As a New Zealander currently living in the UK, the contrast in conservation approaches is stark.
I've come to the conclusion that New Zealand is beautiful in large part because a) it has a low population density and b) it hasn't had a sufficiently high population density for long enough to ruin it. Not so much because of broad public support for conservation. Luckily, I think some good basic protections exist (national parks), and are mostly respected.
In the UK, there's so little wilderness remaining that it commands a considerable respect, and considerable conservation effort and public support. Noticeably more so, I believe, than I witnessed in NZ.
NZ has some of the worlds oldest national parks, marine reserves, etc. While the state of the rivers is particularly bad because of intensive farming there has been a concerted effort to improve that, and in fact the state of the rivers was probably the biggest political issue in the last election with all political parties promising to clean them.
NZ is not perfect, and the relatively good state of the environment is definitely helped by the fact that population density is low, espeacialy in the bottom 2/3rds of the country, but there is a strong desire to improve the situation by most, even most farmers are committed to improving the waterways and providing more green area.
Indeed, I believe "National Park" in the centre of the North Island was the world's second national park. And Goat Island Marine Reserve was the world's first no-take-zone. The story I've heard of the latter is that we (as a society, globally) didn't even know the scope of the recovery that was possible before Goat Island. And the mere existence of DOC is promising.
And yes, I have relatively (to the previous government) high conservation hopes for the new government. Fingers crossed. (I should give some credit for the Kermadec Islands marine reserve here!)
Just to clarify though, my comment was about public sentiment. My anecdotal experience is that Brits are more concerned about conservation than New Zealanders. Which I was quite surprised to discover. And largely I wanted to commiserate with the parent of my comment.
Like anything your perception is skewed by the circle that you live in. Everyone that I know is very interested in conservation. My family votes national and are farmers and put a lot of effort into managing their stock and planting around their waterways. My friends are all urban and vote green or labor, they also put in a lot of effort into the environment.
Everyone I know recycles, uses eco and environmentally friendly products where they can, etc. People who I know who fish always fish within the allowed limits and quotas. My grandmother told me over Christmas that she was never going to use another plastic bag.
So, in my opinion, the country is very eco minded, but that sample is skewed because it's only my friends and family. I did meet someone at a party a few years ago who said she just threw her rubbish over the fence onto a council reserve because she was too busy and lived a too important life to bother with dealing with it. There are also people who regularly get caught taking too much paua, or catching underage fish, etc. So obviously they're out there, how prevalent people with disregard to the environment are I don't know, as I said I live in my own bubble.
It could be that people in the UK are more environmentally minded than here, but that wasn't my experience when living there. It could be that they're not but the people that you've met in both countries have simply given that impression.
Indeed, we're missing some data. Certainly I'm pretty appreciative of the Tidy Kiwi campaign, and how NZ seems to have embraced that. On a personal scale I think NZ is great about conservation and cleanliness, perhaps better than anywhere I've been. But it feels like conservation is somewhat missing from the national dialogue. And, thinking a little more about it, time might be an important factor here. I've been living outside NZ for a little over four years, and during that time clean rivers has become a central political issue. So perhaps I'm plain wrong now!
The Bogd Khan Uul National Park in Mongolia was established in 1778, nearly 100 years before Yellowstone (1872). The fourth and fifth oldest are Banff National Park (1885) and Yoho National Park (1886) in Canada, making Tongariro (1887) the 6th oldest in the world.
Whilst it's true there's not much of what you'd call 'wilderness' in the UK - it's a small island after all where you are never more than 70 miles from the sea, surprisingly only 1% of the UK is built on and only 7% is considered an urban area.
Woodlands currently occupy 12.6% of the UK land area which is almost double the urban area.
Yes, I've found that for me 'wilderness' was initially a tricky term to use in the UK.
As an explanation for anyone else reading: conservation in NZ and the UK are very different. In many areas of the UK, conservation consists partly of maintaining farming practices in the manner they've been practised in these places for hundreds (sometimes tens of hundreds) of years. Which, for a New Zealander, is totally bizarre. In New Zealand, there are gigantic swathes of somewhat-pristine forest (missing mostly birds, and some insects) we can look to as a model for conservation. Farmland and conservation are pretty much mutually exclusive.
So, in the UK you might use the term wilderness for a large, very lightly farmed, very lightly populated area. Where in NZ you mightn't use the term wilderness until you'd walked for half a day from civilisation.
The old—even ancient—cities of Europe avoided the mistake of suburban building and have a naturally high-density shape from having been built before the automobile.
It's not visible in the center of cities, but an urban sprawl has developed on the periphery of cities. Such sprawls are similar to those existing in the US (car mandatory, few or no services, little public transportation).
As an aside (with apologies for sloppy definitions), I understand that the UK is about 0.1% densely built on (more than 80% of ground covered by artifical surface), and about 5.5% urban.
I understand this is much, much less than people typically think, which isn't just an interesting fact; people base their opinions on development on the unchecked feeling that the UK is 50% concrete.
Visit the Highlands of Scotland and you'll definitely find wilderness. The Cape Wrath trail is probably the best indicator. Also places like Beinn Eighe, where the remains of a crashed Lancaster bomber from 1951 are still scattered about as it is was too remote to retrieve them at the time. In 2008 a climber fell during an avalanche only to have his fall broken by a propeller.
One thing to keep in mind about national parks and preserves is that in many cases, impetus for creating them was colonialist in nature - they were intended to displace and 'civilize' native populations, by denying them use of their traditional lands and lifestyles.
That's good to know. I wouldn't rule out that behaviour in NZ's past. But I don't know anything about it. I believe NZ's first national park was gifted by the indigenous people to the Crown, on the proviso that it would be protected.
Europeans have drastically altered the landscape of NZ. This was starkly shown to me as a tourist when our flight from Aus. gave us a high-level view of Egmont park around Mt. Taranaki. From the air, it looks just like the map[1]. The circular area of the park is dark green, the sheep lands outside are pale green. Early in the 20th century they used large mechanized "brush cutters" to clear the native scrub to make grazing lands.
I've come to the conclusion that New Zealand is beautiful in large part because a) it has a low population density and b) it hasn't had a sufficiently high population density for long enough to ruin it. Not so much because of broad public support for conservation. Luckily, I think some good basic protections exist (national parks), and are mostly respected.
In the UK, there's so little wilderness remaining that it commands a considerable respect, and considerable conservation effort and public support. Noticeably more so, I believe, than I witnessed in NZ.