LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 77

A large-scale experiment across the 1230-hectare privately owned Hinewai reserve
(Figure 5.6) has demonstrated that native forest quickly returns if certain conditions,
including the removal of stock, are met (Wilson, 2002). Chemical sprays halt
regeneration; firing encourages the gorse seeds in the soil to grow back with
renewed energy. But with pockets of bush nearby, from which birds can source
and spread seed, shade-tolerant indigenous plants will grow protected by the gorse
canopy. Within five to seven years, they out-compete the gorse which, requiring
light, dies. This process inverts one of the shibboleths of Crosby's 'ecological
imperialism', namely a greater fitness for purpose of introduced northern hemi-
sphere species.
This new perspective on gorse, alongside the changes in agricultural production,
goes some way to explaining the resurgence of the indigenous on the Peninsula.
In turn, this is shaping, unevenly, but clearly, the emergence of different values in
landscape, in which what was once seen as 'unimproved' is no longer demeaned
as 'waste'. Evidence for this is the extent to which landholders have adopted
covenanting schemes that provide a legal mechanism to secure in perpetuity
features of their land that they wish to see protected and retained beyond their
tenure. This represents a new form of enclosure, or more accurately 'exclosure',
since stock-proof fencing is required and public access is unusual. The Queen
Elizabeth II National Trust has been active on the Peninsula since the early 1980s,
and has about 70 registered covenants. The Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust,
established in 2001 by a coalition of landholders, has over 50 (Figure 5.6). Its
covenants are mainly on farms and protect areas of high biodiversity and open
spaces such as headlands. It was set up to counter attempts by local government in
the late 1990s to override private property rights by regulating for protection
(Hillary, 2011).
In contrast, less than one-third of the Queen Elizabeth II Trust's covenanters
are farmers. The rest own residential lifestyle blocks, holiday homes, or small
conservation blocks without homes, pointing to the impact of urban amenity in
the landscape. In all, the extent of covenanted land is small, but it sits alongside
publicly owned categories of conservation land, which are vested in and managed
by the Christchurch City Council or the Department of Conservation (Figure 5.6).
The Scenery Preservation Act of 1903 was the first dedicated state measure for the
reservation of native nature in New Zealand; its provisions were early used to set
up a number of scenic reserves on the Port Hills, the Peninsula's northern flank,
and southward along the ridgeline towards Akaroa. The Act was the result of the
drive of a Member of the House of Representatives for Christchurch, Harry Ell,
who was motivated by a desire to encourage access to the countryside for urban
people. The publicly owned reserves (and Hinewai) allow for this. The majority
of the Peninsula, however, is open only to gaze upon as scenery, otherwise locked
away as an enclosed landscape lacking even the public rights of way that remain
unextinguished in much of Europe.
The historical ecologist Geoff Park characterized New Zealand as 'a land of two
kinds of country: one in which the urge was to advance human activity, and