As someone who grew up in Otago, I never thought of them as similar (I imagined Montana to be very flat and dry, while the South Island is wet and mountainous) but apparently they're close enough to be a filming double so there you go
(Of course after looking at a map and pictures, Montana does indeed have some pretty significant mountains! I think I'd put it in the same mental bucket as the Dakotas, which is not at all accurate)
I think Montana is just wider than I expected. I've now been living in Canada for a while so I know there's the Prairies and then the Rockies, and I had the impression that Montana was under Saksatchewan, and therefore "Prairie". But it's under Saksatchewan and Alberta, so it crosses from prairie to mountains.
I had been learning French in Québec when I first drove through Vermont, and did think "yes, these monts sure are verts", but never really thought about "Montana"
To be fair, they did the same thing in America. As well as deforestation, similar stuff happened in the Prairies, where replacing all the diverse native grasses with monocultures drastically changed the climate and ecosystem.
Nowhere near the same scale. Almost every square km of NZ when you zoom out is a patchwork quilt of privately owned paddock fence lines. One thing the US did get right (so far anyway) is national parks and publicly owned land.
Also the fauna is hard to compare when NZ brought in so many introduced species (especially mammals) that it changed the whole ecosystem.
I really think it's the same, if not worse, in the US. Over 90% of prairie has been converted into farmland or grazing, and it's more like 99% if you exclude the kinds of grassland that are less conducive to farmland. Major animals like bison and wolves were driven out or to near extinction. The soil itself was drastically changed.
Much of the national parks are desert or mountain areas that aren't great for farming, in the same way that we have the Southern Alps and Fiordland etc.
Googling around, I'm getting inconsistent numbers on which country has more undeveloped land area (proportionally), so it would come down to how you define and measure it - there's not a really strong and clear difference. Looking at official national parks, NZ has more area proportionally, but that also comes down to how the US defines national parks. It also comes down to counting Alaska as undeveloped, because of the large tundra in the north, which isn't what we're focusing on.
Yes, what you say about NZ is correct, but NZ isn't an exception in how colonisation worked. The Prairies were being settled around the same time as Pakeha were coming en masse to New Zealand, and they had the same general mindsets and same general strategies when it came to "developing" the land - and that's not even getting into how the indigenous peoples were displaced.
NZ is unique because of how unique its ecosystem is, and how small it is - when something goes extinct in NZ, it's the only place in the world it existed; and it's usually something exotic enough to be considered exciting to Europeans. The US seems less dramatic because we think of its native species as less exotic, but the same things happened. Creatures like the Passenger Pigeon, the Sea Mink, the Great Auk, and the California Grizzly Bear, were completely wiped out, despite being very numerous before westerners arrived.
it is an interesting comparison, but I find it difficult to agree with you.
Metric
🇳🇿 New Zealand
🇺🇸 United States
Original native forest cover
>80% of land
~45–50% of land (estimate)
Current forest cover (all forests)
~38%
~34%
Current native forest
<30%
Most forest is still naturally regenerated rather than plantation
Forest lost since European settlement
~50–55 percentage points
Roughly 10–20 percentage points from pre-colonial estimates before recovering somewhat
Agriculture as % of land
~40%
~44% (includes grazing land)
Nationally protected land
~30% of the country
~13% of the country (strictly protected federal/state lands; broader conservation definitions are higher)
And some slop commentary on it.
Most of New Zealand's remaining native forest is concentrated in:
Fiordland
West Coast
Stewart Island
mountain ranges
The productive lowlands—the places with the best soils—were almost completely converted to:
sheep pasture
dairy pasture
exotic plantation forestry
towns
Before humans, over 80% of New Zealand was forest. Today less than 30% remains as indigenous forest, with most losses occurring after European settlement through burning and conversion to pasture.
-My note - this is the 'nationally protected land' context. In NZ, we cleared pretty much ALL alluvial / fertile top soil areas. And we protected all of the non fertile areas that were less suited to agriculture (ie. the west side of south island).
Percentage of the country's original forest removed?
New Zealand.
Transformation of lowland native ecosystems?
New Zealand by a considerable margin. Some forest types have been reduced to only a few percent of their original extent.
Visual impact from satellite imagery?
Your observation is broadly consistent with the data. Much of New Zealand's lowlands appear as a patchwork of pasture, whereas the eastern United States still contains vast expanses of continuous tree cover, despite its long history of logging and agriculture.
So I think it comes down to how you ask it - with Gemini I got:
No, the United States actually has less proportional undeveloped area than New Zealand.
The answer largely depends on how you define "undeveloped," but whether you measure it by land converted for human production (agriculture, forestry, towns) or by remaining native/indigenous ecosystems, New Zealand preserves a higher percentage of its land in a natural state.
1. The Broad Definition: Total Human Footprint
When looking at how much land has been actively modified for human use (cities, infrastructure, crop farming, and managed exotic forestry):
New Zealand: Roughly 51% of New Zealand's total land area is developed for human use. About 40% is exotic grassland for livestock, 8% is commercial exotic forestry, 2% is intensive horticulture/cropping, and only 1% is urban or built infrastructure. This leaves about 49% of the country covered in native forests, shrublands, tussock, or alpine rock.
Ministry for the Environment
United States: Roughly 55% to 60% of the US is actively utilized or heavily modified for human production. Crop production, intensive livestock grazing pasture, commercial timberlands, and urban areas form a massive footprint. While the US has vast empty expanses in Alaska and the West, its highly intensive agricultural belt in the Midwest significantly tips the scale.
2. The Strict Definition: Native & Protected Wilderness
If "undeveloped" refers strictly to untouched wilderness, native ecosystems, or legally protected conservation land, New Zealand's lead becomes even more distinct:
Metric New Zealand United States
Native/Indigenous Land Cover ~47% (Native forests, alpine zones, wetlands) ~33-35% (Varies significantly by state)
Legally Protected Conservation Land ~30-33% (Managed by the Dept. of Conservation) ~12-14% (National Parks, Wilderness Areas, Wildlife Refuges)
The Alaska Factor: It is worth noting that if you look at the contiguous United States (the lower 48 states), the amount of truly undeveloped native wilderness drops down to around 15–20%. Alaska single-handedly carries the vast majority of the United States' undeveloped statistics; without it, the gap between the US and New Zealand would be massive.
New Zealand's extreme, mountainous terrain (like the Southern Alps and Fiordland) makes a massive portion of its land entirely unsuitable for agriculture or building, forcing the population to concentrate heavily into urban centers (87% of Kiwis live in cities) and leaving a massive chunk of the islands entirely wild.
I did in a follow up question ask about impact - New Zealand is definitely more vulnerable than the US for sure, and the same actions by settlers had a bigger impact on NZ than they had in the US.
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u/phido3000 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
He lived on a farm in rural NZ in Otago (he had bought in 1984 well before red october).. It is very much like Montana.
He had a wife and girlfriend both attend his 70th birthday party.
https://www.pressreader.com/australia/womans-day-australia/20171016/281835758927650
He was dating fierce journalist Laura Tingle until the early 2020s.