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Environmental historians need to differentiate between the origin of forest concerns on one hand, and the structuring of legislative responses on the other. The former began at the local level and resulted mostly in tree-planting in the first instance. The latter developed later, and drew not only on local realities, but also on American or European precedents. In New Zealand in the 1860s, concern for the native environment was primarily an aspect of concern for colonial development, and conservation of native forests was primarily a counterpoint to exotic tree-planting. The advent of native forest conservation in the Colony has been traced back to a demand made in 1868 by Thomas Potts, that government consider ‘the present condition of the forests’. This article closely examines the situation in the province where Potts lived, in the decade before the New Zealand Forests Act of 1874, to find out what sparked this kind of initiative. The American George Perkins Marsh’s thinking, together with Australian legislative precedents, are confirmed as key external influences upon how concern about forests and conservation was framed, but in essence this concern was a local response to ongoing change in a local environment. What Potts and others expressed in the 1860s was grounded in what they themselves experienced: forest and fire, waste and shortage, development and opportunity. By the 1870s, Potts doubted the effectiveness of legislative solutions and his response to timber shortage focused more on exotic tree-planting than on saving existing forest. This article affirms the importance, in a New Zealand context, of considering exotic plantation alongside native forest conservation. Turning to the broader picture, the evidence presented suggests that both local determinants and exotic tree-planting have been understudied by environmental historians, while aspects of conservation more readily associable with environmentalism and preservation may have been overstressed.

Thomas Potts and the Forest Question: Conservation and Development in New Zealand in the 1860s