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ScienceDecember 6, 2017

‘Blood will fall’: the bush Rambos at war with 1080

Guest writer
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The threats over DOC use of the anti-predator poison reveal a crack opening up between urban perception and rural values. We need to grasp its seismic nature, before somebody gets hurt, writes Dave Hansford

In October, somebody let a herd of sika deer into north Taranaki forest. Then they sent the Department of Conservation a letter — signed, allegedly, on behalf of six Taranaki hunters. The writer told DOC they had released “at least 30” sika into the formerly deer-free tracts in reprisal for the Department’s use of 1080. They promised more would join them until the Department stopped using the poison.

Genuinely deerless forest is a rare idyll in New Zealand — seven species from all over the globe were introduced for bloodsport by European colonists. That too, was an act of rebellion, by settlers who had renounced Britain’s despotic class system. In their homeland, they’d been left to gnaw on rabbit meat and “coarse” fish — tench, perch, rudd — while the aristocracy held exclusive claim to the salmon rivers and deer estates.

In the absence of any other constitution, Aotearoa was conceived as a vast, egalitarian hunting estate, a leafy, living larder for peer and plebeian alike.

For the country’s urbanites, that’s a quiz answer. Around the regions, it’s a compact still binding. Some interpret this talk of getting rid of possums, rats and stoats as simple semaphore as a declaration of war on their way of life. We tend to forget that a supermarket is a 60-minute drive for many New Zealanders, and that they wouldn’t buy meat from it anyway. Thousands of men and women still feed their families on whatever they can draw a bead on — wild pork, venison, goat meat.

Possums are one thing, but as far as some are concerned, it’s only a matter of time before those bastards in Wellington come after their deer. In that sense, the first skirmishes of Predator-Free 2050 are already afoot: the hunting forums and Facebook pages are in high dudgeon: “They are deliberately killing off everything that’s edible in the bush so we cannot hunt it…” charges a poster on Facebook page 1080 eyewitness; “Its about the new world order, take the water, kill off all the wild food … and make all self-sufficient on the supermarkets where all the foods are poisoned!”

It’s just one more crack opening up in the broadening reach between urban perception and rural values, and we really need to understand its seismic nature. Quickly, before somebody gets hurt. The same day the poison pen letter arrived at DOC’s head office, a staffer’s vehicle had a window smashed in. Weeks before, a wheel flew off a pest control contractor’s vehicle after the nuts had been undone. Checks revealed two other vehicles had been sabotaged. Prior to that, DOC went to the police after someone left 1080 baits in an employee’s letter box.

None of this is new. Persecution is a deplorable workplace hazard for many front-line DOC staff and contractors. There’s something about hunting that seems to flatter the self-image of a certain kind of Rambo-channeling redneck. Maybe it’s the guns. Or the camo, or the machismo of killing your dinner. This was the demand made by leaflets left at an information kiosk on the Cobb Ridge, not far out of Takaka, in 2007:

DESTRUCTION OF THE 1080 POISONERS

TO THE HUNTERS AND EATERS OF VENISON, TO THOSE WHO APPRECIATE THE ROARING STAGS OF A MISTY APRIL MORNING LIVING AND BREATHING OUR HERITAGE, TO THOSE

WHO HUNT SAMBA RUSSA, WHITE-TAIL AND FELLOW AND ANTELOPE OF THE MOUNTAINS IT IS TIME TO FIGHT THE REAL FIGHT FOR OUR HERITAGE AND FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

… WORLD-WIDE DIRECT ACTION MEANS THE DESTRUCTION OF ANY TARGETS AT ANY TIME ANYWHERE BY ANY MEANS AVAILABLE TARGETS MAY INCLUDE, ANY DOC STRUCTURES,

VEHICLES OFFICES OR SENIOR DOC OFFICERS PRIVATE PROPERTY, ANY FIRMS OR CONTRACTORS WHO PROFIT FROM TOXIC 1080 USE HELICOPTER COMPANIES THAT SPREAD THE SHIT TO THOSE WHO CART IT AND LAY IT … IF YOU WANT HUNTING FOR YOUR SONS YOU MUST FIGHT FOR IT, ITS IN YOUR HANDS DO NOT SAY LATER WE DONE NOTHING PICK

YOUR TARGETS AND PLAN CAREFULLY – BE STRONG IN YOUR CONVICTION OF YOUR BELIEFS.

ANTI-1080 ACTION ALLIANCE AOTEOROA [sic].

Yesterday, the Department received another menacing, if delirious missive, promising more deer liberations and declaring “a war like no other”. The writer warned that “these hunters have more guns than you or the police. We are going to bring you bastards to your knees. We will take down helicopters who support 1080 drops. We will take down people one by one, blood will fall. Watch this happen.”

They went on to claim a backcountry brothers-in-arms; a network of saboteurs in milk plants and abattoirs ready to slip a few 1080 pellets into the country’s primary exports.

1080 is an integral part of the Department of Conservation’s pest eradication programme. Photo: DOC

It’s unfortunate, but about the periphery of society orbits a personality type drawn not so much to a specific cause, but to the hell it offers some assumed license to raise — to renounce probity and unleash instead some pent-up compunction to violence and mayhem. The history of 1080 opposition in this country is a continuum of peaceful protest, punctuated by acts of violence by such outriders: the gunpoint hijacking of a helicopter by Chris Short in 1995; the bungled kidnap plot of anti-1080 activist and lawyer John Burrett in 2002, the beating of Coromandel kiwi advocate Arthur Hinds in 2011 by Peter Findlay.

Anti-1080 activist Graham Sturgeon once told the Waikato Times: “1080 is war to us, and there will be no holds barred.” To Sturgeon, a Vietnam vet, aerial pest control may call to mind the helicopter gunships that terrorised another persecuted populace half a world away, the winged agents of venal government. Certainly, that’s a popular metaphor on social media, where a blogger on the New Zealand Hunting and Shooting forums expresses dismay at “New Zealand’s attempt to lead the world in a systematic program of species eradication. Our extremists … are going for the lot, it’s going to be a clean sweep. It is truly an eco-fundamentalist campaign of such sweeping magnitude, it would make Adolf Hitler look like a timorous wimp.”

More Reading
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How urban nature is connecting communities When thinking big picture about conservation gets overwhelming, look for some smaller scale wins in your own backyard.

Predator-Free 2050 was supposed to be New Zealand’s moonshot: a bonding national ambition, a green, group hug. But the comms plan has no contingency for conspiracy-fuelled false dichotomies. Wellington is not Westport, or Wairoa, and many consider that their birthright is bush meat, not biodiversity. Ngāti Tama have been clearing Parininihi forest, not far from the site of the illegal sika release, of pests for the last five years, in preparation for the reintroduction of kokako last July – an historic return after the birds were exiled back in 1999. Sika eat much the same foliage kokako need to thrive, but their mutinous liberators, apparently, don’t care.

Dave Hansford is the author of Protecting Paradise: 1080 and the Fight to Save New Zealand’s Wildlife

The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.

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Girl holds an oxygen mask while receiving a breathing treatment. She is sitting on the sofa in her home.
Girl holds an oxygen mask while receiving a breathing treatment. She is sitting on the sofa in her home.

ScienceDecember 5, 2017

The NZ tech researchers working to make asthmatics’ lives a little easier

Guest writer
Girl holds an oxygen mask while receiving a breathing treatment. She is sitting on the sofa in her home.
Girl holds an oxygen mask while receiving a breathing treatment. She is sitting on the sofa in her home.

Scientists hope to help asthma sufferers and others needing oxygen at home by developing ‘molecular sponges’ with nanoscale-sized pores to purify the air.

There’s possibly nothing more frightening than struggling to take a breath. Something asthmatics and others with respiratory diseases know all too well.

Many of these people depend on portable oxygen concentrators, small machines that concentrate oxygen out of air. But there are limitations on the portability and longevity of these devices.

New technology allowing small, lightweight, more efficient and affordable oxygen concentrators could underpin a new generation of portable oxygen devices used in hospitals and in people’s homes. And it turns out that the fastest growing class of materials in chemistry, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), may be able to make this happen.

A MacDiarmid team of researchers is looking at using MOFs to enrich oxygen from air, as Massey professor and MacDiarmid researcher Shane Telfer explains.

“MOFs are mostly free space, like an open porous net, with a metal at the corners and an organic component as the rods or linkers.”

To understand how MOFs work, Telfer says, you need look no further than your kitchen sponge. “The pores in your kitchen sponge are the same size as a water droplet. That’s why your sponge works. The pores in metal organic frameworks (MOFs) can be made the same size as gas molecules. That’s how they can absorb O2.

“One of our MacDiarmid PhD students has run calculations to show that if you pass air through a MOF you can capture the oxygen. So now we are trying to replicate this experimentally to find a MOF that is more efficient, cheaper and has a longer lifespan than the current oxygen generation technology. Ideally, it’ll also be resistant to other components in the air such as water vapour. We’d be able to patent a material like that.”

Researchers worldwide are finding these three-dimensional ‘molecular sponges’, with pores on the nanoscale (about the size of molecules), rather useful across a range of areas.

One of these is climate change remediation. Absorbing CO2 is high on the priority list right now, with many companies (such as Mosaic Materials, a start up based in Berkeley, California) seeking to commercialise MOFs to absorb CO2, from smoke stack emissions to prevent global warming. MOFs can also store other gases, such as hydrogen and methane, for fuel.

The MacDiarmid team, which pulls together researchers from all over New Zealand, includes Professor Paul Kruger from the University of Canterbury, who is looking into precisely this area – how MOFs can store gases for fuel or capture CO2 from emission streams – and Dr Carla Meledandri from Otago University, who is investigating new and more efficient ways to make known MOFs.

Telfer says MOFs are useful for more than just gas capture. “MOFs could also deliver a drug to a specific site within the body.”

MacDiarmid researcher Shane Telfer flanked by magnified MOFs. (supplied)

MOFs evolved from research carried out in Australia 30 years ago and significant advances in their design, synthesis and applications were made in the early 2000s by US chemist Omar Yaghi. Already over 6000 new MOF structures are published each year, and many of these are collecting patents.

Patents interest the team of MacDiarmid researchers too, although Telfer points out that much of the research is at an early stage. “Like much of materials science, most current MOF research is focused on pushing back the boundaries of fundamental knowledge.”

Yet MOFs are soon to be used commercially in New Zealand, with a new technology to slow fruit-ripening licensed for use here by Irish company MOF Technologies.

Telfer says the potential applications from MOFs would fit well with the manufacturing landscape in New Zealand.

“We’re are looking to work with New Zealand companies to develop new MOFs for various gas storage and separation applications. The translation of our research towards commercialisation was boosted by the funding we – as a team of NZ scientists – recently received from MBIE to work with our industry-facing collaborators at CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] in Melbourne.”

Another trick MOFs have up their (porous, three dimensional, nanoscale) sleeves is being able to mimic biological molecules, like enzymes.

“Just as an enzyme makes biological reactions work better, MOFs can be engineered to do the same for industrial processes. Enzymes have a cavity or pocket where the amino acids are oriented in order to capture a chemical and help it transform. MOFs can be designed with a similar pocket, and by altering the chemical environment in the pore, we are inventing new MOFs that could pave the way for greener industrial processes, like making pharmaceuticals.”

The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.