I don’t know what the bush should be like. I have no bloody idea what it should be like… (Liz, conservation landholder)
1 Private Land Conservation and Rural-Amenity Landscapes
This book is about the everyday practice of nature conservation on private land. While the pursuit of nature conservation has been most frequently associated with public lands, our focus is on the less familiar, more intimate and sometimes messy practices on private land. Why is this of interest or relevance to wider conservation efforts? Over the past 30 years, the governments of western liberal nations like the United States, UK and Australia (the setting for this book) have taken a much less active role in the purchase and management of terrestrial lands for conservation. While there are a range of factors at play in this shift, it is fair to say that conservation has not been spared amidst the broader retreat of government from direct investment in public goods or the management of the public estate (Kay, 2016). Indeed, justifications for reducing government support for conservation on public land have often been grounded in the argument that private individuals on private land must be the ones to lead the way.
Private land conservation has also become a focal point for conservation due to the recognition that public protected areas are not comprehensive or adequate when it comes to protecting biodiversity. With public protected areas often having been declared historically due on their limited resource utility rather than their inherent ecological characteristics, private land can be vital for protecting some of the only examples of vegetation communities or fauna habitat. Indeed, in Australia, where over 65% of the land mass is private or leasehold land, many threatened species only persist across privately owned land (Hardy, Fitzsimons, Bekessy, & Gordon, 2017).
The growing interest in private lands as a place for conservation has seen a recognition of the need to explore the perspectives and experiences of the landholders who are directly engaged in these efforts. Much of this research has focused on the motivations and values of people engaged in conservation, to understand how policy interventions could be crafted to assist these endeavours, as well as encouraging others to get involved. This is an important work. Yet, as we will argue, to understand conservation it is vital to situate and contextualise people in the ecologies they are seeking to affect. It also means acknowledging that ecologies themselves affect the people who inhabit them, given that in situ experiences inform people’s understanding of how ecologies function and what is required to care for them. A sense that conservation is a ‘practice’—a process of human-environment interaction over time—is necessary for deepening our understanding of private land conservation. As such, this book foregrounds these relationships between humans and nonhumans in conceptions of how conservation plays out.
The reflection from Liz that opens this chapter offers an insight into why human-environment interactions are a vital focal point. After three decades caring for the ecologies on her property in the hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia, Liz carries substantial local conservation knowledge. Her practices of planting and weeding have helped shape the landscape she inhabits, but so has the seemingly simple act of ‘walking through’ (Liz) those ecologies. As the inheritor of a property cleared for grazing after colonial invasion well over a century ago, Liz has interacted with and observed plants, animals, insects and soil in their efforts to cobble together a more complex ecological assemblage. In those immersive moments, Liz has seen small birds taking up residence in plants considered weeds. She has experienced the leisurely growth of trees in sandy soils, which revealed the slow timescales of regeneration in relation to a human life. These experiences have made Liz a humble practitioner—one who prefers to be hands-off where possible, due to a concern that her interventions could further slow ecological recovery. When Liz says she does not know what the bush should be, she is not suggesting she knows nothing about it. Rather, this is an acknowledgement that she is but one player amongst a host of past and present humans and nonhumans acting in this place. Her role is one of shaping the bush in concert with others, not as sole arbiter over what it will or should look like.
As we will explore throughout the chapters in this book, a focus on human-environment relations offers vital insights into how ecologies are being made and remade on private land. By highlighting these dynamics, we offer a fine grain perspective on the topic, which complements the broader institutional and ecological analyses that have examined the need for and the potential roles of private land conservation. Without such a complement, we risk missing vital insights into the social and material worlds in which conservation is performed when considering how to learn, share and adapt conservation goals. The history, scale, speed and diversity of landscape transformations offer further encouragement for grounding our understanding of private land conservation in the contexts in which it occurs. In our case, we focus on the rural-amenity landscapes that surround Melbourne, in Australia, and particularly on conservation practices that involve plants.
In this book, we adopt the term ‘rural-amenity landscape’ to describe the regions in relatively close proximity to major cities and rural centres, where land is being valued more for the consumption of amenity than it is for agricultural production (Argent, Tonts, Jones, & Holmes, 2010). We refer to those who are taking up residence in these landscapes as rural-amenity migrants. The amenity that these migrants seek is often associated with the ‘natural’ values and aesthetics of rural areas, the recreational opportunities they provide and the pursuit of ‘the simple life’ that is perceived to come with leaving the hustle and bustle of the city. Amenity migrants are often as assumed to be retirees (Curry, Koczberski, & Selwood, 2001), but they can also be young families, people buying a second home outside the city (Kondo, Rivera, & Rullman, 2012) or even those willing to commute long distances to city work. As such, the term ‘amenity’ is deployed here in a broad sense, to capture the diverse aspirations of in-migrants. Despite a history of amenity migration into rural areas stretching back to the 1970s and beyond, its recent acceleration has brought a range of land use and conservation issues to the forefront of policy and academic debate (Abrams, Gill, Gosnell, & Klepeis, 2012; Larsen, Sorenson, McDermott, Long, & Post, 2007).
Rural-amenity landscapes provide an insightful setting in which to explore the finer grain of private land conservation, as they are home to diverse land uses and different land management aspirations. The shifting social dynamics associated with amenity migration means that amenity migrants can have a different perspective on rural landscapes than farmers (Mendham & Curtis, 2010). For example, the pursuit of an ‘idyllic’ rural lifestyle can manifest in a desire for seclusion on one’s land (Meadows, Herbohn, & Emtage, 2013). As a result, amenity migrants can be very ‘property-centric’ in their ecological interests (Cadieux, 2011). A desire for ‘getting on with it’ (Gill, Klepeis,...