Landscape as a Driver for Well-being: The ELC in the Globalist Arena

Abstract

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) recognizes that landscapes are dynamic entities that change over time and advocates appropriate management strategies that will protect landscape values and the well-being of communities and individuals affected by change. Global drivers are however often powerful forces to which the inhabitants of landscape don't have means to resist. Two cases of dramatic landscape change, in the contrasting geographies and political contexts of New Zealand and Palestine, are presented. The first example is located within a benign context and the other in an area of extreme conflict. Nonetheless in both cases the changes described have striking visible impact on the landscape and significant flow-on effects, some of them intangible and unquantifiable, on the well-being of the people who inhabit these landscapes. These cases present the two ends of a spectrum in which the hypothesis of a world landscape convention inspired by the ELC is relevant. The argument is that the moral imperative of a landscape convention in the spirit of the ELC holds the potential to become the mechanism to mitigate such ill effects of landscape change at a breadth of situations from the everyday ordinary landscape to military conflict zones.

Key Words:

• European Landscape Convention
• landscape change
• community well-being
• New Zealand
• Palestine

Notes

I first presented this analysis with Tim Williams at the Militarised Landscapes conference, University of Bristol, 3 September 2008.

International attention became focused on New Zealand and its landscape through the success of the film The Lord of the Rings increasing the numbers of overseas visitors contributing to the boost in the country's economic prosperity.

Legislation regarding capital gains tax on home sales is open to interpretation. The law defines taxable property upon sale as that which was built or bought with an intention for sale. Proving ‘intention’ is complicated, thus this leaves the door open for speculation houses to avoid taxation.

The Resource Management Act (RMA) combines in one piece of legislation law relating to the environment (land, water, air, pollution control) that had previously been spread through more than 60 statutes. The Act moved away from the concept of direction and control of development towards a permissive system of management of resources focused on the control of adverse effects of land-use activities on the environment. This approach is piecemeal and does not address cumulative effects oflandscape change such as for example urban sprawl and the protection of land having high value for the production of food. Under the RMA, regional authorities are autonomous, responsible only tocomply with national policy directives, of which there have been few. This has resulted in wide variations between regional, and subsequently local, plans.

Interview 35, Prebbleton study (Egoz & Seiber, 2005).

Since the focus was on how the change affected an existing community, the new residents in the recent subdivisions did not partake in this study. The perspective of newcomers on whether the new landscape has met their expectations may be a topic for a different study.

This enabled the gathering of experiential information as well as personal opinions and viewpoints of interviewees. Data gathering was driven by a quest to explore a variety of views and sample size was determined by ‘theoretical saturation’ – the point at which additional data no longer contributes to thedevelopment and refinement of understanding (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Resident names were taken from public domain property-valuation database information. In addition, word of mouth ‘snowballing’ was used when some residents recommended others to the interviewer. In contrast to a survey-type questionnaire that will process statistical data, this form of data analysis of unstructured interviews is meant to paint a picture of a social situation. It provided a wider range of opportunities to gain an understanding of the ‘grassroots’ dynamics that went on in Prebbleton. Such a perspective is important and can set a foundation for further research questions.

At the outset, it is worth emphasizing that when people lamented loss of community they often made it clear that they had “nothing against the people in the new subdivisions”; established residents felt there was no reason to blame the new residents for the process. The problem was in the planning process that was viewed as ‘short-sighted’.

The gates are not locked but still signify separation from the existing community, something which is further instilled by the distinctive naming of the residential enclaves which sets them apart from Prebbleton.

New Zealand-Aotearoa is a bi-cultural society including settlers and Māori, the Indigenous people of the land. Their rights are anchored in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown, however tensions regarding resources including land ownership are ongoing. Influences on planning issues are thus vital to the well-being of Māori.

For more on the debate around the RMA, see Jacobsen (1999), May (1997) and Memon and Perkins (2000).

At the outset, one can argue that New Zealand's main strategic asset is its extensive land for food production and that global economic forces do get involved; for example, the 2010 attempt of China to purchase a significant stake in the NZ dairy industry.

According to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, Paragraph 6. Deportation and transfer of persons into occupied territory.

To understand the context of the evolution of the oPt landscape see a review of the four commonly identified major periods in the history of the occupation in Egoz and Williams (2010).

One prominent feature of Israeli occupation in landscape, law and social interactions, is the illegal settlement of Jewish Israeli civilians in the territories. These settlements were strategically planned and located, and their expansion is managed, according to long-term political and military agendas (Segal & Weizman, 2003; Weizman, 2007).

It should be noted that in addition, Israeli domination of the Palestinian landscape extends vertically – from sovereignty of airspace to control of underground water aquifers (Weizman, 2007).

The Oslo agreement of 1996 divided the West Bank into three categories of control:

–	Area A was to be in total control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for civil affairs and security/law and order.
–	Area B would be under PA control for civil affairs and Israeli control for security.
–	Area C, which included 60% of the land area, would be under total Israeli control.

Water resources and population registry were excluded from PA control in Areas A and B. Most nature reserves are in area C under Israeli control into which Palestinians have been forbidden free access since 1996.

The construction of a separation wall that would allegedly prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel began in 2002 during the second intifada (uprising) that witnessed a bloody vicious circle of violence, most dramatically suicide bombings within Israeli cities and Israeli military brutal retributions on the Palestinian population.

The route of the wall generally follows the 1949 armistice line, called The Green Line. Nonetheless while The Green Line is just over 320 km, the planned contorted route of the wall is 707 km, more than twice the length.

These figures do not include the population in annexed East Jerusalem.

In a study of 67 communities in the northern West Bank that have lost direct access to their farmland by the building of the wall, only 20% of farming families had permits to pass through the gates in the wall to work their land or bring in the harvest (OCHA, 2008b).