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Category Archives: Land Use
Integrated Agro-ecological Systems Land Use vs the ‘dis-integrated’ industrial machine
There is a difference in kind between complex, integrated, low input, free range systems of land, soil, organic matter, fungi & macroinvertebrates, plants & animals, and …. ….. industrial high energy input feedlot systems which abuse each of those – … Continue reading
Posted in agricultural strategy, Environmental Philosophy, Industrial Mindset, Land Use, Land use policy, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
Tagged agricultural strategy, Commoditisation, Complex Adaptive Systems, Culture-Nature, Economics of Natural Systems, Land use policy, Land use strategy, Managing Complexity, Mechanistic Worldview, Resilience theory, Socio-Ecological Systems, Strategy Vs Technocrats, Sustainable Land Management, Technology Treadmill
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Financial Crises and Forestry Financial Myopia (again)
Our land use ‘strategies’ are often no more than a dedication to financial tactics. It creates fragility and blinds us to potential futures. Is forestry quietly waiting in front of the spreadsheets without bothering to look outside? Continue reading
New Zealand Forestry: Getting off the Love affair with Simple
The British Columbian forestry sector imploded through 2018-2020. There are lessons here for New Zealand and elsewhere. Continue reading
Biodiversity in an Age of Responsibility
The Foresters’ Forum – Further notes on what it is to be a forester …. rather than a tree agronomist. 2020 hasn’t just been about Covid-19. The stories online that should most concern us as foresters are the significance of … Continue reading
Shifting the Culture of Development Policy in NZ – From Linear Technocracy to People-Place Complex
Forestry is not about trees, it is about people. And it is about trees only insofar as trees can serve the needs of people. (Jack Westoby, 1990) A fellow forester and I were having coffee – which he complained about … Continue reading
From Land as Factory, to Land as System: Realising the Potential that the Factory Technician cannot See
This is a follow-up blog to my previous, where I examined the false assumptions agribusiness analysts continue to make, and continue to be taught. Those assumptions and world views actively discourage any imagination of other elements such as woodlands, wetlands … Continue reading
The Economics of Space in Land Use: and our Unrealised Potential in New Zealand
New Zealand industrial agribusiness uses a variety of false assumptions about the economics of space that works against the integration of trees, wetlands and other diversification elements into our farmed landscapes. It conceptualises complex and multifunctional landscapes as simplified factories; a … Continue reading
Changing the Framing of our Lands and Forests …. and Hedgehogs – and Foxes
“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” Archilochus The Parliamentary Commission for the Environment (PCE) report Farms, Forests and Fossil Fuels: The next Great Landscape Transformation was released 26th March 2019. Amidst all the calls for clarity … Continue reading
Reimagining landscapes as socio- and agro-ecosystems [1]
Preamble: Dr Mike Joy brought a team of people together to consider the question of how we can help solve New Zealand’s freshwater crisis. The contributions were published by Bridget Williams Books as Mike Joy (Ed) 2018 Mountain to Sea: Solving … Continue reading
Land Degradation – One Insidious Step at a Time
“Once again, the principal villains across Greece, Southern Italy, Southern France, and Spain, were fires, goats, and timber felling. … Able to thrive anywhere, goats often create an environment in which little but goats will survive.” Ronald Wright. A Short … Continue reading
Shelter from the Storm
It is hard to remember during the sunny days of summer that we had some freak snow storms back in August, and a few wintry blasts in early October. The television news ran lamb death stories, as they did the … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
3 Comments
Review – The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young
Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows gives far more than a simple description of animal personality, behaviour and communication. It speaks also to and of humanity. What animals eat impacts on their health and the quality and taste of their … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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Reimagining Landscapes I: Rejecting the Machine
How do you separate the personal from the professional? We are taught to deal in the ‘objective’, in measured things. But the whole idea of reimagining how we look at landscapes – our so-called ‘working lands’ of farms and forests … Continue reading
Reimagining the Potential of Landscape I: Start with the Deeper Story
This is a paper in two parts, or perhaps three. This first part looks to some of the mechanical assumptions within New Zealand’s colonial land management, and a glimpse at the potential by shifting that view. There is so much … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
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Ruataniwha Dam will Transform the Region
Regional Councillor Debbie Hewitt is quite right that should the Ruataniwha Dam go ahead it will be “absolutely transformational” (quoted in Hawke’s Bay Today April 2017). You need only look to Mid-West rural America, whose communities were also sold the … Continue reading
The Future of Managing Water in our Landscapes – Go Local Scale
There are so many examples both past and present where taking a decentralised approach to managing water in dry landscapes provides multiple benefits. Such examples tend to be low capital as well as suited to a particular people and place – … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
4 Comments
The Wisdom of Intimacy
Edward Abbey – he of Desert Solitaire, one of the classics questioning the values of our modern world – wrote a short and scathing essay of a laboratory scientist intent on studying dog behaviour because “no one had done it … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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Who is a Forester, a Farmer, A Fisher?
These are the sentiments of a husbandman, a farmer, a forester. You can teach all the agronomic head stuff you want, pile on the degrees; but if you don’t have the heart to see more in land, plants, animals and … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
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What’s Good about Gorse
I recall some time in the distant past having to put up with Wordsworth going on a bit about ‘golden’ daffodils. Saccharine sweet. They’re not even golden. More yellow really – similar to broom. Now for the colour of deep, … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Landscape function, Thought Pieces
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Four Arguments Against GM Food Production
The argument for GM Food is supported by those taking a number of positions: 1. That GM will increase food production and we need to feed the world (false on both counts); 2. that GM will provide business opportunities for our … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
5 Comments
Greed, Cruelty & Ingratitude – and a Short Future
I’ve been reading David James Duncan’s The River Why. The movie does absolutely no justice to this book. I suppose big philosophy books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Catch 22, will always struggle to get the questions … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
2 Comments
Rebuilding our Relationship with Land – The Emerging World View
Here lie so many interesting questions – the idea of land ‘ownership’. Is it a modern social construct? We used to live in tribal common lands – in much of Europe as well as in Aotearoa; in land referred to … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
3 Comments
Reforming our Regional Economy II – Making Magic in the Landscape
In the late 1940s my father came down from the East Coast to be a shepherd on Omakere Station in Central Hawke’s Bay. Part of the work was removing regenerated shrublands of manuka and kanuka and turning them into pasture … Continue reading
Posted in Building Regional Economies, Land Use, Thought Pieces
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Reforming our Regional Economy I: Value over Volume
Why do we manage land the way we do? Why does New Zealand focus on ever-more gross production over a great scale of sameness? Why do we talk of “feeding the world” when we can at best feed 40 million … Continue reading
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall …. Unless
I had an interesting conversation today heading into the beauty of the Eastern Wairarapa on the road to Castlepoint and Riversdale. The question was put, why do you even care about the future? The planet will be fine. People are … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
2 Comments
Creating Disorder and the Capacity to Renew
What does stability mean? How do you provide for it? If you are student of ecology you see patterns of disturbance everywhere. Stability comes from dancing through the inevitable disturbance. Functional integrity comes from a position of accepting change … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
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The Art of Space – Realising the Potential of our Lands and CityScapes
I am struck by the similarities we face when we look at land and cityscapes. Patterns, connections, things that do many things at once, that mean this as well as that. You have to hold a few ideas simultaneously in … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
2 Comments
Teaching Wisdom – To Know the World, you Have to Live in the World
“To know the world, you have to live in the world.” Carol Black has written a beautiful and insightful essay on connection between children and the outdoors, knowing, and what education ought to be. It resonates with me. I think … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces, Virtues, Ways of Seeing
9 Comments
Everything is Connected: Make it Sing
I’ve used this diagram often when talking about land use. But it is so much more than that. The connections between and among things, patches, processes, dollars, functions of soil, stock, trees, wetlands, water and thought – many not quantifiable, … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
1 Comment
Connections – Harm People and the Land, and you Harm Your Future.
Letter to the editor sent to the Hawke’s Bay Today 28th August 2016. Context. We are currently experiencing polluted drinking water, the result of intensive farming locally. Some old people have died from infections impacting on underlying health issues. … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
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Putting Culture back into Nature
We have spread across and changed our world. Change is the constant. But it is maintaining the integrity of our systems that is more important than whether there is any particular ‘natural state’. Continue reading
Our Land is not an Industry
“To heal is to make whole. This applies as well to the ‘industries’ of landscapes: agriculture, forestry & mining. Once they have been industrialised, those enterprises no longer recognise landscapes as wholes, let alone as homes for people and other … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
3 Comments
Would you Commoditise Rain?
We are heading for a winter drought in Hawke’s Bay. Nothing on California’s situation. But I find myself longing for heavy rain. A cloudburst that goes on for a few hours. I want to just sit and listen, and smell, … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
4 Comments
Creative versus Extractive Economies
The sands of Iraq and the karst mountain bones of the Grecian hills tell a story. These were once fat lands; the Tigris/Euphrates fields of Sumer, the Arcadia of Greece. They were once Mediterranean empires, now struggling countries of a … Continue reading
Are GMOs New Zealand’s Agricultural Future?
The debate about the future of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in Hawke’s Bay (and NZ agriculture) is heating up. A number of opinion pieces are reacting to this government’s attempts to take legislative decision making out of the region’s hands. … Continue reading
Wanderings of Henry David Thoreau I
Henry David Thoreau, Extract from ‘Baker Farm’, Walden Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Poems
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Industrial Farming: The Deeper Roots of Animal Cruelty
My father was a gentle stockman, and he cared for people the same. He taught us how to hunt up and how to use presence and eye when mustering, and how not to push cattle too hard. He had a … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
Tagged Agro-ecology, Alternative Vision, Animal Cruelty, Commodity trap, Corporate Influence, Land Degradation, Local Development, Mechanistic Worldview, Neo-liberal Economics, People as Cogs, Production vs. Value & Price, resilience, Sustainable Land Management, Value not volume
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Climate Change: from a Protest to a Movement
We dread the horror documentaries on climate change. “This is what is happening. If we don’t do something about it, these are the consequences.” It has the effect of stunning us. It’s better to put our head under a rock. … Continue reading
Becoming Native to a Place
I am searching for farm landscapes (farmscapes); researching & writing something about how to look at land as other than a utilitarian set of ‘resources’, a list of measurable ‘nouns’ to put on a truck with a weight and a … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces
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The Trans-Pacific ‘Partnership’ and Our Environment
The very idea that the Trans-Pacific ‘Partnership’ (TPP) is good for the environment (Craig Foss MP Hawke’s Bay Today 26th October) is arrant nonsense. More than that, it is wilful distortion. While Mr Foss might have the privilege of knowing what clauses … Continue reading
Posted in Building Regional Economies, Land Use
Tagged Better economics, Biodiversity, Commons, Corporate Influence, Culture-Nature, Development, Economics of Natural Systems, environment, Environmental Ethics, FSC, Government Propaganda, Labeling, Local Development, Local Enterprise, Neoliberalism, Planetary Boundaries, SME, Sustainable Land Management, TPPA
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Ways of Seeing II: The Mechanical View and the Treadmill of Techno-Fixes
This is the second in a series. I wanted to write about where we have come from in land use and conservation, what we are doing, and where we could be going: from Pre-modern (Pre-Industrial), To Modern (Industrial, or Productivist), to … Continue reading
Irrigation in New Zealand and yet more Propaganda
The following was submitted to regional papers in response to an opinion piece written by Andrew Curtis from Irrigation NZ in early September 2015. Irrigation NZ’s Andrew Curtis’s comments (3rd Sept 2015) about land use and irrigation – as well … Continue reading
Propaganda and the Rhetoric of the Ruataniwha Dam
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell I was taught propaganda at school. Our English master, Mr Brown, liked words. He had an inspirational … Continue reading
Ways of Seeing I: Paradigms of Progress – the Rise of the Machine
Preamble. This is the beginning of a series. I wanted to write about where we have come from in land use and conservation, what we are doing, and where we could be going: from Pre-modern (Pre-Industrial), To Modern (Industrial, or … Continue reading
Regional Development – Thinking Short & Narrow or Long and Broad
Wairarapa MP Alistair Scott’s opinion piece regarding the environmental record of New Zealand’s National led government (Hawke’s Bay Today 26th July 2015) is so full of errors, misrepresentations and clichés that it is difficult to know where to start. At its … Continue reading
Reframing our Water as a Commons
This article was published in the Hawke’s Bay Today following the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s (HBRC) decision to allow an overseas water bottling plant to take water from the high quality aquifer that lies beneath the cities of Hasting and Napier. … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Socio-ecological Systems, Thought Pieces, Wicked Problems
Tagged Alternative Vision, Better economics, Common Pool Resources, Commons, Culture-Nature, Development, Environmental Ethics, HBRC, Heretaunga Aquifer, Neo-liberal Economics, Privatisation of the Commons, Privatisation of Water, Socio-Ecological Systems, Water Rights
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Seeing the World System of Weeds – Or – Do Androids dream of Intelligent Sheep? A Compleat Ramble
An anecdote about our research focus on ‘weeds’. I was a little mischievously provocative about our ‘weed’ research at Otago University. I remembered an Aldo Leopold article in one of my books of his essays (no, I can’t be bothered … Continue reading
Future Goals and Options in NZ Land Management – A Transdisciplinary View
A brief argument from some years ago to rethink land use in New Zealand “If we go through a list of some of the main problematiques that are defining the new Century, such as water, forced migrations, poverty, environmental crises, … Continue reading
Building Land Systems for Drought-Flood Resilience
A few notes from a morning rant “Although rainwater harvest has been accomplished by humans in virtually every drought prone region of the world for millennia, our society seems to have collective amnesia about the utility, efficiency, sustainability and beauty … Continue reading
