New Zealand’s Mackenzie Basin is famous because of the movie industry. Its iconic brown grasslands were featured prominently in the "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Return of the King," and more recently, in "A Wrinkle in Time." But those landscapes are changing. And ecologists blame New Zealand’s booming dairy industry, which they say is transforming the naturally arid MacKenzie region — that “Gondorian” gold — into green pasture.New Zealand produces more dairy for the global market than any other country — and alone provides half of China’s dairy imports. But the massive dairy industry has an environmental impact to match: The country’s 6.6 million cows are contaminating the iconic landscapes that the tourism industry depends on.“We've got quite a few dairy farms in the region. And so, where 15 years ago, the landscape was [tussock grassland], now you have big irrigators and it’s green and lush with grass for those dairy farms,” Dawn Goorah, a local "Lord of The Rings" tour operator, told VICE News. “If you look at an overall view you actually see [crop] circles right throughout the Mackenzie.”The landscape change isn’t just an eyesore. The Mackenzie provides a unique landscape for some of New Zealand's endemic, and increasingly threatened plants and animals, says Dave Kelly, an ecologist at the University of Canterbury. And now they’re threatened. But the value of that natural landscape isn’t always apparent to farmers. “A lot of people look at those landscapes and they think that they are no use,” he says.VICE News traveled to New Zealand to see how the dairy industry is changing the Mackenzie — and to participate in a Lord of the Rings Tour.This segment originally aired May 16, 2018, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
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