Farmscapes: property, ecological restoration and the reconciliation of human and nature in Australian agriculture

Abstract

Reconceiving the relationship between private property and the environment is a major challenge of our time. Ecological restoration is one construct that is being used to reimagine this relationship. While preferable to more exploitative human-nature relationships, ecological restoration in Australia is generally aimed at reinstating pre-1788 habitats, which may be neither desirable nor feasible, and perpetuates an anthroparchic approach to management. Environmental laws may similarly engender maladaptive behaviours, and perverse consequences include frustrated aims, landholder resistance and poor penetration of the broader neo-liberal imperative to maximise profit. This paper critiques some dominant approaches to restoration and considers an alternative - reconciliation. We illustrate its potential by drawing upon the narratives of landholders whose agricultural land use practices are place-based. Their approaches de-centre the human, and the environment is not an end-point but a relational-material co-becoming. Instead of restoration, there has been reconciliation between human and nature, and between European agricultural practices and Australian landscapes. The farmscape is the result, and a similar way forward for environmental law is proposed, one that is dynamic, reflexive and place-based, that aims to reconcile humans with nature rather than at humans restoring a 'nature' that is external and prior to us.