LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 67

its profit-making promise (Goldstein, 2013). In Europe, not all common rights
were extinguished. In contrast to colonial settings, which were strictly privatized,
rights of way across landscape were often maintained.
The enclosures of British 'wastes' and those of the colonial periphery have
generally been the subject of discrete literatures. For Karl Marx, they were hardly
separate, since enclosure - and its proxies of commodification, privatization and
dispossession - were fundamental to the emergence of capitalist logic and its
geographical expansion. Over-accumulation, or the lack of opportunities for
profitable investment, could be resolved through the opening up of demand for
investment and consumer goods via imperialist activity (Harvey, 2003). Meanwhile,
to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the theorist of colonial promotion, it was not over-
accumulation so much as over-population that required the safety valve of
geographical expansion (Fairburn, 2012). Marx saw Wakefield's contribution as
aimed 'at manufacturing wage-labourers in the colonies' through exploitation and
injustice resulting from unequal class relationships (Marx, 1976: 932); Wakefield
and his contemporary liberal colleagues represented it as efficiency and order.
Wakefield's mechanism of the 'sufficient price' of land (which was to provide funds
to support the social reproduction of new societies as well as a fluid supply of wage
labour to improve property for its new owners) depended upon unimproved land
being deemed 'waste'. That is, it was to be acquired from its indigenous owners
for next to nothing and on-sold at a much higher price to new colonizing
occupants. In the liberal discourse of both colonies and 'home', improvement was
therefore the route to the realization of nature's potential.
A system of land titles and tenure provided the spatial and social building blocks
of this new settler economy, being the basis upon which improvement and
enclosure could be implemented. Enclosure was enforced and practised using the
technologies of surveying and fencing, which allowed for effective management
and containment of flows of living bodies, people and animals alike (Christensen,
2013; Goldstein, 2013). They delineated private property rights in territory at the
same time as excluding those dispossessed. Fences also enabled the parcelling of
land for removal of its indigenous land cover, and its replacement by introduced
plant crops, the most significant of which in temperate latitudes has been sown grass
(Brooking and Pawson, 2011). Biotic exchange, both in place and across space, has
therefore been a key to improvement undertaken to generate surplus value during
the Anthropocene. Ideologically it was underpinned, in New Zealand at least, by
a specific reading of Darwinian evolutionary theory that appeared both to explain
and to legitimate the speed with which indigenous vegetation was replaced by a
more vigorous northern hemisphere biota (Livingstone, 2005). The residue of such
beliefs has long persisted in the management of New Zealand landscapes.
Banks Peninsula: a landscape of 'improvement'
Banks Peninsula is an area of about 1,000 square kilometres; geologically it is the
product of late Tertiary volcanic activity. It was originally named 'Banks's Island'