STEWARDSHIP an idea whose time has come

Forest and Bird, Volume 17, Issue 2, 1 May 1986, Page 34

STEWARDSHIP an idea whose time has come

by

President

Gwenny Davis,

_ Native Forest Action Council

he fine concept of stewardship expresses the aspiration of a community to retain resources unimpaired for future generations. As originally intended, the new Government’s proposed Department of Conservation was to exercise a stewardship function over large areas of natural New Zealand — especially native forests, shrublands and tussock grasslands. The idea was that these lands (most of which lie outside existing parks and reserves) would be managed as a ‘‘holding category’’, offering choices for the future, and protection from modification for the time being. To draw a line around the ‘‘stewardship lands’ and safeguard them from piecemeal encroachment and development was the most important idea behind the environmental reorganisation. It was a major departure from the frontier policies of the existing departments of Forest Service and Lands and Survey, which recognized only two land uses, preservation and production, and zoned for the latter whenever possible. Halfway house Stewardship represents a halfway house, protecting land and resources for the time being, and placing a high value on the protection of choices for future generations as to how they use natural resources. It is a concept which conservationists have always upheld strongly. Sadly, the original intention to promote stewardship has been eaten away by officials within the government. When the legislation establishing the Department of Conservation is introduced into Parliament — after this issue of Forest and Bird goes to press — it seems likely that the concept of stewardship will have disappeared entirely. That will mean that conservation leaders have failed in their behind-the-scenes efforts to improve the draft legislation. There will then be no choice for us but to take our case to the public in a bid to raise hundreds of submissions to Parliament, seeking the restoration of the original vision. Make no mistake: the philosophical base on which the new Department of Conservation is established will be crucial. Nothing else will have so much influence on the management of natural public lands for the remainder of this century. If we can get it right, the Department of Conservation will be a powerful force for good, a bastion of hope for all those who care about the relationship of human beings to nature on these islands. The original thinking for the environmental reorganization was expressed in the Environment 1986 report, published in June 1985. This report proposed two central but distinct functions for the new department: protection (for existing national parks and reserves) and stewardship (dePy Re OOS EIORO ACI OSREINIEEECE DO NERCNISONID SEYELPC ILE PSS LPS SL BLL i ELIE BLE

fined as management for the time being of public lands for which no end use has been determined). Included in the stewardship category were the Crown lease lands, under which heading the report’s authors had in mind mainly the leased tussock grasslands of the South Island high country. Stewardship under attack It is in the nature of things that a concept like stewardship for the future will come under attack from those in the present who want commodity production, and want it now. And that is what has been happening to the Environment 1986 proposals. The first setback came in the initial package of Government decisions on the Department of Conservation, announced on 16 September 1985. The Cabinet seemed clear in its intention to endorse the stewardship concept, for besides the national parks and reserves it decided to include in the new Department a range of public lands not being used for wood production, nor being used ‘‘mainly"’ for agriculture, and whose long term future use has really not been decided. Forest parks were a specifically mentioned example. But in that same announcement, the Government — influenced by Treasury argument — decided that Crown leasehold land should be the responsibility of the Land Development and Management Corporation. This cut across the stewardship concept and created an implication that the fragile and dearly-loved landscapes of the South Island high country would be managed with single-minded commercial intent. Understandably, that is a notion that has been roundly criticised by conservationists.

Yet if lasting solutions are to be found, it will be important to understand the concerns of the Treasury — of which more below. A second setback for the concept of stewardship came when committees of officials began drafting briefs for the legislation which will establish the Department of Conservation. The announced mission statement for the new department is to be: ‘the promotion of conservation values in the management of New Zealand’s natural resources and historic places together with the application of those values to the management of the protected and other resources entrusted to it." That sounds fine until one looks up the definition given for ‘‘conservation values" and finds that these include the utilization of resources. And to reinforce this, one of the specifically drafted functions for the new department is to be "conservation management’, defined in this phrase — ‘consistent with the principles of conservation and any legal protection status, to manage for productive purposes the resources vested in the department’ What that means is that any land or resources not legally protected in reserves or national parks will be managed for productive purposes. Examples given in official documents include the production of wood and minerals. Under these definitions, the ‘‘promotion of conservation values" which the department is to undertake must mean the promotion of commodity production — presumably on a sustainable basis where possible, although this is hardly possible with minerals. Under these ee ee ae" Se

definitions, the Department of Conservation’s mission is little different from that of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries or the Forest Service. The intentions behind the ditching of ‘stewardship’ and its replacement by concepts such as ‘‘conservation management’’ and "‘utilisation" may be illuminated at two levels, political and philosophical. Guarded jealously The politics of the situation within the government is clear enough. The Department of Conservation has no official employees at this date, and the officials who are advising the government on its constitution are the same resource managers who last year fought so tenaciously to retain Lands and Survey and the Forest Service in their original forms. Charged now with designing the Department of Conservation, these powerful managers seek to reincarnate the old form of the old departments they know and like so well. The de facto power to decide the balance between production and protection over vast tracts of their public land empires is a power they have always guarded jealously, and will not voluntarily give up. Another potent factor here is the fervent commitment of many Forest Service hands to indigenous production forestry. Their operations have always run at a loss: New Zealand spends two to three times as much per year on subsidizing the logging of indigenous State forests as it spends on acquiring land for protected natural areas and coastal reserves combined. Indigenous forestry would continue in some limited areas under the Forestry Corporation, but for those foresters who are zealous to maximize the area brought into production, it is undoubtedly essential to take over the Department of Conservation as well. By subverting the original concept of this department, they can neutralize what would have been an advocate for preservation and at the same time establish a departmental platform and even a nebulous rationale (‘‘conservation management’) for extensive wood production activities. Not much further down this doublethink trail is the idea, already being discussed, of remaking the Department of Conservation in the image of a self-funding ‘‘conservation corporation’. Under this concept, income earned from timber production, grazing, mining, hydroelectricity and other "conservation management"’ activities could be used to pay for recreation development facilities, reserve acquisitions, and wild animal control, thus reducing or even eliminating dependence on government funding. The controversial idea of entry fees for national parks is part of this concept. The trade-offs which would regularly have to be made between protection and production are no doubt challenging and attractive to the departmental resource managers who would run the show. But the dangers are surely obvious: ¢ lack of accountability of the resource managers © undermining the New Zealanders birthright of free access to public land for recreation

* government pressure to produce revenue from mining, logging etc, leading to active erosion of the national heritage by the very department charged with safeguarding it. © conservation expenditure would follow not so much conservation needs as the availability of natural resources for trading away.

Mission corrupted Any move to make the Department of Conservation a resource trading department would open the way to corruption of its fundamental mission. That is why the "conservation management" concept is such a sinister intrusion into the draft legislation. Where does ‘‘conservation management" as a production-oriented concept, come from? Its emergence may be traced to a fundamental schism which occurred in the American conservation movement just before the turn of the century. Obviously the origins of conservationist concepts reach back a lot further in both European and Polynesian cultures, where they are deeply entwined in myths and tender feelings about the human/nature relationship. But the word ‘‘conservation’"’ was stripped of such emotional subtleties and rocketed into mass public consciousness as a simple scientific-mechanistic concept by the American philosopher-for-ester-publicist Gifford Pinchot, founding father of the US Forest Service. Pinchot was undeniably a conservationist of sorts, inasmuch as he crusaded against the waste and depletion of resources associated with America’s reckless westward expansion. But he expressed little understanding of non-material resource values, insisting as virtually a moral principle that renewable resources must be used, not "‘locked up’’. His advocacy of dams, grazing and logging in areas that others felt should not be touched led to a deep and bitter conflict with leading conservationists of an older school and spirit, people such as John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and Stephen Mather, founder of the US national park system. This philosophical division has strongly marked the conservation movements of most western-influenced countries. It is Pinchot’s essentially utilitarian notions of conservation that dominate the thinking of departmental resource managers in New Zealand today, reaching their highest practical expression in the sustained management for the industry of serried ranks of radiata pine. Pinchot’s conservation philosophy was infused with the social and political themes of US President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era — a reverence for scientific management and technical competence, and a boundless optimism about the benefits of material progress. Conservationists today are much less ebullient about the benefits of advances in science and materialism; we search beyond these realms for deeper understandings and harmonies, in the human/nature relationship. The humility reawakened by our modern experience has given renewed impetus to the old ideal of stewardship: the idea that there is a good part of this country which we can and should largely leave alone, at least until we are an older and wiser nation. ""Wise"’ resource manager The departmental resource managers claim already, of course, to be ‘‘wise’’ on our behalf. From the truism that most resources have multiple values they have de-

rived the self-serving concept of the professional, multiple use resource manager who should be given wide powers over our public lands. But it is a profound disillusionment with both the responsiveness and the effectiveness of management by the multiple-use bureaucracies that has led to the recent reform which split up those institutions. Underlying the reform was a belief that smaller institutions with simple, non-con-flicting goals will make for more accountable managements. A dominant use was to be recognized on each area of public land, and the land allocated accordingly to the appropriate institution. The political sensitivity of the allocation process was to be recognized through the establishment of a Crown Estate Commission making careful recommendations to the Cabinet. This new system for accountability in public land management seemed to offer a new clarity, transparency and responsiveness. It is these qualities that will immediately come under threat if the Department of Conservation is to become a reincarnation of the old multip!e use bureaucracies, allowing resource managers once again to play god with the conflicting goals of production and protection.

The impetus for more accountability came from two quarters, the Treasury and the conservation movement. The conservationists found that resource managers were rarely neutral. In a situation in which politicians could only be sporadically interested in environmental issues, the resource managers pursued their own Pinchotesque ideologies and did fairly much as they liked. The Treasury saw a similar failure of accountability. For example, commercial analyses were never carried out for the high pine planting investments, since resource managers had their own inscrutable reasons for what they were doing. The result has been a very poor rate of return on the taxpayers’ investment in production forestry, while much of the State resource available for harvesting in future is poorly located on steep remote land whose high production costs seriously undermine the future international competitiveness of New Zealand's export forest industries. From the Treasury viewpoint, management of Crown pastoral leases under a multiple-objective management regime is just as likely to miss vitally important opportunities for improved economic performance. Parts of the leased land are capable of much higher returns if subdivided or turned over to new land uses. The Treasury recognizes that much of the land is not suitable for intensive use and agrees there should be a process of evaluation leading to sieving out of land whose spe-

cial non-productive values require protection, either by preservation of such land in the Department of Conservation or by imposition of covenants. It is on the question of where the leases should be administered in the meantime that the Treasury and the conservation movement are in disagreement. The Treasury fears that if the leases are given to the Department of Conservation they will never come out again, and no real reform will result. That fear is given some substance by the establishment of the ‘‘conservation management" concept, since that implies the positive management of leased lands for production, and will clearly strengthen the political claim of resource managers to retain control of leased land in the department permanently. Key to resolution The key to resolving the pastoral lands impasse is for the Department of Conservation to eschew any claim to be a production land management agency. The ‘conservation management" concept should be discarded in favour of the stewardship concept, under which it would be explicitly recognized that the pastoral lands were being held in their existing state for the time being. The job of the Department of Conservation would then be to rapidly identify those portions of the leased lands which should be withdrawn permanently from intensified commercial use, for scientific, recreational or national heritage reasons. After consideration by the Crown Estate Commission, the balance of leased land could then be released to the Land Development and Management Corporation, to meet the goals espoused by the Treasury. This example, and that of wood production, both illustrate the point that the expected benefits of the environmental reform — greater transparency and accountability, a strengthened environmental protection system and enhanced economic performance — could all be placed at risk if the Department of Conservation is mandated as a production agency. The alternative concept of stewardship would overcome these problems. There will of course be a need for the legislation to allow for various kinds of development on public land, from construction of television transmitters to the removal of timber from roadlines. But such provisions belong — as they do in the National Parks Act — in the subsidiary fine print, not in the central purposes of the statute. It is the stewardship role that must be recognized among the central purposes of the statute, if our public land allocation decisions are to be orderly and transparent, and are not to become once again the private affair of powerful departmental resource managers. Most important of all, a stewardship role would formally recognize that not all our land allocation decisions need to be made or biased right now, using only the limited information and technologies we presently have and the values of the present generation of powerholders. Stewardship is a mark of respect for generations to come, and a reserving of certain powers of decision to them. y&

Make no mistake: the philosophical base on which the new Department of Conservation is established will be crucial.