Are the Greens dumbing down conservation?
- Grant McLachlan
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
From Vienna’s first menagerie to Fiordland’s stoat-plagued islands, conservation has always demanded hard, unsentimental choices. Green politics is increasingly unwilling to make them.
A young self-described conservationist told me recently that zoos are evil, that farming animals is exploitation, and that she has never owned a pet.
It is a tidy, comfortable position — right up until you ask what actually built the modern conservation movement.
Zoos did.
Farming did.
And so did people prepared to kill one species to save another, a fact Vienna’s Schonbrunn Zoo history makes plain. It began in 1752 as an imperial menagerie, not a temple to animal rights, and only became a conservation institution once its twentieth-century directors made breeding endangered species part of its mission.
The real question is not whether zoos, farms or hunters have blood on their hands. They do.
Conservation’s whole history is a slow transition away from a purely anthropocentric view of animals — as trophies, as livestock, as resources to extract — towards a more empathetic one, in which an exotic species is worth more alive, and increasingly worth housing in something resembling its own habitat rather than a cage.
That transition is real and it is still under way.
What is less clear is whether the political movement that inherited conservation’s legacy — the Greens, in New Zealand and abroad — still understands what got us this far, or whether it has substituted a comfortable sentiment for the uncomfortable arithmetic of actually saving species.
Contents
What conservation was built to do
Modern conservation was not born from a love of animals in the abstract.
Conservation was born in the same era as the imperialist hunting culture it is now fashionable to disown.
While wealthy Europeans shot exotic game and mounted the heads as trophies, Vienna’s Schonbrunn menagerie opened to the public in 1778. Twenty-six years after Emperor Franz I established it, they did something radically different: putting the same exotic animals on display, alive, so the public could see what was worth protecting.
Madrid’s royal menagerie, La Casa de Fieras, followed in 1774, Paris’s Jardin des Plantes menagerie in 1793, London’s Zoological Society in 1828, and Moscow’s zoo in 1864.
These were not petting zoos. They were built by monarchs and scientific societies who understood something today’s zoo critics do not: in an age before photography, film or television, nobody was going to fund the protection of a rhinoceros or a giant panda they had never seen.
Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens created the public constituency for conservation. Without that constituency, there is no political will to protect anything.
From cages to habitats: the arc of empathy
The exhibited animal has followed a fairly consistent arc since then, and it says more about the exhibitors than the animals.
It begins with the hunting safari, where an animal’s worth was measured by the size of its head on a wall.
It moves to the barred cage of the early menagerie-zoo, where the same animal’s worth became its rarity and its ability to draw a paying crowd — still a transaction built around human use, just a gentler one.
German animal trader Carl Hagenbeck broke that model in 1907, when his Tierpark Hagenbeck near Hamburg replaced iron bars with moats and contoured landscapes that let animals move as though in the wild, a shift historians call the Hagenbeck revolution.
By 1931, London’s Zoological Society had opened Whipsnade, Europe’s first open zoo, where herd animals roamed paddocks of hundreds of acres instead of yards.
Around the same period, the photographic safari turned the tourist into an unarmed hunter, driving past free-roaming animals with a camera instead of a rifle — a shift the next section follows through the life of one prince in particular.
Long before any of that, the same instinct had already produced a mobile version of the zoo, built for the places a fixed one could never reach.
George Wombwell’s travelling menagerie, touring Britain from 1805, was the largest of dozens, carrying lions, elephants and tigers from village to village by horse-drawn wagon to people who would never travel far enough to see a fixed collection.
The Scotsman judged in 1872 that no schoolbook had taught ordinary Britons as much about wildlife as Wombwell’s show had over its wandering decades.
Circuses were the same idea stripped of pretence: entertainment first, but entertainment that put a rhinoceros or a tiger in front of someone who would otherwise never have known one existed.
When the Wombwell and Bostock menagerie business was finally wound up in 1931, its surviving animals were dispersed to zoos including the newly opened Whipsnade — the travelling menagerie’s last animals arriving just as the naturalistic enclosure was replacing it for good.
Each stage moved the animal further from a possession and closer to a subject: from carcass, to captive spectacle, to a resident of a landscape built to resemble its own.
That is the same arc a self-described conservationist who thinks zoos are inherently cruel has skipped past.
Modern naturalistic enclosures are not the endpoint of exploitation. They are what a century of empathetic pressure, applied to an anthropocentric industry, actually produced.
The value placed on an animal shifted from what could be extracted from its corpse to what could be preserved of its life — and it took the cage, uncomfortable as it now looks, to get there.
A world-first, gifted rather than seized
National parks did for landscapes what zoos did for species: they gave the public something to defend.
Yellowstone was the world’s first, in 1872. New Zealand was not far behind.
Tongariro National Park — by most counts the fourth national park on Earth — was established when paramount chief Te Heuheu Tukino IV gifted the summits of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu to the Crown in 1887, on condition they never be sold or exploited. It remains one of the only national parks in the world founded on the gift of its original owners rather than the removal of them — a distinction New Zealand rarely gets credit for internationally.
When a culture doesn’t know what it has
Conservation assumes a culture already recognises what it stands to lose.
That assumption fails, at some point, for every culture.
New Zealand’s own moa were hunted to extinction within a century or two of the first Polynesian settlers’ arrival around 1300, according to Te Ara, the New Zealand government’s encyclopaedia — not through malice, but because nothing in that culture’s prior experience had prepared it for the idea that a food source so abundant could simply run out.
Middens across the South Island show moa, native geese, adzebills and other large birds disappearing from the archaeological record within a few generations of first contact.
The pattern is not unique to Polynesian settlement.
European settlers reduced North America’s bison population from tens of millions to a few hundred animals between 1820 and 1889, a species Native American nations had lived alongside and depended on for thousands of years without driving to collapse.
In both cases, proximity to a species was no guarantee that a culture would value its long-term survival over its short-term use.
What eventually changed the outcome — for the bison, and later for New Zealand’s surviving native birds — was contact with an outside culture that had already been forced, by its own earlier mistakes, to develop a science and a language of extinction.
The collision of cultures, more than either culture’s instincts alone, produced the conservation ethic each now claims as its own.
Richard Henry and New Zealand’s inverted ecology
New Zealand’s peculiar contribution to conservation is that it so often runs backwards to everyone else’s.
Richard Henry, a self-taught Irish immigrant naturalist, spent fourteen years largely alone on Resolution Island from 1894, ferrying hundreds of kakapo and kiwi across Dusky Sound by hand to save them from stoats. His project failed — the stoats reached the island within about six years — but his methods became the template modern conservationists still use to save the same birds today.
New Zealand also both imports and exports extinction.
Possums, harmless in Australia, are ecological wrecking balls here.
And in 2026, something like the opposite is unfolding with salmon: Chinook salmon eggs shipped from California’s McCloud River in the early 1900s established a run in the Rangitata River and other Canterbury waterways that outlived the original, which collapsed after the Shasta Dam blocked the McCloud in the 1940s.
Ngai Tahu, Fish & Game New Zealand and American scientists are now testing whether the Rangitata’s descendants can help restore the Winnemem Wintu tribe’s salmon in California — a rare case of an introduced species becoming the rescuer of its own native range.
From rifle to camera
Conservation’s most famous conversion story belongs to the man who would briefly become King Edward VIII.
As Prince of Wales, he went on safari with the hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton in 1928 and 1930 and came home carrying a film camera instead of a rifle — the same Finch Hatton later immortalised in Out of Africa.
The pair lobbied for safaris on the Serengeti to be limited to photographic ones.
It took Prince Philip’s later role co-founding the World Wildlife Fund, and Sir David Attenborough’s decades of BBC documentaries, to turn that photographic instinct into a tourism industry — one that has given African and Asian communities a direct financial stake in keeping the animals nearby alive rather than dead.
Conservation is killing
“Conservation is not a petting zoo. It is the calculated killing of one species to protect another — and pretending otherwise helps nobody.”
This is where sentiment collides hardest with the practice of conservation.
Protecting a threatened species nearly always means declaring another species a pest and killing it.
Paramilitary rangers shoot poachers in African reserves.
Predator control in New Zealand kills millions of rats, stoats and possums every year to save native birds.
None of this sits comfortably with a movement whose instinct is to protect all animal life equally.
But ivory and whale products no longer carry the market premium they once did, because science has produced synthetic substitutes for both — doing more to reduce poaching pressure than any boycott or import ban has managed on its own.
Insurance policies with a heartbeat
New Zealand’s smaller conservation organisations — wildlife reserves, regional trusts and the Rare Breeds Conservation Society — perform a function critics of farming rarely acknowledge: they maintain gene pools as insurance against catastrophe.
Several dog breeds, the Boxer and the British Bulldog among them, were bred so hard for appearance that they accumulated crippling genetic disorders and needed outside bloodlines to recover.
The same logic applies to farmed and wild species alike.
Name a farmed species that has gone extinct.
Wild, unfarmed populations disappear routinely; farmed ones almost never do, because someone has a commercial incentive to keep the gene pool alive.
No value, no protection
Conservation only works when people can see what they are protecting, and why.
Poachers do not kill rhinos for tourism revenue; they kill them because someone, somewhere, still believes powdered horn cures what modern medicine already treats, or because a mounted head still buys status among wealthy hunters.
Every genuine conservation success recasts the same animal in a different economic role — not a trinket or an aphrodisiac ingredient, but a functioning part of a food chain, a drawcard for tourism revenue, or a subject of ongoing scientific study.
Species stop being killed once they are worth more alive than dead to the people who live alongside them.
True extinctions inside a zoo, aquarium or botanic garden are almost unheard of, but they are not quite the clean record they are sometimes claimed to be.
The Christmas Island forest skink died out in captivity in 2014, and the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog died at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in 2016. Both arrived in captivity as already-doomed, last-resort rescues, not as the product of an established, funded breeding programme with anywhere left to release them.
That distinction matters more than the headline claim.
Species kept inside an institution with an economic or scientific reason to keep breeding them essentially never disappear.
Species kept purely as a genetic backup, with no functioning habitat left to return them to and no real incentive built around the programme, sometimes still do.
New Zealand shows what happens when the incentive is never built in time.
At least 63 known native species — birds, a bat, frogs, lizards, a freshwater fish and four plants, plus an uncounted toll among invertebrates — have gone extinct since human settlement, according to Te Ara, the government’s own encyclopaedia.
The underlying cause is in the land itself: New Zealand has lost 90 percent of the indigenous forest that once stood below 100 metres of elevation, and 86 percent of what stood below 200 metres — precisely the warm, fertile lowland country species depended on, and precisely the land people wanted for farming and settlement, long before anyone had reason to value it standing.
None of this is an argument for shrugging at extinction until scarcity forces the point, or for banning first and explaining later.
A hunting ban, a live import restriction or a 1080 drop imposed without telling the public why achieves compliance at best and resentment at worst. It does not build the constituency conservation needs to survive the next funding round or the next change of government.
Seeing a kakapo in an aviary, a rhino on a photographic safari, or an oryx bred back from zoo stock into the Sahel does more to build that constituency than any number of laws people were never shown the evidence for.
When the party contradicts its own science
New Zealand’s Green Party formally backs the science on 1080 and has supported the Predator Free 2050 programme that depends on it.
Yet the party has repeatedly struggled to hold that line internally: co-leader Marama Davidson’s 2018 comment that 1080 protesters had valid concerns prompted the National Party to accuse the Greens of contradicting their own conservation minister, who had called the poison the best tool available.
New Zealand First’s opposition is more consistent but scientifically weaker — the party’s stated goal is to phase 1080 out entirely, against the advice of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
Conservation policy that bends to the loudest objection, rather than the best evidence, is not conservation. It is public relations wearing conservation’s clothes.
Exporting the ideology
The same instinct plays out on a larger stage.
Germany’s Green Party built its identity on shutting down nuclear power — a fifty-year campaign that finally succeeded in 2023 — only to watch the country keep coal and lignite plants running longer to cover the gap, an outcome analysts say increased short-term reliance on fossil fuels that zero-carbon nuclear power would not have required.
In Britain, a parliamentary bill to ban the import of hunting trophies — a cause championed across the environmental movement — drew an open letter from more than a hundred African conservationists, scientists and community leaders warning it would strip funding from the anti-poaching and habitat programmes that trophy fees currently pay for.
Botswana’s government called it a return to colonial-style interference in African wildlife management.
Whatever the merits of either policy, both cases share a pattern: an environmental movement choosing the position that feels right over the one the evidence, and the people living with the consequences, say will work.
A revolving door, not a coincidence
The personnel overlap between the Green Party and New Zealand’s two most prominent conservation and campaigning brands is a matter of public record, not speculation.
Russel Norman resigned as a Green MP and party co-leader in 2015 to become Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director, a role he still holds. Kevin Hague left Parliament as a Green MP in 2016 to run the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society for six years, then returned to the party in November 2025 as its chief of staff. Two of the country’s highest-profile conservation and campaigning organisations have, at different points, been led by the same people who lead the party.
None of this makes either man’s personal commitment to conservation any less genuine. Both have spent, between them, a working lifetime on the issue. But it is honest opinion, not a claim of coordination, to say that when the executive suites of the country’s largest bird-conservation charity and its most prominent environmental campaigning group have repeatedly interchanged with a single party’s front bench, the line between conservation advocacy and party political strategy gets harder for a donor or a member of the public to see.
Forest & Bird’s current chief executive, Nicola Toki, has never worked for the Greens directly, but she describes recent Department of Conservation funding cuts, resource management reform and the Fast-Track Approvals Act as a “War on Nature” — language that casts her own organisation, rather than DOC or the elected government, as nature’s only legitimate voice.
DOC is a statutory science agency answerable to Parliament. Fish & Game New Zealand is a separate statutory body, funded entirely by anglers’ and hunters’ licence fees rather than taxpayer money, that manages the country’s introduced sports fish and game birds. Both do the unglamorous, contested work of trading off competing demands on the same rivers and forests.
Forest & Bird’s framing leaves little room for the possibility that either might occasionally have the better argument.
That trade-off is not abstract.
Trout, introduced to New Zealand’s rivers in the nineteenth century, compete with and prey on native galaxiid fish, and a 2020 freshwater policy change downgraded trout habitat protection below that of native species, a decision Fish & Game has continued to challenge in later resource-law submissions, including on the 2026 bills replacing the Resource Management Act.
Trout and the Chinook salmon that share their rivers have never come close to extinction here, for exactly the reason this piece has already made: licence fees give anglers a direct financial stake in keeping the fishery healthy.
The Rangitata’s own salmon, described earlier, are now a candidate to help restore California’s collapsed run — an incentive-driven conservation partnership that owes nothing to righteous advocacy, and everything to a fishery someone had a reason to keep alive.
Conservation was never a comfortable business, and the people who built it — the menagerie-keepers turned zoologists, the lone naturalist rowing kakapo across Dusky Sound, the prince who swapped his rifle for a camera — never pretended otherwise.
It took a century to move animals from cages to habitats and cultures from ignorance to stewardship, and neither shift happened by refusing to look at what the work actually required.
A movement that has forgotten how to kill in order to save is not practising conservation. It is playing at it.
