Ecological reconciliation on private agricultural land: Moving beyond the human-nature binary in property-environment contests

Abstract

Resolution of the troubled relationship between private property and the environment appears to have reached an impasse. Two debates in particular have ossified in unproductive and polarising ways. The first are the arguments concerning property, an institution that underpins dominant human-nature relationships within capitalist economies. While the privatisation of natural resources is still promoted as a means to ensure protection from over-use, the commoditisation agenda has been undermined by the failure of ownership, including of real property, to avert exploitation and environmental harm. The second debate concerns the positions taken with respect to managing our environment into the future, which at one extreme advocate for half the Earth to be preserved in a pristine, 'restored' and almost human-free state; and on the other advance human coexistence as not only ubiquitous, but necessary.<br/>Our analysis is based on the documented experiences ofleaders in regenerative agriculture, who have attempted to go beyond ecological restoration through creating 'farmscapes' that reconcile agricultural practices with the Australian environment. Informed by a growing body of work in the areas of new materialism, new environmental governance and new 'localism', we consider how private land ownership, and in particular intensive uses such as agriculture, can support rather than undermine environmental ends through recognising that humans are always and already situated within an agential 'nature'. We argue that place-based approaches that reconcile humans with nature, and the particular potentials and emergent conditions ofliving landscapes, rather than restoring a 'nature' that has been 'lost' or is external to humans, can address the underlying anthropocentrism of Anglo-Australian property. Reconciliation approaches de-centre the human, and recognise that the environment is dynamic, reflexive and a relational-material co-becoming, rather than an end point. We submit that the reconciliation of human and nature can resolve the tensions betwed private property and the environment.