in. I was in Auckland at the time. Our home had been destroyed in the February 22 earthquake in 2011 and declared a write-off by both the insurer and the government. It was declared a write-off within about three weeks of the earthquake. There was no salvageing it. My parents went through about two rentals and ended up in a rental that they were quite stable in until they built their new house. But they were very nervous at the time that the red zone was being announced. They were very worried about what the offer would be.

 

They thought if you either had to take the government offer or your house insurance, they knew they would be in financially very dire straits. So they went out of town for the day of the announcement, to get right away from it. They went down to visit a relative in Geraldine. I was self-employed at the time, up in Auckland, and I was in my home office that day. This was a time when Twitter was the way you found out breaking news, and the news came through on Twitter. I read it, that you could take your house insurance and the government offer for the land, which was what they had been hoping for but feared might not happen. So I immediately rang my parents. My mother didn't answer the phone, but I just left a voice message saying, it's okay, you can come home now, the offer's what you want. 

 

I was actually a bit underemployed at that time, so then I spent the rest of that day looking at the proposal for red zoning and the map and thought that it could be quite interesting if that was all returned to nature. And I got this bright idea. I was working in comms, but I'd never done a social media campaign. I thought this could be a fun way to work out how a social media campaign works. So I contacted my parents first and my sister who was in Christchurch and some friends there. I don't think any were actually red zoned, but one was neighbouring, about two houses away from that initial red zone announcement. I said, if I propose this, would it be okay? Or is it too much at the moment? And they just said, no, go for it. So I started the page on the evening of the first red zone announcement. At that stage it was called Avon River Park (later becoming Greening the Red Zone). And I then spent the next three days basically learning how a social media campaign works.

 

By the end of the weekend, after the Wednesday or Thursday the red zone was announced, the page had a thousand followers. I was going, whoa, okay, so that's how a social media campaign goes, I think I've started something here. Within about two or three weeks, I realized that there had to be somebody on the ground doing something in Christchurch. Lots of people were saying, can we get something going? To which I'd respond, I'd love to, but I'm in Auckland. It's going to take one of you from down there to do it. And I wasn't getting any response. I approached several people but they were basically too busy with other stuff, including dealing with their own homes. So I was up in Auckland keeping it going but also getting a bit frustrated that I couldn't find anybody on the ground to pick it up and organise around it. It seemed like forever, but when I look back it was only about a month later, that Mark Gibson actually messaged the page and said, can we organise a meeting around this? What time suits you? 

 

To which I responded, actually I'm in Auckland, I can't do it, but I'd love you to. And he picked it up and ran with it. And that was the first meeting down in New Brighton Community Gardens. On the day of the big snow. I think the snow started on the Sunday evening, and people were coming out. And that led to the Avon Ōtākaro Network (AvON). I was coming down for a double school reunion on the Labour weekend of that year and Mark organised another meeting for the Saturday afternoon, I think, of that weekend so that I could be there. And the people that I can remember being there were Mark, Chrissie Williams, Sue Vallance, Evan Smith, Sarah Butterfield. I don't think Colin Meurk was there, but he might have been. And several other people: it was in the New Brighton Union Church Hall. 

 

And that was actually when AvON came about, it was Evan who suggested the name. I think the organisation really started from that meeting. I flew back to Auckland, I kept in contact. I said I'll help with publicity and such things because that's what I was doing at the time. That was in 2011. Eventually, at the beginning of 2013, I gave up my job in Auckland and came back down here to be more involved. So that's how it all began.

 

Where does Greening the Red Zone come into the story?

 

When AvON formed there were all sorts of ideas about what it should be. And my definite plan of what I saw for the red zone is effectively what it's becoming now, mostly native regeneration with regeneration friendly activities around it. As AvON developed, it became more inclusive of all sorts of ideas that I couldn't see fitting in to that native regeneration vision. And I became increasingly conflicted about where AvON was going. Once they brought the East Lake [rowing proposal] into the loop I was kind of, yeah, I'm out of here, this isn't going to work. So I actually resigned from AvON; that would have been later in 2013. And spent some time thinking about what to do next. 

 

It seemed that other people could promote what they wanted, but we needed an organisation that promotes and campaigns for ecological regeneration and gets politically involved in trying to make that happen. So that's when Greening the Red Zone came about. Again, I advertised on the Facebook page that had kind of become the de facto page of the Avon Ōtākaro Network. But I still had control of it, so I put a post on there saying AvON is going this way, which is valid, but it's not the way I want to go. Is there anyone else out there who wants to form an organisation that focuses just on native regeneration? That's how Greening the Red Zone came to be.

 

There were tensions, as there were throughout the entire lifetime of campaigning for the red zone. At the time they seemed catastrophic, but looking back on it, that's just what happens in campaigns like this, and you just need to move on. It was like the people who were really committed to this, even if things weren't going their way, would find another way to get back involved. At the time, it seemed very negative, very disappointing, it was very upsetting. But eventually you could see that it had been a good thing because Greening the Red Zone really had that singular focus and we were able to go to City Council, to CERA [Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority] and eventually to LINZ [Land Information New Zealand] and just make a really strong case for native regeneration and the benefits it would bring without being distracted by rowing lakes and such like which we didn't see as being part of the vision at all. 

 

What was the relationship between Greening the Red Zone, AvON and other organisations? 

 

The Facebook post got a significant response. Denise Ford, Michael Reynolds originally, but then he went off in his own direction with food resilience, Glenn Stewart, Colin Meurk, John Sullivan, Luke Boyce and one or two others. The first meeting was at the Baptist church on Linwood Ave. Did Mark get us that contact? Because I can remember Mark was sympathetic, but wanted to remain in AvON because he could see the benefit of involving everyone in the community aspect of it. So there was overlap between the two groups. Colin was a member of both at that stage. I think he might have been the only one. Colin ended up being involved in just about every group. That's what Colin does.

 

So there was overlap, there was tension, but there was also, despite the tension, there was a realization and desire to present a unified face. There was some sort of public statement about the complementarity of both groups. There was still tension about the involvement of some groups, but this occurred further on along the journey too, like for example over Otakaro Forest Park, which ended up splitting off from Greening the Red Zone. This one group gave birth to several. Every time a split happened there was internal tension, but a desire to present a united front to the public and to the organisations that held the power. And if I look back on it, to be perfectly honest, I don't think those splits were bad things. I actually think they were quite good things. It didn't feel like it at the time, but what they did was give people different ways to campaign for largely the same thing, but in an organisation that really fitted their values and vision. Whereas if we'd stayed with the one organization there would have been all-out fights, I strongly suspect, about how to do it and the precise nature of the vision that we held.

 

And so by becoming those three organisations rather than one, each was able to really positively put forward its vision and or do the campaigning or contribution in the way that they felt comfortable with. And I think that in the end made the campaign a lot stronger because there wasn't all this internal fighting going on and each organisation then became very clear about its role and its purpose and didn't have the distraction of trying to internally maintain that.

 

What were the positive and negative experiences for you in these roles?

 

We were very clear in Greening the Red Zone that our sole purpose was to campaign for maximum native regeneration. That's all we were doing and we agreed that if this vision was formally accepted, then Greening the Red Zone would cease to exist. It had done its job. So we did a lot of submissions. We submitted to the City Council, to CERA, to the Select Committee [that led to the 2016 Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016]. We submitted to everything that you could possibly submit. It was the whole selling the benefits thing again. We did a lot of media, lots of opinion pieces to the Press. Basically jumped at every media opportunity we could. Went and talked to groups and organisations. Most of it was around lobbying the powers that be, and also lobbying public opinion, to make sure that there was the public pressure behind our submissions.

 

It was frustrating, it was exhausting. I actually stepped back from Greening the Red Zone before the formal regeneration plan was announced [in 2018] because I was just burnt out. I resigned as chair and from the committee. Sometimes you felt like you were banging your head against a brick wall. Things like the changing of CERA to Regenerate Christchurch and then having to do it all over again with a new organisation. And it seemed like things would never happen. It often felt like we were having to disabuse people who came to power of the same things that we'd had to disabuse the person before them of. It felt like you were on a real treadmill sometimes. 

 

Having said that, there were also really, really high points in the whole thing. One of the high points was early on, after I started the Avon River Park page, but I think before the group on the ground had got going. I'll never forget this one. There was a comment on the Facebook page along the lines of, ‘We've just lost our home in wherever, and it's been just the worst thing that's ever happened to us. But this page gives me hope and makes me feel like something really good could come out of it’. I can remember that comment. When I was getting frustrated that I couldn't find anyone on the ground to keep going, that was one of the things that kept me going. 

 

I was still in AvON when Nicky Wagner [then MP for Christchurch Central] arranged for Gerry Brownlee [the Minister for Earthquake Recovery] to meet us. This was when I was still up in Auckland, and I flew down for that meeting. And we'd all had a debrief beforehand saying, okay, nobody mention native forest, okay? We're just not going to mention native forest. We'll just talk generally about restoring nature. But Gerry Brownlee was actually very supportive in his own way. I can remember him saying something like, I can see kahikatea forest. I was, so, oh, we're allowed to mention that. He was not quite on the same page with us as he was talking about pockets, whereas we were talking about the whole thing. But it was actually a really positive meeting and I can remember coming out feeling a bit on a high.

 

There were two things that we did as Greening the Red Zone that I can remember being really positive. One was the video that Tanya Didham did from one of the Plains FM programmes. It was an hour-long video on the campaign and Greening the Red Zone. We had a video evening at the Wainoni church, the one that's been demolished. And something like about 70 or 80 people turned up. We had a panel discussion afterwards and it was just brilliant. We recruited a person to the committee from there. Then two or three general elections ago, we had an event in the transitional cathedral called Parties on the Red Zone where we invited a member of every political party and also Raf Manji, who wasn't a member of a political party at that stage but was a City Council representative. Again about 80 or so people turned up to that for a panel discussion. We were basically quizzing them about their party's policies on the red zone. Organising things like that was really stressful, but the outcome was just really excellent when you saw how many people were engaged and really wanting this to happen and wanting to contribute or just wanting to find out more.

 

I came out of Greening the Red Zone less than a year before the regeneration plan was announced. I was still working at the Bio-Protection Research Centre at Lincoln. I can remember getting a phone call from Rob Kerr one afternoon saying, look, Ashley, I know you're no longer actively involved in Greening the Red Zone, but you've been so involved with this that I want you to know that the regeneration plan is coming out today, and I think you'll be pleased with it. I can remember getting that phone call and just thinking it was extremely considerate of him to have phoned me. 

 

What did you think of the regeneration plan?

 

I was 90% pleased with the draft plan. If I'm being perfectly honest, I said to Colin [Meurk] fairly early on, look, if we get Bexley restored, that's a win, and we should take that. And so while I had this grand vision, I strongly suspected that we wouldn't get the whole thing. That there would be stuff carved off for other stuff, like housing, horticulture. But actually the horticulture was unlikely because the ground was not good. But I wouldn't have been surprised if some of the less bad places had been carved off for remediation and a return to housing. So when the regeneration plan came out and I looked at it and I thought actually this is 90% of what we asked for, so I was quite delighted. 

 

And I think the way it's developed since to be perfectly honest, it'll end up being about 98% of what we've asked for. A lot of the things that were in the plan that I had my doubts about, such as [the] Eden [Project], but a lot of them have fallen by the wayside anyway because it's just not practical. I think that the vision of returning it all to nature and seeing that as being the most cost effective and most beneficial thing is actually pretty much going to come to fruition. There will be parts that aren't but they will be things like community gardens and sports fields. And I'm absolutely fine with that. 

 

The beneficial things: first of all, the restoration of a bit of wilderness to Christchurch and what that provides in terms of mental and physical health. I think that's where, quite frankly, the biggest benefits are to be had in terms of health, and I can see it happening now, just in terms of regenerating the eastern suburbs and turning them from what some people see as undesirable to having a whole new aspect of being the places where Christchurch is in touch with nature. There's the whole flood protection and climate change aspects of it which are huge, helping to clean the Ōtākaro is huge. I think some aspects of it will help businesses along the way. For example, the City to Sea path was an integral part of the vision right from the beginning and I can see that actually being hugely beneficial to New Brighton. It's going to draw people there like nothing else does. You can see that beginning to happen already, even without the final pedestrian bridge in Dallington, since that first part of the path has opened up, the number of people riding and walking and jogging has increased exponentially. 

 

Having that formalised pathway as opposed to what people perceive as a wilderness, and having things like the play area being built where the pathway intersects with Galbraith Ave: with things like that along the way, it becomes an adventure with places to stop, including the landings and everything. It's just getting so many more people back into it. I've been doing it with my dogs since I moved down here. But for a long time, people would say they were scared to go in there, that they thought bad things would happen. There was this whole fear of going in there, and that fear has been decreasing gradually over the years, but with that pathway being put in, use has just shot up exponentially. 

 

Have you had any recent involvements with red zone organisations?

 

Not formally, but I've kind of continued to be involved informally because of my history. So, for example, I was invited to the announcement of the government adoption of the regeneration plan. Sometimes I've thought of getting back and getting involved again, but then I just think, no, actually, I've done my bit. And remember I said that if our vision came true, then Greening the Red Zone would be redundant. That's basically where I am now. I'll still be there on the side, advocating for it, but in terms of, in terms of lobbying or anything like that, I think my bit's done.

 

Greening the Red Zone only exists as a Facebook page now, so it's no longer an organisation. It's good to keep the Facebook page, because it's got 5,000 followers. Several thousand. Anyway, it got up to 2,000 within about two months. It just went like that. I still put my two cents in any time people ask for it or even if they don't. I was a member of Te Tira Kāhikuhiku, and that was interesting. That was the organisation that advised on temporary land use [chaired by Chrissie Williams]. That was my last formal involvement. I don't know that there's too much to say about it really. It was actually a good group. There were different people's opinions came into it. and that wasn't all focused on regeneration. I'm not entirely sure of the use or value of the group. It was a bit frustrating that there were people there who, quite honestly, were only learning about the red zone by being on the group. However, having said that, they brought their community's opinions.

 

I'm not too sure what effect it actually had. Otherwise I should stay off Facebook. I get frustrated about people saying ‘Has anybody ever thought about doing this to the red zone?’ Yes, they have, and it's in the regeneration plan which was adopted way back and now it's part of the District Plan and actually we've been saying this for years and where have you been? I do get frustrated about it being turned into a local politics issue every time there's a new election. It's decided: just leave it alone. 

 

How do you feel about the red zone today?

 

I think it's gone so far now that there is very little threat of it being undone. And once that final bridge is put in and the pathway is completed, there won't be any going back at all. And that will get so many people engaged and involved. 

 

Things like the opening of the first wetland down in Waitaki Street: it's interesting watching the reactions to that. There's still some people, especially around the New Brighton area, who are going, not another bloody wetland. And there's no reasoning with that: they're just not wetlands and native vegetation and native birds people. But those voices were probably only about 10 to 20% of the total. Most people go, this is so exciting, how wonderful! I think what it's done is to turn a lot of people who would never say that they were conservationists into conservationists. I never thought, never in a million years, did I think that I'd end up being campaigning for an environmental issue. That wasn't on my radar, really wasn't. And yet here I am now, completely radicalised to environmental issues.

 

And I think it's done that to a greater or lesser degree to a lot of people in Christchurch. Because I grew up in Bexley when it was houses and a rubbish dump basically. And what became Pacific Park was just undesirable swamp with dead cars in it. And I can't remember ever being engaged in anything environmental through my childhood, my teenage years, my early adult years in Christchurch. And then I left. I went to London and then Nelson in Auckland. In Nelson and Auckland, I came to appreciate some of the nature that I enjoyed from my homes, and which was actually part of what gave me the idea in the first place. But I never saw myself as an environmental campaigner. Never. It was just something I'd go, that's nice, let's do that. Yeah, I'll lend my name to that petition, that's okay, let me move on. 

 

I think that there are a lot of people in Christchurch who, one way or another, even if they haven't been actively involved in the campaign, have learned a lot from seeing the visions that have been presented. For example, understanding that our latitude is not the reason tūī aren’t in Christchurch. Tūī aren't in Christchurch because we don't have the home for them, the habitat for them. A lot of people didn't realise that. They thought tūī were just a warm weather bird. And you point out, well, they're in Dunedin and they're on Rakiura, so that's not it. So there's been this whole education of the people of Christchurch about how lacking we have been in natural habitat. When I grew up in Bexley, I can't ever remember seeing pied shags or paradise shelducks. I can remember seeing the occasional white-faced heron. I can remember seeing kingfishers and swans. But all those other wetland birds, can't remember seeing them at all. 

 

There may have been the odd one or two, but go down there now and you can't miss them. So I think what’s happening in the red zone is helping people to realize what they've been missing. It’s been one of the most positive things to come out of this. Maybe there are a lot of aspects of luck in getting to where we got to. For example, Labour coming into power [in the 2017 election]. I doubt we would have got the same outcome if National had won that election. We might have; I think we still would have got something good, but I don't think it would have been quite so good. And probably for a lot of people who've been involved in campaigning in the red zone, it's taught us about perseverance in the face of adversity, but also realising when it's time to step back and let somebody else take over. That was actually a huge one for me. I think it's been a huge one for a lot of people who've been involved.

 

Interview with Eric Pawson at Avebury House, 4 April 2025

Transcribed with Cockatoo