The future of New Zealand conservation: Ethics and Politics

Abstract

The natural environment raises moral questions. Its evaluation calls for a concern with ethics, visible in our public decisions and having regard ultimately to some qualities intrinsic to the system itself. This need brings no irresolvable conflict with proper economic or cultural aspirations; but there is reason and necessity to look to ecology for the normative code by which environmental decisions are to be instructed and must ultimately abide. This article examines the sufficiency of the Resource Management Act as New Zealand's base-line code of practice, and the ways it is juridically evolving. It proceeds to discuss the need and scope of public intervention, with the question, how far should governments go? It advocates that environmental regulation at the commanding heights should ? like the safeguarding of the monetary economy ? be removed from the day-to-day intervention of executive government, into the hands of a properly chosen and resourced faculty of Guardians of the Environment; and considers what should be the character and status of such a new public estate.