LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 79

another in which the urge was to exclude it' (Park, 2006: 202, emphasis in original).
The 30 per cent of the national land area that is occupied by the conservation estate,
being national parks and lesser categories of conservation land, comprises the second
category. It is there that the most extensive tracts of indigenous vegetation survive.
A middle landscape is one that has some attributes of both kinds of country. On
Banks Peninsula, the emergent mosaic of native bush patches and corridors across
farmland encourages the return of birdlife, with growing populations of kereru
(native pigeons) and bellbirds. Tui have been successfully reintroduced by the
Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust (Hillary, 2011). Officially protected areas may
only provide spot coverage in the landscape, but between them is a growing skein
of bush life that constitutes a public good for all who look and listen. In this sense,
the once-tidy clarity of the Peninsula's landscape of grass is being modified in ways
that begin to blur the boundaries of private and public.
If space is made for displaced native nature, then a middle landscape also creates
space for native people. The Ng¯i Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 made
economic redress to Ng¯i Tahu for property rights lost through dispossession. Some
of this has been used to underwrite its 18 regional papatipu r¯ nanga (local councils),
four of which have marae , or meeting houses, on the Peninsula. The Act also
returned ownership of the bed of Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere to Ng¯i Tahu, given
its importance as a food basket noted for eels, flounder and waterfowl (Figure 5.6).
A co-governance agreement has since been developed by Te Waihora
Management Board between Ng¯i Tahu and the Canterbury Regional Council,
along with a joint management plan with the Department of Conservation for the
lake bed and adjacent conservation lands (Stevens, 2013). Nonetheless the lake is
one of the most polluted in the country, being a shallow sump into which drains
nitrate-enriched run-off from surrounding farms. The extent of change can
therefore be exaggerated, but Park's claim that there is 'No framework for living
with the indigenous, in any other form than visiting and admiring it' (Park, 2006:
202, emphasis in original) is less the case than even a few years ago.
Conclusion
The question that this chapter posed at the outset was how have we exercised our
'gargantuan agency' and how we might come to terms with 'an almost unbearable
level of responsibility' in the Anthropocene (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2009:
321)? The narratives discussed here have provided some insight into these
two issues. Banks Peninsula typifies one of the great landscape changes of the
Anthropocene that occurred with the incorporation of remote places within cir-
cuits of imperial expansion. This was the intentional displacement of indigenous
vegetation, in this case 'the bush', by introduced 'English grasses' and their fellow
travellers such as gorse. Territory was appropriated cheaply as 'wastelands' from its
native occupants. Monetary value was created through enclosure, enabling the
benefits of 'improvement' to be captured by new owners. An essential part of
improvement was the use of imported biota to seed and contain new fields of