Environment needs to make room for people

Comment by RICHARD BRABANT*

In an article on Monday, Raewyn Peart argued that the Resource Management Act was not delivering for the environment and needed reform before all our special places were subdivided and built on.

Contrary to her assertion, the act does have special provisions to protect outstanding landscapes - whether privately or publicly owned.

Section 6 requires as a matter of national importance the preservation of the natural character of the coastal environment, wetlands, lakes and rivers and their margins, and the protection of them from inappropriate subdivision use and development.

And that outstanding natural features and landscapes be protected from inappropriate subdivision use and development, as are areas of significant indigenous vegetation and significant habitats of indigenous fauna.

The questions that have been posed for this weekend's New Zealand Landscape conference (and are raised by Ms Peart) imply a concern that many important or even outstanding landscapes are being harmed by inappropriate development.

This concern is not answered by locking up our coast or our rural landscapes, or by creating heritage landscapes.

The more pressing issue is to restore degraded landscapes and to require existing and new land uses to move towards sustainable "steady state" production systems.

Of course, there are examples of inappropriate use or development (including subdivision).

But there are also many good Resource Management Act-consented and implemented developments which have involved a sustainable design process and involve the private landowners in the ongoing management of the landscape. It is not "trading off harmful landscape impacts against potential positive ecological benefits".

Criticism has tended to focus purely on aesthetic considerations; the substantial environmental benefits achieved by revegetating large areas of degraded land to restore biodiversity and a sustainable land use pattern have been minimised or not mentioned at all. The common complaint is the introduction of new houses and people onto the land.

People living on the land have a positive contribution to make and this is where a conflict with traditional environmental ideology arises.

It is not uncommon to find the perspectives, policies and practices of conservation biology hinged on the idea that human action or even presence must mean degradation, that nature needs people to be absent.

This position has no future since the only way we are likely to preserve ecosystems is to get involved in their management. Even systems that were never managed before will change in perhaps undesirable ways unless we act.

Traditionally, environmental philosophy seemed to allow full scope for people to create damage but deny all chances for positive change. New philosophies are needed that empower people to undertake the management that will be necessary in the future.

Collapsing ecosystems may be perceived as beautiful, and not everyone may see beauty in intact ones. But there does not need to be any intrinsic conflict between beauty and ecological health. Evaluation of landscape "quality" is important but it is important to apply appropriate measures of value.

The coming decades may bring extensive environmental degradation that will require enormous efforts to resolve. These challenges need to be carefully prioritised, and those involved in the Resource Management Act process and the community at large will need to identify when changes have significant functional consequences, compared with changes that simply differ from our presumptions of how things should be.

There is a well-researched and recognised practice of assessing the "value" of landscapes in visual terms. The notions of landscapes having outstanding visual qualities, high aesthetic values, and requiring protection to retain "existing rural character" or the like are well-known concepts in many regional and district plans. That practice, however, can fail to recognise underlying issues of sustainability.

Sustainable design can enable our valued landscapes to evolve and change through development and use, while providing for future generations, safeguarding life-supporting systems and avoiding, remedying or mitigating the harmful effects of activities.

It is unrealistic to expect that large tracts of our valued landscapes can be transferred into public ownership and, even if they were, that it would be feasible to restore degraded ecosystems and landforms that way.

Land-use strategies should maintain a focus on conservation and recreation results but we should not shrink from recognising the need to restructure land holdings to rationalise property ownership and associated land use activities.

Some intensification of rural and coastal residential development will need to be part of a suite of options.

* Richard Brabant, a barrister specialising in environmental law and former director of the Environmental Defence Society, is presenting a paper at the Reclaiming Our Heritage: the New Zealand Landscape Conference this weekend.