Insulationism and Decline

Abstract

New Zealand is, relatively speaking, a small country, thinly populated and isolated geographically. The country consists of two large islands and a number of smaller ones, located in the South Pacific ocean. In terms of land area it is somewhat larger than Great Britain, but has a population of just 3.5 million people, roughly the same as the Republic of Ireland. Australia, its nearest neighbour of any size, is over one thousand miles away. Its physical remoteness from the Earth’s major inhabited regions has been a major factor in New Zealand’s development. For millions of years New Zealand remained untouched by human influences and inhabited only by birds and insects. In the absence of any predators, many of New Zealand’s native birds such as the kiwi and the moa simply lost the ability to fly. When the first humans arrived on the scene about one thousand years ago, they, together with the animals they imported with them, found that these flightless birds were easy prey. The moa, a large bird, proved a particularly attractive source of food to New Zealand’s early inhabitants and within a relatively short period of time it had been hunted to extinction.