Zoran Rakovic: Shared Environment, Shared Love: Ending the Myth That Only Some of Us Care for New Zealand

New Zealand’s environment belongs to all who cherish it. It’s time to challenge the myth that only one culture holds the key to true ecological care.

It has become a common refrain in official documents, consultation papers, and government-funded summits across New Zealand: Māori are presented as the natural stewards of New Zealand's environment, the only true guardians of the land and waters, the only people whose relationship to the environment is described as spiritual, noble, and ancient. One would almost believe that environmental care was invented in the rohe of iwi, rather than an instinct present among countless peoples who have lived in harmony with the natural world.

What is framed as cultural celebration, however, has become something else entirely. In elevating one worldview above all others, our public discourse has begun to obscure—if not erase—other deep-rooted ecological ethics held by New Zealanders of many heritages. The result is an unsettling binary: Māori as sacred caretakers, and non-Māori as industrial exploiters, careless settlers, looters of natural capital. It is not only false, it is damaging to the shared national conscience, and worse—it serves as camouflage for something more insidious: the quiet offloading of Crown obligations onto private citizens under the guise of respect.

Let us begin by acknowledging what is beyond doubt. Many Māori traditions reflect an intimate, reciprocal relationship with nature. The concept of the mauri of a river or a mountain, the practice of rāhui to restrict use after over-harvest or tragedy, and the oral histories tied to place and season are legitimate expressions of human beings trying to live with reverence in a world they did not create. This deserves recognition. But the trouble begins when the state machinery decides that this form of ecological mindfulness is singular, superior, and obligatory for all others to emulate, whether or not they share the metaphysical premises.

There are thousands of people in New Zealand—many of them non-Māori—whose lives are also steeped in environmental respect. They plant native trees on their farms, test nitrate levels in their bore water, rescue injured birds, teach their children the names of insects, and save up for solar panels and rainwater tanks. They clean riverbanks on weekends, fight subdivision sprawl through legal submissions, and attend local council meetings where they advocate for wetlands and dark-sky sanctuaries. These are not acts of obligation, profit, or imitation. They stem from a culture just as valid—rooted in different traditions perhaps, but not less sincere. Yet in the architecture of policy and public messaging, their efforts often go unseen. The story being told by the Crown is that environmental love has a whakapapa—and if you can’t name it in te reo, then perhaps your love is not quite pure.

Some of this stems from a governmental desire to correct historical injustices. There is a wish to celebrate, to restore voice, to affirm value. But in oversteering, the bureaucracy has begun to write a new fiction in place of an old one. In this retelling, to be Māori is to be ethical by nature, to be in harmony with Papatūānuku by inheritance, while others—by implication—must earn such moral standing, or worse, apologise for its absence.

This is not just identity politics; it is environmental chauvinism. And its practical expression has become systemic. Consultation processes, it seems to me, now regularly require cultural impact assessments not just where mana whenua have direct links to land, but across virtually every planning and resource consent framework. These assessments are increasingly being requested by the state, but paid for by citizens, ratepayers, and developers. Environmental permissions that once required ecological science now often require cultural approval. It is not just the principle that is troubling; it is the transfer of cost and accountability. The Crown speaks of obligations, but does not bear them. Instead, private individuals and businesses are asked to fund, perform, and submit to processes born of state commitments they did not make, and do not control.

In effect, the Crown is outsourcing its historic responsibilities. Having declared itself a party to long-standing environmental commitments—many tied to a specific group’s worldview—it now finds itself unwilling or unable to fulfil those obligations directly. The workaround has been to embed Māori environmental authority within the machinery of local governance, to require private actors to consult and pay, and to frame the whole process as ‘just doing what’s right’. It is a moral laundering of political evasion.

What makes this especially painful is that many of the people being made to carry these costs are the very ones who live closest to the land. Small farmers. Rural homeowners. Community trust volunteers. Builders trying to comply with regulation-heavy codes. Parents fundraising for a new school hall on reserve land. They are not enemies of the environment—they are its daily companions. Yet the prevailing narrative leaves them painted as potential polluters unless checked by cultural oversight.

This offloading is not a one-off. It is a pattern. And it is spreading.

We see it in the education sector, where schools are expected to implement tikanga-based environmental modules regardless of the background of the students or the relevance to local ecosystems. We see it in water governance, where local communities are asked to incorporate mātauranga Māori in catchment planning, while the Crown retains ownership but avoids the difficult conversations about accountability and funding. We see it in the legal system, where environmental claims that invoke cultural loss are granted standing over those that cite scientific data or community impact, with Crown lawyers quietly stepping back, allowing tribunals to arbitrate what is increasingly a moral and spiritual question.

None of this is to say that Māori knowledge should be ignored or excluded. On the contrary, the environment deserves many voices. But when only one voice is amplified, and when that voice is used as a filter through which all environmental care must pass, we no longer live in a pluralist society. We live under a sanctioned monoculture of meaning. And that monoculture is more dangerous than many seem to realise.

Nature is not a brand. It is not a symbol to be worn by some and denied to others. Its rhythms predate our identities. And in New Zealand, where alpine forest, coastline, swamp, and tussock all meet within a few hours’ drive, there are many paths to reverence. A Croatian grandfather might see the same mountain and be reminded of his childhood village by the Adriatic. A Samoan mother might plant taro in volcanic soil and give thanks in a different language. A Serbian man might kneel by a stream and remember the cold rivers of the Balkans, where water meant life. The idea that only one lineage has the right to define the sacredness of environment is not only untrue—it is unkind.

There is a further risk. When the state holds up one group’s way of relating to nature as ideal, it creates resentment rather than respect. What should have been a shared journey of ecological stewardship becomes a competition of identity. The moral authority of environmentalism begins to erode when it is yoked to bureaucratic favouritism. The long-term danger is that real environmental crises—loss of biodiversity, microplastics, coastal erosion—get sidelined by procedural performances designed to appease cultural symbolism rather than ecological outcomes.

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must also admit that environmental degradation in this country is not neatly split along ethnic lines. Rivers do not care who pours pesticide into them. Birds do not survive because of whakapapa, but because of habitat. Forests do not grow because of who prays near them, but because of who protects them with law, labour, and love. The idea that morality maps neatly onto heritage is a political illusion. And it is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

What, then, is the way forward?

It begins with intellectual humility. A government that claims to care about the environment must be brave enough to honour all the traditions that care for it—not just those that flatter its ideological leanings. It must also be principled enough to bear the costs of its commitments, rather than quietly pushing them onto the backs of citizens trying to build, grow, and live responsibly.

This means reforming consultation frameworks to make them more transparent, inclusive, and efficient. It means recognising that obligations that the Crown owes directly—due to its history and its public undertakings—are those that should never have been forced upon private citizens. It means restoring a sense of shared environmental responsibility, one that unites us not by ancestry, but by aspiration.

The environment does not belong to any one tribe. Nor does care for it. In elevating one group as environmental saints, we inadvertently alienate all others. We fracture the very sense of togetherness that sustainable stewardship requires.

There is still time to undo this. To re-centre our public conversation on what unites us rather than what divides us. To speak not in the language of exclusive virtue, but of collective guardianship. And to remember that the river does not ask your surname before it quenches your thirst.

What it needs is not ceremony, but care. And care belongs to us all.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. He blogs HERE.