The splintering of NZ landscapes

11-08-2008 | Sandra Taylor

A renewed vision of the rural landscape is needed, where landscape is seen as a means to achieve wider goals of sustainability and not a barrier to it.

This is according to Professor Simon Swaffield, a landscape architect from Lincoln University who says rural New Zealand is at the intersection of two different policy agendas - the open market agenda promoted by the World Trade Organisation and OECD and the sustainability agenda.

The open market agenda creates what Swaffield describes as spaces of flow; landscapes that are globally integrated but locally disconnected, while the sustainability agenda attempts to protect and restore local spaces of place.

"Rural landscapes are caught in the tension between these two dynamics."

This country's policy response has been to separate out rural functions in space, policy and institutions.

This has created what has been described as a "divided landscape".

Swaffield says the landscapes of production are increasingly corporate, specialised and vertically integrated into the global food market.

They are highly capitalised, which places great pressure on the environmental and economic margins. This makes them more vulnerable to fluctuating external conditions.

Historically production landscapes have been cost and production driven, but increasingly producers have attempted to break out of the price trap and attract premium prices by promising "clean and green" food.

"The landscape has been enrolled to add value to our primary produce."

But this creates the new challenge of eco-consumerism.

While the new eco-consumers of the developed world are willing to pay premium prices they make ever-increasing demands on the moral legitimacy of their food.

In this country, a long way from anywhere, product morality is composite, says Swaffield.

Individual producers sell milk, cheese, lamb, venison, wine and apparel on the back of clean and green NZ Inc.

The use of industry-based production certification systems is in response to this demand for moral legitimacy, but they are not sufficient in themselves and need to be connected to a local landscape context.

No matter how well a local production space is managed, its legitimacy depends on the integrity of the wider landscape.

A local landscape may have different producers, who are neighbours, connected to a range of different international markets all of which have a different set of agendas.

For example a dairy farmer supplying milk to Fonterra works to a set of internal quality assurances, yet a widely publicised pollution event elsewhere in the locality, or even in the same country can cause great harm to their reputation.

"In short, production spaces need a sustainable local landscape setting in order to protect their brand value and moral legitimacy with consumers."

The second model of rural function Swaffield described was what he referred to as landscapes of consumption.

These are private lifestyle landscapes along coastlines, lakes and around the main cities. They are landscapes of high land value, expensive tastes and equally high costs of maintenance.

They follow international fashions, are energy intensive and expensive to maintain.

"They depend upon urban funding and their long-term sustainability must be seriously questioned."

These landscapes, he says, also need to be re-grounded in sustainable local landscapes.

Many New Zealanders see agricultural production as a major cause of environmental problems and no longer see it as sustaining the country as a whole.

Farms are becoming increasingly exclusive; the public is a long-distance viewer and seldom a visitor.

This has resulted in what may be described as a splintering rurality, the shared rural ideal of the productive and environmentally benign family farm is long gone.

The public are also only occasional visitors to the third main landscape, the conservation estate.

This landscape is bureaucratic. It is made up of a mixture of high value enclaves and significant areas of residual land.

At the interface of these three functional landscapes is the regulatory system of the RMA.

In the RMA framework, production and consumption are private functions.

They overlay a safety net of public regulation of minimum standards for the maintenance of eco-systems and natural resources.

"Most commentators agree the RMA has been a partial success, the problem is we can't agree which part."

However there are plenty of examples where the bottom-up approach of the RMA has been successful at site scale.

There have also been many successful examples of private conservation initiatives such as QEII covenants, whole farm plans and integrated catchment management schemes.

However these voluntary schemes are limited in their overall contribution.

They are typically in the less intensive landscapes and cover only a small proportion of the production landscape.

Volunteerism, says Swaffield, cannot be relied upon to achieve environmental sustainability.

The problem is that the combination of a bottom-up effects-based regulatory system, a top-down product certification system and voluntary schemes have been least successful where it is most needed - and these are the landscapes undergoing rapid intensification.

A series of reports highlight continuing decline in lowland biodiversity, issues with water over-allocation and declining water quality in areas undergoing intensification.

This indicates this country's approach to rural governance is not dealing well with the need to anticipate and manage cumulative effects of rapidly and often unforeseen change.

In addition to rapidly changing world markets there are also many large-scale rural landscape challenges including climate change and possible peak oil.

Rural landscapes are likely to experience increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events including floods, windstorms and droughts.

This will place stress on extensive hill country and intensive production areas of the exposed plains.

Droughts in particular highlight the issues of water use quality and management that the RMA has so far failed to manage.

"Peak oil and the emerging carbon economy means the tyranny of distance is reasserting itself in intensifying our dependence on value-added markets.

"They increase the value and need for landscape integrity."

These challenges also create new demands on rural landscape; land for biofuel and carbon sequestration, demand for large-scale water storage infrastructure and sites for renewable energy generation.

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