Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
production. In turn the Peninsula became an important source of seed for the repair
and extension of pastures elsewhere, showing how in the Anthropocene flows of
biota have criss-crossed in tangled webs.
Landscaping has been the product of, and shaped the labour of, both humans
and non-humans: sawyers, farmers, cocksfooters, townsfolk, cattle and sheep. The
agency of plants, birds and trees has become increasingly significant as a landscape
of grass has given way to a more complex assemblage of pasture, resurgent bush
and settlement. The picture that Charles Elton drew half a century ago of New
Zealand exposed to 'a steady stream of aggressive invaders' (Elton, 1958: 59) needs
to be modified. People are now working with the attributes of invaders like gorse
to enable native and introduced birds to re-establish both native flora and fauna.
At the same time vigorous programmes are being pursued to kill other invaders
that undermine this objective, animals such as possums, wild goats, mustelids and
rats, and plants like old man's beard, clematis and sycamore (Schmechel, 2009).
This new accommodation is an example of what Elton himself described as 'looking
for some wise principle of co-existence between man and nature, even if it has to
be a modified kind of man and a modified kind of nature' (Elton, 1958: 145). The
ways in which spaces are being created for living with the indigenous represent a
conscious re-alignment of human interests away from the prioritization of
environmental dominion and towards recognition of our connections with land-
scape and history, as well as our dependence on nature.
Recently invasion biologists have debated vigorously about whether or not we
should learn to live with 'novel ecologies' (Davis et al ., 2011; Simberloff, 2011).
It has been suggested that an embrace of novelty might enable us to put edenic
visions aside and 'dispense with imaginary places to which there is no
hope of return' (Robbins and Moore, 2012: 16). Others have begun to argue
for programmes of 'rewilding', in which the interests of the introduced and
the indigenous, of farming and of native ecosystems are recognized (Monbiot,
2013). At least part of an answer as to how we might assume greater responsibility
for our actions in nature is through a growing acceptance of messy, emergent
'middle landscapes' in which there is clearer agreement of how to intervene and
to what ends. The argument of this chapter has been that these middle landscapes
represent one response to the fretfulness of the Anthropocene, and that New
Zealand's Banks Peninsula is one example of what a middle landscape might
look like.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Edward Aitken and Paul de Latour for talking about Banks
Peninsula farming, and to Alice Shanks, the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust
representative for the Peninsula. Garth Cant, Ian Hodge, Harvey Perkins, Stig Roar
Svenningsen and Vaughan Wood kindly discussed aspects of the draft with us.
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