New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern arrives at a Pacific Island forum on climate change where she watches performers and socializes with children in Funafuti, Tuvalu, Wednesday, August 14, 2019.
Ardern met with Pacific Island leaders in Tuvalu, a Polynesian island country located in the Pacific Ocean, to discuss global warming.
Some of the Pacific islands are currently battling rising sea levels and other climate change impacts that have forced some residents to move to higher ground. (Reuters)
Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced ‘weed’ gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers”.
Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.
