“Unfortunately, everyone has a shadow side, and Peter Pan is no exception, as you’ll recall in the story,” she adds. Of course, too much of a good thing can sometimes hurt. “Chances are, what drew you to someone with Peter Pan syndrome was their lightheartedness, love for life, and sense of adventure.” “This can actually have some strengths to it,” says Lauren Cook, PsyD, a therapist based in Los Angeles, California. In fact, some of these traits may be endearing to you. Garden has also held positions as helicopter safety counsellor and chairman of the Helicopter Division for the Aviation Industry Association of New Zealand, chairman of the Steering Committee of the New Zealand Helicopter Association, aviation advisor to New Zealand Land Search and Rescue and a founding trustee of Southern Region Air Ambulance Trust and the Forest Hill Foundation.You fell in love for a reason. "If it hadn't been for him I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today." The award also recognised the people he had worked with including the department's Pete McClelland who had driven the programme, he said. Now there was a push to build up more expertise and pass on the knowledge so more people were able to continue the work. I've worked with some incredibly dedicated people around the world - people doing marvellous things in the environment and very little gets heard about it." "It's a real pleasure to be able to do those things. "The real satisfying thing about it is that I've had the opportunity to do something positive for the environment - for the world. They can see the conservation values in doing this job. "There's a real appetite for doing these projects now because people are seeing we've got a reasonable repertoire of successful projects behind us. His company had a contract for the Antipodes land mass eradication job and he has a project coming up in the Galapagos Islands. "I still hold New Zealand and American commercial pilot's licenses and have been working this year in the Carribean."
He has recently been involved with establishing a new company advising on similar work and is still out flying when he can. He was the chief pilot for predator eradication on the sub-Antarctic Campbell Island, and lead pilot for various Habitat Enhancement Programmes internationally, including the Pacific Islands, the Seychelles and the Aleutian Islands.įrom 2013 to 2015 Garden was helicopter adviser and flight operations manager for South Georgia Heritage Trust, working on the eradication of rats from South Georgia Island, a British territory in the south Atlantic Ocean.
One successful programme followed another. "We saw an opportunity and we started working around the Southland coast initially and that led on to Codfish Island and working to eradicate rats there." Garden had been working with new American-based GPS technology in the agricultural sector and he thought it could be useful, in predator control along with newly developed toxins. In the early days one of the big concerns was finding safe, predator-free places to release them.
He also spent quite a lot of time working for the Wildlife Services and later Department of Conservation, particularly with endangered species including the kakapo. Wanaka man Peter Garden is regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent eradication helicopter pilots