LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 76

the growth of the British market for frozen lamb. The production of these
'improved' landscapes, often newly prone to surface erosion, did not impress all
thinking people (Cumberland, 1941). A well-known essay published in 1952
portrayed the land as being used 'not for farming but mining', its inhabitants living
'like reluctant campers, too far from home' (Pearson, 1952: 226). Nonetheless, by
the 1990s, forest transitions - increases in the extent of forest cover - were
beginning to occur in these places, as in many other countries (Rudel et al ., 2005).
On Banks Peninsula, regeneration of bush has increased in coverage to between
10 and 15 per cent of the land area (Wilson, 2009; Hillary, 2011). This raises the
question of whether this is an example of an emerging 'middle landscape', or a place
that progresses 'both people and the land's indigenous life' (Park, 2006: 202).
To explore this, it is necessary to understand the changing dynamics of land use
after the 1920s, and how this has been shaped by a liberal social order re-energized
since the 1980s with the new configurations emerging from neo-liberalization
(Larner et al ., 2007). Land use outcomes reflect changes in agricultural practices, in
policies for the protection of indigenous interests and through expressions of urban
amenity in a landscape adjacent to a city - Christchurch - that now has a population
of 360,000 people. Until the demise of the grass seed industry in the 1930s, the
work of maintaining a landscape of grass was undertaken by cocksfooters and dairy
cattle. Thereafter sheep farming took over. Sheep were not compatible with
cocksfoot production as their bite is sufficiently close to the ground to damage the
growing part of the cocksfoot plant (Wood, 2008). But as grazing animals that do
not need daily care, they are better suited to the steep slopes of the Peninsula. Most
sheep are New Zealand Romneys, and well known for growing strong, white
wool.
Thirty or forty years ago, Peninsula farmers received about 70 per cent of their
income from wool. Today that share has fallen to nearer 15 per cent, with the
emphasis now on sheep meat, some beef and supplementary sources such as
tourism. This reflects a long-term decline in wool prices since the 1960s, and the
removal of production and price support for agriculture with the restructuring of
the state in the 1980s (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). Farm size has increased with
amalgamations of holdings. A shift towards fat lamb production has meant more
intensive use of flatter land in the valley bottoms, where grass can be more readily
resown and fertilized, in turn enabling lambing percentages to be raised from about
100 to 140 per cent. Better pasture supports more and faster growing lambs. And
whereas formerly many farmers would cut or spray 'scrub' on the steeper slopes,
today it may be left alone. Scrub is a term adopted to describe species that are
invasive in pasture, both native shrubs such as Coprosma and k¯nuka, and exotics
like gorse and broom.
Gorse was introduced in the 1850s as a fencing plant. The vigour with which
it grows in the wetter parts of the Peninsula has long rendered farms in the southern
and southeastern bays economically marginal. Increasingly, however, it is
recognized both by farmers, and by town dwellers buying land, that it need not be
demonized. It acts as a very effective nursery for the regeneration of native plants.