ABSTRACT
Television and the environment have a long and rich but sometimes vexed association. New Zealand television and some of its popular shows the celebratory messages about the nation's environment. New zealand reality television is described as a site where competing local cultural agendas can play out, where settler colonialism reenacts and reinforces anxious and tenuous claims to the landscape. This chapter discusses the Wildlife and natural history programming on television which is the most popular genre of explicit imagery of the natural world. It explains that the education and conservation values appears to be under pressure as wildlife programming adapts to the rapidly changing conditions of what Cottle refers as production ecologies. The chapter offers a critique to the underacknowledged and underrepresented relations between the environment and colonialism and suggests that the television is a potentially productive medium to examine increasingly complex social formations in postcolonial settler sites.
