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"As of last month, it is illegal to race greyhounds in New Zealand. We document the last big race, and the afterparty, as a community struggles to conceive of a new way of life."

"The other day, I got chatting with an Uber driver who used to be an agriculture consultant. I said something about how relieved my parents had been to get out of orcharding as frosts, hail storms and diseases, which can wipe out a crop, became less and less predictable. “Funny you should say that,” he said, and paused, and I shut my eyes for a moment, knowing the impasse we were headed for. The weather has always been unpredictable, he continued happily. Everyone on the land knows that. Same as it ever was. I had spent the afternoon looking at heat maps of the looming El Niño—the intensity picked out now in purple and white, where once crimson was as hot as it got. I’d been flicking through photographs showing the Danube and Colorado rivers drying up, and reading a report from the Climate Change Commission that quantifies how many New Zealanders live in the path of floods and landslides. So for the first time in my life, instead of just silently grimacing, I engaged. That’s not really the point, I said to him (politely, I hope). Weather has always been unpredictable, but the thing is, that unpredictability is escalating. We are changing the baselines of our planet, changing the normal, buggering up the currents and cycles that control it. The science is unequivocal. Okay, he said. When I hopped out, we both smiled, and said have a nice day. Nature has always resisted a box. We never stop trying. We wrap the world in maths, spooling out trend lines and data points, organising, predicting. It is tempting, and certainly comforting, to think that all these equations might function as a buffer, that if we can just deduce enough patterns we can map a way out of the crises we’ve caused. I still hope that’s true. But it is unsettling to realise there is often a gulf between the real world and our attempt to pin it down. Sometimes the convulsions of our planet confound our modelling. At other times, the assumptions or inputs are off. In this issue, Kate Evans and Richard Robinson investigate human error in the way we harvest the sea. When we were figuring out how many scallops we could sustainably take, we lashed our calculations to an assumption that scientists now acknowledge was “invalid”. Scallops, as our models imagined it, distribute themselves evenly across the sea floor. But life does not come in convenient grids, and neither do scallops. We knew this—and knew, as well, that scallops face a litany of other threats—yet we went ahead anyway and here we are, almost every bed on our coastline drained and closed. This is a blow to the economy, of course, and to every one of us who used to love gathering these iconic kaimoana. To my mind, more important is the damage done to scallops themselves, their ability to breed and thrive as they should. Scientists and officials are already reconsidering how we fish scallops, if we ever get the chance again. The same scrutiny should be applied to the broader Quota Management System, a web of equations and assumptions meant to protect 98 species: hoki, snapper, pāua, orange roughy, and everything else we like to eat at scale. We tend to forget that these are creatures we’re talking about, many of them native, not just “fisheries”, not just “stocks”. They are already under immense pressure; we’re warming and acidifying their oceans, crashing their own food supplies. In this shifting fray, fishing, as Evans writes, is “the one human impact we can turn off like a tap”. The danger is that we take and take, trusting our own numbers, until one day the nets come up empty and we realise we have failed, again, to fathom the sea."

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