The (Nearly) Perfect Circle Forest
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The image above depicts Egmont National Park in New Zealand’s North Island. The park contains an almost perfectly circular forest and, at its center, the active volcano Mt. Taranaki.
The boundary between the national park and farmland are clear even from space. This national park exists mostly for the same reason other national parks exist: for conservation.
You need look no further than the edge of the circle to see the clear difference between farmland and native wild forest.
Governments around the world have a hard time enforcing the conservation of their native fauna and flora. Take the Amazon Rainforest, for example, where farmers are not afraid to illegally burn down patches of land to make way for agriculture.
Even with all the strict rules stemming from Egmont’s national park status, people still litter around the volcano. This has led the government to go as far as to grant Mt. Taranaki personhood, increasing the legal leeway to prosecute its offenders.
And the volcano is the third natural feature to receive personhood in New Zealand alone.
Forests are already a rarity — many people hold the misconception that most of the planet’s land is forested. The actual figure is 31%, down from 48% before humans began interfering.
And the reason why that is can be seen quite clearly from space — just by looking at Egmont National Park. All the land that could legally be turned into farmland was.
Still, the small circle around the volcano bolsters incredible biodiversity.
But we cannot forget that the area of any given undisturbed natural space is closely linked with its biodiversity — bigger spaces hold exponentially more biodiversity than smaller ones. This means that what we see in Egmont National Park is a shadow of the biodiversity once present in North Island.
Gone are the days when one had to traverse forests and natural grasslands to travel places, today this is a rarity for most people in the developed or developing world.
With every passing year, the world loses nearly 19 million acres of forest land out of its total of 9.88 billion. Compared to the whole, it is not a figure that worries much, but that is without considering the massive effect on biodiversity that stems from removing small areas or splitting up large ones.
Still, some countries are doing better than others. Sweden leads the way in the developed world, having 68.9% of its land covered by forests. Japan is a close second at 68.5%. It shows that losing all this forest land is, tricky though it may be, avoidable.
Egmond National Park is such an excellent example because it is painfully temporary. The biodiversity it holds will likely be gone within our lifetime — and not thanks to humans, but to nature itself.
Mt. Taranaki is an active volcano, and most importantly, it is overdue for an eruption. Geologists say the chance of an eruption taking place in the next 50 years is at 80%.
When that happens, whatever shadow the park represents of the area’s former biodiversity will be gone.
Of course, North Island’s ecology lives on in other national parks — after all, New Zealand’s conservation efforts are applaudable.
But losing natural areas is never something to be happy about. While the loss of Egmond National Park is sure to be quick and dramatic, it remains a reflection of the path we are ultimately leading the planet on.
