Page 10 - 2008 NZ Subantarctic Islands

Chapter 2. Some Present Day New Zealand Facts

This island nation is about the size of Colorado in land area:
103,737 square miles. To draw a more familiar comparison,

Florida comprises 58,560 square miles of land territory. Florida’s
peninsula is 447 miles long while it is 1000+ miles from the tip of

New Zealand’s North Island to the bottom of the South Island.
Florida is 361 miles wide at its most expansive while the New

Zealand’s broadest area is on the North Island and measures a
slimmer 186 miles across. Florida’s human population has
swelled to 15,982, 378 in a smaller territory while New Zealanders

number 4,173,460. Needless to say, Florida’s native flora and
fauna have suffered devastating human pressure just like New

Zealand’s, but Homo Sapiens Floridiensis has not yet undergone
the evolutionary shift described above as characteristic of New

Zealanders.

A couple of specific factors about the make-up of New Zealand’s
human population are also relevant to this sea change observed
in ecological awareness. The median age is 36 so we have a

relatively young, but nonetheless mature group of people living
there. 70% of the people are of European stock, Maoris make up

8%, but people who describe themselves as mixed between Maori
and European are 12% (Asians & Polynesians make up the other

10%) of the population). Perhaps this relative homogeneity is a
factor in the development of ecological sensitivity. Maybe the fact

that Maoris and other New Zealanders have lived together for
200+ years in peace since the original conquest has helped the
two cultures which have so impacted their native land see the

biological situation similarly. It is obviously true that the Maori
minority is definitely a working part of the nation’s attempts to

restore the country to a stable and healthy biota.

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