IT’S NOT EASY SEEMING GREEN A Backlash To New Zealand’s Vow Of Purity - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-28, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages.

IT'S NOT EASY SEEMING GREEN A backlash to New Zealand's vow of purity

A Fans combing internet sites are not the only people eagerly anticipating a pair of epic fantasy movies based on "The Hobbit", by J.R.R. Tolkien, that it is planned will start filming this year. New Zealand's tourist industry, too, is eager to see the islands' sweeping and unsullied vistas revealed once more to millions of cinemagoers, as they were almost a decade ago when the first of the three films based on Tolkien's "The Lord of The Rings" was released. Those films did a great deal to boost the country's tourism trade (Air New Zealand promoted itself as the "airline to Middle Earth"), fitting nicely with the country's "100% Pure New Zealand" marketing slogan, first used a couple of years earlier.

B But how much of this is, indeed, a fantasy? Last November, in his "Greenwash" column for the Guardian, a British newspaper, environmental journalist Fred Pearce pointed out that New Zealand's greenhouse-gas emissions had risen 22% since 1990 (its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol was to keep them level) and were now 60% greater per head than Britain's. The image New Zealand attempted to show the world amounted to a "shameless two fingers to the global community" in the face of a far dirtier reality, including the world's third-highest rate of car ownership, and methane-belching cows that help to push agricultural emissions to almost half the country's total.

C When tackled on these claims by an Australian reporter, New Zealand's normally amiable prime minister John Key angrily dismissed them as "bollocks", pointing to his country's efforts to tackle its emissions by energetically planting trees that would re-absorb them. But local papers took up the theme. "New Zealand: 100 per cent pure hype" trumpeted the New Zealand Herald. "We are clean and green, but only relatively speaking and by accident rather than conscious effort." The ruggedness of much of New Zealand's terrain may have protected its film-friendly uplands, but at lower elevations farming has stripped away forests, eroded hills and clogged rivers with silt and fertiliser run-off.

D On previous occasions New Zealand has been able to see off threats to its green image. When concerns about "food miles" started to be widely voiced a few years ago, New Zealand's agricultural exports – 40% of its total exports – looked at risk. Few foodstuffs other than those on the space station rack up more miles than a leg of New Zealand lamb on a British dinner table. The government latched on to research by New Zealand's Lincoln University which showed that the country's agricultural exports were relatively efficient in terms of energy use, by comparison to agricultural production in Europe, even when shipping was taken into account. Europe's concerns, it was implied, had more to do with fear of competition from unsubsidised antipodeans than concern about environmental degradation.

E New Zealand has also followed some policies designed to match reality to green rhetoric. In 2007 an "Environmental Performance Review of New Zealand" by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) noted a bunch of improvements over the past ten years: better approaches to recycling and water treatment, reforestation of pasture to prevent erosion, strengthened efforts to preserve endangered species, the removal of agricultural and fishing subsidies, and by OECD standards, a high use of renewable energy sources, at 30% of supply. However, the report also pointed to new environmental pressures, such as growing demand for electricity that was leading to greater use of fossil fuels for power generation, and climbing car ownership unhindered by measures such as road pricing.

F Mr Key's centre-right government, elected in 2008, although less green-in-spirit than the previous Labour-led coalition, has taken some environmental action. Just before last year's Copenhagen summit, it enacted an emissions-trading scheme just as an Australian attempt to do the same was foundering. At Copenhagen, Tim Groser, the minister for climate-change negotiations and a pragmatic former trade diplomat, pushed strongly for a "global alliance" to research ways of reducing agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions.

G From an environmentalist's perspective, though, these positives are outweighed by much larger negatives. The emissions-trading scheme excludes agricultural emissions until 2015, and its generous allocations of free carbon credits to business have been lambasted by environmentalists. The country's transport strategy favours road-building over already-scant public transport, and there is much talk of the need to ease resource-management rules that act as barriers to business. In February, the government revealed it was considering opening some of the country's pristine public land up for mining – an activity to which the dwarves in "The Hobbit" are much given, but which is not popular with more elvish sensibilities. Energetic lobbying by environmental groups forced it to scale back the amount of land under consideration, but on March 22nd it announced that it still intended to open 7,000 hectares of conservation land to mining, with other conservation areas to be surveyed for their mineral potential.

H Even the government's boasts of reforestation to replace forests cleared for dairy farming are less green than they might appear. As the Guardian reported, these forests are not long-term sinks for carbon, but plantations, which will when harvested return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The Sustainability Council of New Zealand, an independent body, has also criticised this approach as playing games with Kyoto targets.

I In many ways, the dilemma New Zealand faces is not different to that of other rich countries – how to balance economic growth with the need to address environmental degradation. But it is particularly acute in a country so dependent on the export of commodities and landscape-driven tourism. The difference between New Zealand and other places is that New Zealand has actively sold itself as "100% Pure". Now that New Zealanders themselves are acknowledging the gap between the claim and reality, and the risk to their reputation this poses, it is time for the country to find itself a more sustainable brand, and soon.