Principles ENTIRELY JUST THOUGH NOT ALTOGETHER POPULAR

Forest and Bird, Volume 16, Issue 2, 1 May 1985, Page 12

Principles ENTIRELY JUST THOUGH NOT ALTOGETHER POPULAR

The final of our articles on the theme of environmental protection on private land ts an abridged verston of last year’s Sanderson Memortal Address, by Professor John Morton, Professor of Zoology at Auckland University, a member of the Forest and Bird executive and one of New Zealand’s best known conservationists.

| he battle for our publicly owned forests could soon be over. There remain no good reasons ... (in economics, timber need, export or employment policy) why the Minister could not halt indigenous logging by administrative order tomorrow. This probably won’t happen. Political inertia, grudging resentment of the conservationists, foresters’ engrossment with techniques that have now _ become pointless, may be too strong. But if it did happen, we ought not to spend too long in _ congratulation. Because the great problem would still remain that is with us now, and that no conservation body has properly confronted: the saving of indigenous environment, especially forest, in private hands, that is today under intensive threat, all the more alarming for being so fragmented and widespread. You won’t need me to remind you where the urgent problem spots are today @ The superb lowland podocarps of the Waitutu coastal forest, owned by the local Maori Incorporation. @ The Catlins coastal forests of south east Otago still unsaved, with the Clutha County Council wavering and reversing upon its own scheme of change, while a mobile chip mill, like St Peter’s devil, ‘prowls about seeing what it may devour.’

@ Kauri coming on to the market from fellings of privately owned bush in the north, whether being cleared for exotic forestry, or by selective extraction of prime trees. @ The host of little remnants of northern forest, of puriri, taraire, kohekohe, falling casualty to farm development encouragement loans. Forested Maori land being cut for the cash crop ... kauri sold, often totara wasted, as happens constantly where parcels have been leased to the forestry companies; or are being privately pineplanted with encouragement grants. @ The clearing of regenerating forest — some would call it ‘mere scrub’ in the north, with kiwi rescue programmes operating like rape crisis centres! Against all this, our effective conservation response won’t be to wave frustrated arms, trying to save one bit after another from clearing or logging. But crisis reaction like this constantly happens: last ditch appeals to supporters to raise money, the Government to subsidise it, and a little bit more land to come into public ownership. ‘If you want to save it, buy it ... or persuade the Government to buy it? — so runs the common assumption. Compensate the owners out of what they want to do; and claim that they are legitimately entitled to do what they want on ‘their own land’. With this contemporary approach, there are several things wrong. No socialist land policy First: I don’t want to see all the choice environment coming into public hands! I want as much of it as possible to continue permanently in private ownership. I am convinced this is the best place it could be with private or family vision and tradition; and with pride and initiative for what would be collectively no one’s responsibility. It is well that I’m not a socialist when it comes to land policy. For there wouldn’t be any chance of such a political blueprint being effective in today’s New

Zealand — to save environment, or anything else. Our Labour Government are not socialists : or at least on the available evidence we’d have to find no case to go to trial. Nor would they appear to be conservationists, out of any deep or traditional understanding. They tend to understand the land less than agrarian conservatives; because they don’t tend to hold it, or if so, they don’t primarily value it for working and farming. Second: Some of those agrarian conservatives have, however, developed exaggerated expectations. This could be true of some of those in the Canterbury landed tradition, with the Elworthy pressure to freehold high country grazing areas. But, third, other chief conservation problems with land come not today from locking up, but insensitive development. I find it unthinkable that the fee simple of land entitles an owner to do what he will with it, to develop it to the ultimate or alternatively be entitled to compensation for the loss of this development potential, by the rest of the community. God will make no more of it To devise a code, then, for the treatment of private land in New Zealand will be a complex task. Not just to prevent Northland Forest or Catlins being cut or sold, or making bush clearance harder. It will entail some regard for the sort of society we want to live in, where the environment is a resource in which we all have a beneficial interest. We shall need to consider a little history, economics, planning, and and rating law, remembering all these things are far too important for the citizen to leave to the experts. To begin : LAND is a resource calling for special social policies. It is that peculiar sort of property called ‘real’, and as such has certain characteristics. It is immobile. It is scarce. It is for practical purposes fixed in supply. God will make no more of it (Napier earthquake or reclaiming harbour boards apart). There was (generally) no cost involved in its creation.

Much of the land and its natural cover, under ongoing management policies, will be sustainable. But some parts of it may carry rare, fragile and ancient, and therefore precious ecosystems that, if left to the economic assumptions of land use for profit maximisation, would not be sustainable. There are the threatened communities that for an appealing variety of reasons — not hard-nosed or ‘productive’ in the accounting sense — we may have to preserve. Conservation and preservation An impression is abroad, even among some environmentalists today, that CONSERVATION is a good word, meaning balanced and sustained multiple use, with a little for everyone — being able to log our forests and mine our national parks, all to be accounted admirable and sound-headed. PRESERVATION, by contrast is a bad thing, only to be urged by unrealistic academics and activists, that entails the selfish, unjustifiable locking up of resources. It is high time every environmentalist learnt the proper place of both, as our own Society painfully had to during the North Island forest campaigns late in the °70’s. PRESERVATION is, properly regarded, a special case of conservation with its own appropriate place and occasions. Some resources -like fossil fuels — we have to use up and ultimately run down. We can conscientiously do this if we are using them to tide us over to, say 2020, to the change from stock to flow sources. A large range of resources, probably the majority of our ecosystems, can perfectly well undergo sustained yield management : dairy farms, wheat fields, pine forests, snapper fisheries, operated with due attention to growth rate, productivity and the age structure. There are other ecosystems — complex, slow-growing, beautiful in their diversity and precarious stability, that we may not be able to exploit or consume, without losing them. Two of these are forests of mature kauri and of giant podocarps. The oldest podocarps in Whirinaki were seedlings when the first canoe arrived. The middle-aged are as old as the Wars of the Roses. The time scale is too slow and prolonged for human manipulation. We must nonetheless try to take account of that stately rhythm and pulse. We must not in our human presumption cut off options that it has taken hundreds or thousands of years to create. This arrogance that, since ‘the land is ours’, we have unlimited power to change its future by our present exploitation, is a fiction of human law as unrealistic as the notion that our fee simple title reaches in space from the centre of the earth to the vault of the heavens. The good sense and capacity to live upon the land, in harmony with its cycle through time, is one of the virtues — whatever else may be the faults — of a land-owning class, a squirearchy or a tribe, whose tradition has brought it into a proper respect for that land.

Great Britain is today a remarkable country in that the best seashore in Europe is preserved as a National Sea Coast (virtually a national park) in private hands, in some part by protective planning, but far beyond that, by the virtues of private restraint. So that one of the indicia of a ‘gentleman’ — in a landed sense — was in being brought up to know how to treat his land. That is why, over so many years, we got along without Town and Country Planning. It could even explain how the loveliest New Zealand areas, city and country, took their present form long before our own first Town and Country Planning Act of 1926. The New Zealand Experience In New Zealand, planning has tended to be ‘country’ oriented. Unlike the landscape of England, much of New Zealand’s bio-surface is fragile and primeval; with podocarp forests, groves of kauris, high level forests of beech, swamps and wetlands, marshes with wading birds; high country with scree and shingle, threatened plants like Ranunculus parviflorus at Mt Clarence. Anxiety is also being raised by the amounts of Maori land — small patches in the north, to threatened Waitutu in the far south — that are being effectively signed away from Maori ownership in forestry leases and regularly approved or enjoined by the Maori Land Court. By all the signs Maori people are being pushed into exploitative attitudes, and turning out no more far-seeing or valueconscious than the European did before him. What shall we do? First, we need to know the resource we have. Nation-wide ecosystem survey is going on. Much of it is by part-time staff, some working in summer projects: most of it dedicated work by young people with a care for the environment beyond their present weight or influence in the

bureaucracy. Their enthusiasm, and the quality of their work should push departments concerned such as Lands and Survey to go on funding, to get it finished ... and put it into circulation. One of these student groups showed me a large scale bush and forest map of Northland, made last summer. Its complexity and richness was a revelation. I am not now talking of great forest sanctuaries like Waipoua, but all those many small strips and remnants that are the scattered glory of the North. All these are in danger. Most of them are privately owned. They are confronting us with the problem only a little more urgent in the north than in the rest of New Zealand. Second, there should be an obligation enshrined in law recognising its as aboriginal New Zealand environment, calling for planning or total protection. Since 1973 there has been an obligation in the Planning Act to look after our rivers, lakes and the coastline. This should be enlarged to enable mature and regenerating forests, tussock, montane communities and wetlands to be placed under secure planning protection. The gazetting of it as Scheduled Environment would bring it before the attention of local planning bodies. Third, such bodies would than be charged with giving it explicit planning consideration. They would be nudged with suitable incentives to do this without undue delay. This scheduled environment would be rate exempt until a planning decision was made. Thus, the owner could be given a pleasurable foretaste of the privilege that would attach to any land that became Protected Environment. Still in private hands Three results would emerge: 1. The District Planning Authority may decide that a piece of environment will not be put under protection at all. 2. Exploitative use of land might be made a Conditional Use, which would be publicly notifiable and challengeable. 3. Scheduled Environment could become Protected Private Space,

whereupon its exemption from rating would become permanent. Either the owner or district planning authority could decide this. The first of these latter options means the land would be the subject of a voluntary covenant, to maintain its present environmental quality unimpaired. It would become like much of Britain’s National Park system, including the national coastline, still predominantly privately owned. The covenant would be registrable with the QE II Trust, or with a Nature Conservancy. It would run with the land, against the covenantor and subsequent owners, assignees or heirs. The Trust or planning body would enforce any breach. The cost of survey, fencing and ongoing conservation would be borne by the Trust or local authority. Rating valuation would be nil. Value upon probate, for estate or succession duties would also disappear. The value upon ordinary sale

would follow the free market. Lost rating revenue would be restored to the local authority out of a Government Environment Conservation Fund. Thus the people would bear the burden of safeguarding fine environment in the national interest. But remitted rates would be restored only in proportion to that part of the Scheduled Environment in its area that had been placed under adequate planning protection. Here would be another incentive for the local authority to act with promptness and liberality. There is no question here of ‘nationalising’ the development value, as was the philosophy of Harold Wilson’s Community Land Act of 1973. Here in distinction, no-one would be harvesting the development value, for it would be eliminated in favour of conservation and enjoyment.

Such land should not be liable for rates. Rating at present has two main functions: the first is the financing of local works and services; second, the accumulating sum taken in rates is the anticipatory levy on the prospect of capital gain from development. Its peculiarity is in being extracted in advance from the landowners at large, for a gain that many might not wish to realise, rather than levied afterwards upon those that have actually recouped a gain. Will Voluntarism Work? I would hope these incentives would bring an appreciable flow of Scheduled Environment into protection voluntarily. It would seem so desirable to do this by free consent, that I would prefer to let some be lost, rather than for protection to be seen as a source of inequitable or bureaucratic threat. But other questions of equity will also arise from owners unwilling to enter into covenants. Should the willing be left to carry the whole burden? What could be done to bring uncovenanted environment under similar protection? Cases might also arise where trustee or corporate owners lack the power to encumber the land, or charge it with a covenant. Here a useful procedure could be what I have previously advocated as PPOS (permanent private open space). The owner would permanently keep the title, inalienable by sale or disposable by will. Existing use would generally remain, but with the requirement — as under a covenant — that the environment would not be detrimentally altered. Such a zoning would be applied at the instance of a local (= district planning) authority, or a regional, or maritime authority. It would not come under inspection with each five yearly scheme review, but would be ‘permanent’ so far as permanence is possible in planning. A final sort of rating concession might follow where former rating had already been heavy. Here, with covenanted land, some rate restoration might be made, not in cash, but by suitable issue of interestbearing Government stock, representing in today’s values, the accumulated sum paid in rates over — say — the 20 years past. These measures I have been suggesting could be among the policies our Society could be thinking through and advocating. They would achieve some regard for the long term and crisis action would no longer be necessary as each new piece of threatened environment was brought to notice. Above all, fine environment, so far as possible, would be left in private hands. Then might it be said of us, that Royal Forest and Bird has given signs of caring about the land and whole habitats, not birds and specimen patches alone. And as it was written of William Rolleston, pioneer of Mt Algidus: ‘‘He has had the noble audacity to advocate principles which if not at the present time altogether popular are entirely just.’’ Pe