Beauty under threat from land grabs

By GEOFF CUMMING

Earthworks pierce the silence in the bushclad foothills of the Waitakere Ranges. From the Oratia valley to Swanson, diggers and bulldozers are busily converting former orchards and vineyards to lifestyle lots. Off West Coast Rd, concrete driveways 20cm deep snake hundreds of metres to new building footprints in bush clearings, steadily eroding the buffer zone between suburbia and the protected ranges.

It's the same to the north at Albany, to the south at Clevedon and up and down the country around coastal settlements and inland resorts.

The beaches of the Far North, the Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty, the Marlborough Sounds, the Wakatipu and Wanaka basins and farms in the South Island High Country are under siege from the lifestyle development boom.

Our Middle Earth landscape is becoming as mythical as our clean, green image.

As houses dot yet another unspoiled bay, headland or mountain backdrop, it seems clear that the rule book, the Resource Management Act, is failing to protect the landscapes valued by New Zealanders and which underpin our tourism industry.

But just as we rail against the disappearance of empty beaches and undisturbed views, we would all jump at the chance to live in these scenic spots.

And it is unfair to tell struggling rural landowners they can't subdivide to meet this demand - unless we are prepared to compensate them, right?

A two-day conference underway in Auckland aims to identify new measures to protect valuable landscapes on private land. The sensitivity of the issue is reflected in the high-profile line-up it has attracted - from conservationists, landscape architects, lawyers and academics to judges, politicians and state servants.

New Zealand is almost unique among OECD countries in not having special protection measures for valued landscapes, says Gary Taylor, chairman of the Environmental Defence Society. Taylor believes stronger rules in the RMA and special purpose legislation are needed.

But the RMA is already despised by property developers for its environmental restrictions, added costs and delays. Taylor says landowners have nothing to fear from reforms but pro-market advocates such as Owen McShane say the act already contains the necessary tools to do the job - it's just a matter of using them properly.

McShane says the society, the Department of Conservation, and Forest and Bird are out to "capture" as much unspoiled landscape as possible in district plans so farmers can't touch their properties.

"In their view the only decent landscape is one with no human footprint on it. The fact is that the majority of the public are quite happy to see a powerful landscape with some form of human activity on it. We don't turn away in horror if we see a house on top of a hill."

McShane says we need to prioritise - and where there are landscapes which should not be touched, the public should buy them. "The RMA provides for purchase and compensation but they don't want to pay for it."

It is the heritage of New Zealanders to live in scenic settings, says McShane, who lives on a waterfront property on Kaipara Harbour.

"We're one of the few countries in the world with an undeveloped coastline and we've only got four million people - there's enough to go around."

But the problem with the RMA is that it is an enabling piece of legislation, says Raewyn Peart, senior policy analyst for the society, a joint organiser of the conference. As long as the effects of development can be mitigated, or remedied, the act tends to let "sustainable development" go ahead, she says.

Another key factor is that each resource consent application must be decided case-by-case on its merits - even those that don't comply with district plans.

Peart's studies of development in the Waitakeres, the Wakatipu basin near Queenstown and on the Coromandel Peninsula reveal the cumulative impact of this approach.

"The Wakatipu basin is an area of outstanding mountain landscapes and vegetation, which you would think worthy of protection," says Peart. "But one by one, the council has approved building applications which are transforming it to a rural-residential lifestyle location.

"No one had any overview of the cumulative effects - and these are not small houses."

The act devolved decision-making to local councils, leading to variations according to political slant and staff expertise. And landscape is subjective. Its importance can be harder to measure than, say, ecological values.

"We haven't had a debate as a country about what we should be preserving, and there are no checks and balances if you get dodgy decision-making," says Peart, a resource management lawyer. "The Department of Conservation and the Ministry for the Environment are not engaging in landscape issues."

In the foothills of the Waitakeres, the Waitakere Ranges Protection Society is tiring of fighting subdivision applications case-by-case, in and out of the Environment Court.

Society president John Edgar says the use of "structure plans" to mitigate the effects of development have ushered in a new wave of subdivision in the foothills.

"It is changing rapidly and we won't get it back again. The only way to ensure this doesn't continually happen is to put long-term protection over the 10,000ha of Waitakeres which is privately owned."

The protection society wants the Waitakere City Council to seek prohibited activity status over the "bush living zone" in the district plan, preventing further subdivision than is already allowed for.

"It will give certainty for the future so you can't buy a bit of land in Swanson and then divvy it up into small lots."

The protection society is celebrating its 30th anniversary this weekend and while it is showing no signs of flagging, Edgar says battling the ad hoc nature of development under the RMA is increasingly time-consuming.

"I'm spending two to three days a week on it - it's affecting my income and family life," says Edgar, a well-known sculptor. "You can't expect people to do it forever.

"We're not trying to stop everything but draw a line in the sand to say this is as far as the growth can go. Otherwise when you stand on Mt Eden and look at the Waitakeres it won't be the bush you will see."

But landscape is not just something to look at. It has a cultural component, says Peart. It is one way in which we relate to nature. It helps to define who we are. Even modified landscapes gain value with time, but the RMA refers only to protecting outstanding natural landscapes, a weakness which developers, and their lawyers, have cashed-in on.

Environment Court rulings have tended to reinforce the act's enabling nature. At Pakiri Beach, north of Auckland, the court stated that buildings on a ridge line were "not inherently unattractive" and that pasture, as a degraded landscape, could be enhanced by native bush planting - a finding which has encouraged developers to offer to plant bush in return for extra house lots.

More than once, the court has chided councils for not being explicit about what their planning rules are trying to achieve. If they don't want something to happen, district plans must say so.

Yet councils which have tried to introduce landscape protection in their plans have run into huge opposition from farmers and other rural landowners and often had to retreat.

Simon Swaffield, professor of landscape architecture at Lincoln University, says few councils have done proper stocktakes of what is worth saving, the first step to developing effective policies.

Public perceptions of outstanding landscapes are clear, says Swaffield: the more "natural" or unspoiled, the more we value them.

Based on this, landscape architects Stephen Brown and Rachel de Lambert have just finished identifying outstanding natural landscapes in the Auckland region for the Auckland Regional Council.

Areas tagged outstanding include much of the coastline outside the urban area, the Waitakeres and Hunuas, the volcanic cones, and pockets of bush throughout Rodney District. Many are already under siege from development, particularly the coastline north of Orewa.

The ARC's inventory will, after consultation, form the basis for increased protection in its regional policy statement and in district plans.

Swaffield hopes other regional councils will follow. But he says rural councils, because they are small, often lack the expertise to devise sensible landscape-protection policies.

"So there is probably a case for more guidance at the national level. I think we do need to do something, but rather than new legislation I would rather see much clearer guidance from the Government, and councils should be putting more effort into developing rigorous policies."

The Ministry for the Environment believes councils have enough powers to protect outstanding natural features.

"Where the real scraps happen is with rural landscapes where you have to ask whether it is fair for the community to impose a whole lot of restrictions," says Sue Powell, the ministry's general manager, working with local government. But she acknowledges the concern about the coastal development, "where there is a huge amount going on".

"Councils need to construct plans so you can't drive a bus through them. Some people are quite canny about how to get through it."

Landscape architect Stephen Brown says the legislation gives more room for manoeuvre than we are seeing at present. Where landowners want to put houses on pristine beach frontages, headlands or ridges, transferable rights can be used to shift the development elsewhere.

But we need to move from a framework where everyone has the potential to develop their land to one where there are winners and losers, he says.

"We should probably develop the hell out of areas where it is entirely appropriate for development to occur and have no development at all in areas which are precious. Otherwise we will end up with rural-residential development everywhere."

At present Brown says there is a "fundamental contradiction between the values New Zealanders hold dear and the kind of environment we are creating.

"We keep saying we are world leaders in resource management but it is interesting that, 12 years down the track, no other country has bothered to follow New Zealand's lead in effects-based resource management."

He advocates a third layer of landscape management which sits between national park status and private land covered by the RMA in which human activity could be restricted but the tourism value exploited.

For the conference's keynote speaker, Malcolm Grant, a New Zealander who has lived in Britain for 30 years, the debate holds some irony.

In Britain, one of the world's most modified landscapes, landscape protection is not only regulated but underpinned by negotiated agreements and public support, says Grant, professor of land economy and pro vice chancellor at Cambridge University. Farmers are compensated for undertaking stewardship roles and can seek grants and subsidies.

In New Zealand, internationally known for its beautiful landscape, the regime is more "hands-off" and landowners' rights hold sway.

Overseas models being examined at the conference range from voluntary agreements to state-funded landscape protection agencies.

Says Grant: "Prescriptive regulation is better at imposing restrictions, but achieving positive outcomes usually requires inducement."