Sublime at the End of the World

Nowhere Else to Go

Boundless and blasting, assaulting the senses. The salt in the air catches my throat as I breathe in the relentless energy of the ocean slamming into the cliffs with primordial force. This is Slope Point, the southernmost tip of New Zealand’s South Island. The South Pole lies roughly at the same distance from here as the Equator. And yet, standing on this weather-lashed bluff, it feels unmistakably like the end of the world.

It was mid-November, late spring in New Zealand. We drove with friends through the Catlins, a remote region tucked into the island’s far south – one of the most southerly inhabited corners of the planet. The Māori call the island's entire southern region Murihiku – 'the tail end', or 'the last joint of the tail'. The Catlins is only a small part of it, stretching roughly 100 km of rugged coastline, extending inland only up to 40 km wide. The inland valleys bloomed with warmth under the November sun, but once we neared the shore, the raw Pacific wind asserted dominance – first faintly hissing, then blowing up in our faces.

I stand on the edge of a cliff – land giving way in a steep slope to an underworld of sea. Dizzying and unruly, the wind toys with my hair and slightly rocks me side to side, almost taking gravity away from under my feet. Waves crash on the shore with bone-splintering force, plants cling like survivors to stone underneath, lighthouses mark the last outposts of men on the brink of a swell, albatrosses and gulls blare like foghorns, gliding over the ocean, reveling in freedom. A staggering scene, it satisfies the deep longing in my heart – limitless wilderness into which I can surrender, where I can be small and frail. I take pleasure in this moment of fierce isolation. Sublime.

Along the Catlins coast, the kind of beauty that unfolds is not the kind that soothes. It threatens, in a way, expands until it feels like more than the mind was built to take. It embodies what the 18^th-century philosophers called the sublime: the power of grand scenery to make spectators feel at once humbled and overwhelmed. In antiquity, the sublime defined an uplifted state of mind inspired by literature, but in the 18^th century, it came to mean something darker: a dreadful wonder incited by both breathtaking artworks and natural spectacles. An almost mystical capacity of forces so mighty they strip away any illusion of control; the capacity to summon reverence laced with a peculiar pleasure. Joseph Addison saw in it an elevation that transcends the self; Edmund Burke tied it to terror and danger – the shocks that awaken our instinct for self-preservation; Immanuel Kant showed a certain paradox: the pleasure in surrendering to powers beyond measure – physical, moral, aesthetic, intellectual – where scale defies comprehension. Dominance inspires awe, mystery makes our vulnerability oddly satisfying – when danger stands close enough to quicken the pulse yet far enough to keep you safe.

That paradox follows me through the Catlins valleys toward the coast, where the surf breaks against stiff rock pillars on one side of a cliff and washes soft sandy inlets on the other. A shoreline of extremes, it highlights the isolation of New Zealand with its spatial and temporal vastness, which has given rise to the islands' unique ecosystems. Stunning, but intimidating, too.

Here, the only native land mammal is a bat – no four-legged creature could migrate to these remote islands. Offshore, however, life explodes: some of the marine mammals, like Hector’s dolphin or New Zealand sea lion, are found nowhere else in the world. Countless species of fish and shellfish share the waters with whales and dolphins, sea lions and seals lounge on algae-slick rocks along the shore, penguins nest in their hideouts among the coastal bushes – a restless macrocosm seemingly endless in its life forms. And on the seaboard, succulents ripen their leaves into bright red, tipped with pink and yellow blossoms – a burst of color against rock-ribbed wilderness.

Just a little off the coast, past the wind-bent trees expanding sideways, dense rainforests rise, overgrown with ancient flora. The Catlins hosts the largest intact native forest on the South Island’s east coast, where some trees have stood for a thousand years, slowing time beneath the canopy. Step inside, and the green almost blinds through its intensity: giant ferns and podocarps tower overhead, moss thickens into a velvet carpet across trunks and forest floor. From above and around this shelter, birds shape the soundscape with ceaseless calls and wingbeats, joined by the buzz of insects and the rustle of lizards slipping into shadow. No beginning, no end to their harmonies. At night, glowworm caves mimic stars through shimmers in the dark, and in an everlasting fashion, waterfalls crash into pools to carve out woodland oases. At one cascade, I learned how quickly the sublime turns to hazard – a slip on wet rock, and I carried away a bruised ego as my abiding souvenir.

The entire South Island feels like a prehistoric forest, only occasionally interrupted by farms and little towns. The Catlins mirrors that sparse settlement pattern: most residents cluster near the former state highway or in tiny farming communities and coastal settlements of a few dozen souls. It’s as if only the bold dare live on this world’s edge, staking a claim on land where few others tread.

And beyond this edge – a cruel realm. Early European mariners learned this the hard way: in the 19^th century, eight ships wrecked on these shores. One of New Zealand’s most dreadful shipwreck disasters occurred in 1881, at Waipapa Point, when only 20 of 151 lives were saved aboard the Tararua ship. The ocean showed no mercy – rocks cut deep while black nights allied with unforgiving winds.

These disasters were some of the earliest clashes between human ambition and the sea’s ferocity. But people are strong-willed in nature: competitive, controlling, compulsive. If men were to stay beyond the edge of the world, the ocean had to be tamed – so the lighthouses were raised. Timber by timber, they pushed back the coast’s domain. Mariners no longer feared the dark as the light charted safer return routes. Fishermen and travelers came ashore – enabled by human inventions, rooted in isolated hillsides.

And yet, standing before the vast Pacific, I can’t help but think how fragile that triumph looks against the horizon. We build beacons to master the sea, but mastery may be nothing more than a temporary glow in the dark. A sense of the sublime – astonishment with greatness – however, emerges from what seems endless, infinite, atemporal.

Strange, then, I think, that the Catlins’ sublime brings boundary and ‘the end of the world’ to mind. As I learn about the penguin breeding grounds and the albatross colony, the awe begins to morph. The sublime reveals its shadow, the reality: not distant wonder to take pleasure in but imminent threat – wildlife endangered, coastline crumbling, changes looming. The end acquires new significance as my attention shifts from space to time.

Time Shows Its Face

Etched in the sediment of the rocks beneath my feet is the very beginning. They formed during the Jurassic period, over 150 million years ago, when dinosaurs dominated the subtropical forests that covered this land. Today, those primeval layers remain – uncharted by skyscrapers, largely untouched by machinery. Stand on a tree 170 million years old, and it's hard not to feel limited. It's the unique mark of the Catlins, the Petrified Forest – trees turned to stone by volcanic debris when this land was part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. The timelessness of Earth folds over me, while awe – that classic ‘sublime’ of rugged coastlines with crashing waves – grows disheartened by something more contemporary and less romantic: a fragile ecosystem under pressure, shaped by people far more recently than the rocks would suggest.

European settlers arrived here in the early 19^th century, and the impact was swift. The economy initially focused on hunting seals for their fur and shipping it to Europe's fashion houses. When the breeding colonies were quickly wiped out, whalers replaced sealers. And soon after, as whale catches declined, the settlers turned to logging – an industry that stripped vast areas of native podocarp forests, many of which had likely stood there for centuries, and left countless other native species endangered. By the end of the century, as timber dwindled and the sawmilling industry declined, farmland replaced forest. Today, sheep, dairy, fishing, and tourism dominate – remnants of a once-ruthless reshaping of this land.

Not even two centuries after the ocean conquered many ships with their sailors, we now visit well-signposted tourist sites – Waipapa Point, Slope Point, Curio Bay Cliffs with Petrified Forest, Nugget Point – warning in red at the gates: “Standing on or near the rocks here is DANGEROUS.” I, too, slowly creep back and forth among the crowds. It’s less scary, less intimidating – when you’re among the crowd. You can hide behind unidentified backs, grounding your awareness in a controlled environment.

In the battle of tame-and-surrender, the overwhelming touch of the sublime on New Zealand’s south-east coast is still in the air, but it’s trembling. Few species make that clearer than hoiho – the yellow-eyed penguin, a living symbol of this battle. Unique to New Zealand, it exists in only two distinct populations remaining: a northern one, on mainland New Zealand and nearby islands, and a southern one on its Sub-Antarctic Islands. As Richard Seed, the DOC's Senior Ranger for Coastal Species, has noted, the northern population has been in rapid decline since the late 20^th century – down 83% in just 27 years. A study published in PeerJ warns these birds could vanish from the mainland entirely by 2043 as the warming ocean undermines their ability to breed.

The threats to their survival are manifold – and almost all trace back to us. Overfishing depletes the nutrient-rich fish that the penguins rely on. Set nets often result in their accidental killing through bycatch, along with dolphins, seabirds, and even whales. Unidentified toxins pollute the waters where they hunt and breed. On land, domestic animals and non-native pests roam on the shorelines at the very hours penguins return from the sea to feed their chicks, nest, or moult – disturbing and often hunting them. And as native coastal forests have been cleared for pasture, breeding has become even harder. Hoiho nest in forests and shrubland; when that shelter is gone, so too is their chance to raise the next generation.

We stopped at a few points along the coast where you can perch on a cliff at sunset and watch the ocean, hoping for the rare sight of a yellow-eyed penguin coming back home. With only a handful of breeding pairs left in the region, the odds are slim. Still, wildlife is worth the wait, and the cliffs of Curio Bay draw many patient spectators. Once, we got lucky. When the sun had dropped far beyond the horizon, a lone penguin emerged from the surf. Through binoculars, we watched it pace the rocks, preen its feathers, and settle into the stillness of the evening. We were in a nature documentary. No TV screen, no voice-over narration. We were in.

That penguin was one of the last of its kind in this region, and watching it came with a rule: keep away from the beach so the bird wouldn’t feel our presence. Further north, near another breeding site, we met a Department of Conservation (DOC) ranger who shared with us her passion for penguin monitoring and laid out the stakes in the birds' struggle for survival. Even with bright signs posted at cliff paths warning visitors to keep their distance, some still ignore them as their curiosity overrules sensitivity – what harm could one cute picture do? But what seems innocent to us might be life-threatening to the penguins.

Hoiho are among the shyest seabirds in the world, intimidated by the slightest unfamiliar movement, sound, or flash of light. If people enter beaches at nesting areas, adults may linger offshore, avoiding the threat – and leaving their chicks to go hungry. Penguins feed their young by regurgitating partially digested fish; the longer they’re delayed, the fewer nutrients reach the chicks, leading to malnutrition or death, especially when food is scarce. The adult penguins, too, are susceptible to human disturbance. Each autumn, they spend 25 days ashore moulting – replacing feathers, unable to swim or feed. If spooked, they can damage their new plumage, risking hypothermia when back in the ocean, or prolong the process, pushing them toward starvation.

I try to wrap my mind around the disquiet that looms in my heart – a sense of something ending. Is it the fate of species like the yellow-eyed penguin, or the retreat of untamed nature itself? Why do we care deeply about wild environments at all? And if they’re slipping away, can we change their course?

Take hoiho, the rarest penguin in the world. Does its extinction matter to human survival? Probably not, at least not directly. But to our wellbeing? Almost certainly. No species disappears in isolation – each loss signals instability across the entire ecosystem. In the case of hoiho, that includes both marine food webs and coastal vegetation. In 2019, a report released by the United Nations estimated that a million species face the risk of extinction within the upcoming decades as a direct result of human activity. As such, wildlife is not sublime anymore – it’s a chain of threats to the global food supply, water sources, and climate stability as a whole, making the numbers of predicted extinctions far higher – tens or hundreds of billions.

Even beyond survival, there’s something deeply human about wanting to see ecosystems vibrant and intact. Healthy environments — alive with movement, color, form, and interaction — spark curiosity. They calm us, fill us with joy, and remind us that we’re part of those vast and ancient cycles of life that mesmerize us.

In the Catlins, the scale and power of the landscape create that effect of admiration instantly, and I want this natural wonder to remain. The answer to why we care may lie in Kant's idea that the experience of nature’s grandeur stirs more than awe or mere aesthetic pleasure: the sublime, he said, awakens moral awareness. In the face of something ungovernable, something beyond full comprehension, we’re reminded not just of our limits, but more importantly of our capacity to reason – and therefore to act with moral purpose and empathy for the environment we’re in, with all human and non-human life. With the world on the verge of billions of extinctions, this understanding becomes a powerful tool that gives us back our control. If standing on a fossil forest makes us feel the weight of time, standing near an endangered penguin should make us feel the weight of choice. When species are at risk, our morality is threatened too, as we try to decide how to live within the natural world. Essentially, the real danger isn’t that we’ll lose the penguins, but that we might lose the capacity to care, or the very possibility to make the right choices.

Understanding the risks our presence can pose is critical, and admiring wildlife from a safe distance may be one of the simplest yet most effective steps in protecting both animals and people. Distance preserves the power of the sublime: the recognition of nature’s intrinsic worth that lies beyond our control, and the acceptance of the smallness of our place within it. When we breach that distance – when we push too close to the forces that sustain an ecosystem – awe tips into threat. Full-on terror. In the case of wildlife, it can manifest in the form of stress, habitat loss, or extinction. For us, it’s a confrontation with our own vulnerability, from personal dangers like a slip off a cliff or a shipwreck disaster to the broader collapse of the systems that keep us alive. From the moral point of view, near-extinction motivates to take action and care. Hopefully, while time is still watching.

Surreal Splendor Sustained

As we continued along the Catlins, amid the raw force of the cliffs and the grim stories of the looming threats to the yellow-eyed penguin, there was also calm. Away from the crowds, we discovered a secluded wild beach: a reminder that a sense of wonder inspired by grandeur doesn’t always announce itself in crashing waves or knife-edged rock – it can live in stillness too. In that halted scenery, the electrifying energy of the coastline didn’t vanish; it lay tightly wound, waiting, as if the whole place was holding its breath.

Behind one of the countless serpentine turns, there it was – Helena Falls Beach. It appeared in our itinerary almost by accident, found on the map but absent from any guide or local tip we’ve encountered. This, I thought, was my definition of New Zealand: open space that exhales its own sly – at once feral and serene. Wilderness unbothered, in a state I can almost believe has never been touched.

The walk to the beach from the road where we parked our car was short – 200-meter-or-so – but messy. Mud camouflaged in high weeds until it coated our shoes. A river stream soaked them in, leading the only path to the solid ground. Then – a spacious bay of freedom opened up. No more than 300 meters across, hemmed by cliffs on both sides, yet the empty sand floor created an illusion of infinity. Tiny succulents, bright algae and microscopic molluscs dotted the rocks, massive kelp washed in with the tide, oyster catchers combed the shore picking their delicatessen.

The full measure of the Catlins' character – with incredible diversity of life finding shelter under the surface of the ocean and behind sturdy vegetation, the far-flung layering of air and tides and stone and sky, the tension of elements in unrelenting motion – is a complexity that may slide past unnoticed from car windows or crowded lookouts. That’s why finding this empty beach with no other soul in sight felt like a lucky chance encounter, a chance to fully sink into the place rather than skim its edges. With far more time spent here than anywhere else along the coast, we became the land itself. We walked the cliffs, traced the grain of stones and patterns of seaweed, studied the microcosms clinging to the rocks. We drank the salty atmosphere in until it hit with wild intoxication through its oddly intense tranquility, charged with the same raw force that shapes the cliffs and drives the tides.

Only when we left did we realize we hadn’t seen the falls themselves, tucked away behind the hills. It didn’t feel like a loss, though, the moment of freedom was complete. Alongside reason, that sense of freedom becomes a second key element shaping the ground for moral action in Kant's account of the sublime. In the presence of landscapes that overwhelm or even alienate us, we encounter not just our ability to understand our place within broader systems, but also our freedom to decide how we move through them. And if morality stretches beyond humans, then travel only sharpens the tension of choice – between action and consequence.

It’s not surprising that places like the Catlins trigger such a strong impulse to preserve wilderness. They illuminate beauty and power untouched by human design – complexity that exists entirely on its own terms. The solution to their struggles, paradoxically, nowadays lies in human hands. Simply admiring the view doesn't seem enough anymore, and distance alone won't answer the harder questions of how to live within ecosystems. In New Zealand, conservation efforts are underway to safeguard what remains. The DOC manages natural and historic heritage across the country, working alongside other organizations to monitor and treat injured hoiho, restore their habitat, and control predators. Forest & Bird, a non-profit organization with numerous conservation missions, runs projects across the Catlins, including penguin protection. Its South Otago Branch, formed in response to the loss of the Catlins native forest, actively undertakes projects on native plant propagation and biodiversity monitoring.

Hellena Falls Beach is part of a 12 km reserve along the Catlins coast, purchased in 2009 by the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust and the Minister of Conservation’s Natural Heritage Fund. At the time, it held more than 10% of the mainland hoiho population. The Trust still monitors the penguins and protects other seabirds, sea lions, fur seals, rare coastal plants, and the remaining native forest, while Forest & Bird operates predator control.

In protecting wildlife, visitors, too, have a role. Some actions we can take are straightforward: donating to conservation projects, volunteering, or funding research. On more ordinary trips, however, it may be harder, and subtler: good intentions may dissolve into half-measures, uncertainty, making it even more necessary to choose our path carefully – whether to follow a crowded trail or slip away to a quieter path. I don’t know whether visiting the more secluded, less crowded places is less harmful. That feels like a moral calculation in itself – it may ease pressure on hotspots, but it can also spread the footprint elsewhere. In this suspended freedom between impact and restraint, the Catlins reminds me that traveling as a whole is never neutral: every movement is a negotiation with the power and vulnerability around us.

But few of us will stop. The world is too accessible and too compelling. The challenge, then, is to decide not only where we go, but how – to match wonder with responsibility while seeking understanding of the ecosystems and the threats we pose to them, respecting local regulations, and moving carefully, leaving the least possible trace. In New Zealand, the DOC provides information on how to protect the country's wildlife, and answers some of the most frequent questions: what to do if a penguin seems injured, how far to stay from sea lions, when not to intervene at all. In these choices lies the disquiet of the sublime: the awareness of our relation with nature, unveiling both the wonder and the risk, and reminding us that our presence matters. The sublime, then, isn’t just in the view anymore, but in the uncomfortable freedom of decision.

In places that unsettle and renew us, awareness comes as a first step to action. It drives empathy and reminds us that for nature preservation, emotions matter just as much as rationality. As Australian musician Sam Nester has written, “Facts alone won’t save us. Science helps us understand the threats we face, but bold policies to fight climate change and extinction depend on our language, art, and experience with the natural world.” What matters above all is how we feel, and only when we feel and care deeply for something do we want to protect it. So perhaps when we think of how to play our part in preserving wildlife, we can turn to art. It provides the frame through which awe might be translated into care, where concepts connect to speak of our deepest values, and an appreciation of the superiority and magic of nature is inspired.

A wall in Dunedin, a city on the edge of The Catlins.

With the backdrop of the Catlins' scope of wilderness – rich in natural history and ongoing changes – each visit left us with a double edge: a humble admiration sharpened by unease. The natural forces that shape this coast still hold their sway. To stand among them is to remember that in their endurance our own responsibilities take root; responsibilities to ensure that they remain sublime – not threatening to eliminate both itself and us along the way, and not underwhelming through losing everything in destruction – when edges and ends seem so close.

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