Understandings of, and responses to, people-place connections are at a critical juncture in New Zealand. Rapid tourism growth, new and evolving economies in farming and industry, extreme weather events and changing climates present both opportunity and risk for stewardship of our heritage and environment. I argue that...
Understandings of, and responses to, people-place connections are at a critical juncture in New Zealand. Rapid tourism growth, new and evolving economies in farming and industry, extreme weather events and changing climates present both opportunity and risk for stewardship of our heritage and environment. I argue that we can only stand tall to these challenges if we actively forefront the inseparability of nature and culture in environmental practice. Two aspects of strategic thinking are explored here. First, the necessity of taking a bicultural approach to environmental management, and second, of proactively responding to an era of unprecedented change.
Environmental research both nationally and internationally is increasingly recognising the necessity of multi-disciplinary, holistic responses to “total” environments as cultural landscapes, acknowledging that even the most unspoiled environments are shaped by people-place relationships. However, constituting and managing “nature” and “culture” as separate entities remains entrenched in environmental planning and policy frameworks. This holds serious risk of constraining innovation and resilience in a transforming landscape.
Rather than perpetuating fragmented practice, there is an opportunity here for a strategic shift towards a genuinely bicultural enweaving of Māori and Pakeha environmental values. This is not only a mutual obligation as partners under the Treaty of Waitangi. Māori understandings of place offer (re)new(ed) language for identifying, evaluating and managing our natural and cultural heritage at a time when Western discourse has systematically objectified and componentised environments. Questioning our position may necessitate acknowledging, and wrestling with, divergent and multi-layered realities that are not easily delimited and homogenised. However, I argue that environmental resilience will only develop by consciously forefronting holistic cultural landscapes rather than isolated elements. Complexity and contradiction does not need to be paralysing. Rather, it can be tensions that sustain our environs in a time of unprecedented change: living cultural landscapes, contested and renewable.
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