moa.’’
The discovery gives her hope, Toki says. ‘‘We started joined at the hip, and we have that thread we can draw through.’’ Among all communities, there is no shortage of will to protect nature. ‘‘We’ve embedded the bush in the mountains in the sea and our hearts, even though 87% of us live in the towns.’’ But we need to do more. The natural environment needs to be seen as an investment in our future, Toki says.
‘‘If we’re going to tackle the impacts of climate change – and if we thought Covid was a disruption we’ve got our eye off the ball because the effects of climate change will continue to provide more disruption than Covid ever could – here’s the opportunity, New Zealand.
‘‘We have an asset that delivers our emissions reduction returns, our freshwater returns, our clean air returns. We don’t seem to have worked out how to invest strategically in that asset.’’
As climate change melts our glaciers and shifts our environment, perhaps irreversibly, it might be the best investment we ever make.