communityin perpetuity. Hopefully, as is the situation with my own conservation
group dynamics (see side bar). a treasured forest landscape can both be protected
from clear felling, provide opportunities for recreational living, and contribute to
overall environmental wellbeing ‘indefinitely’.
A variation on the public-private open area landowning situa-
tion, in the direction of public rights and interests, arises within
nature conservancy groups. These exist on a stand-alone basis in
settler societies. Eve Endicott in Land Conservation through Public
and Private Partnerships(1993) has editorially collated for the
United States the public acquisition and private conservancy
options, and detailed the legal, tax-saving, and partnership com-
plexities.^17 The grandparent agency is the Nature Conservancy,
which straddles all the United States and has a toe-hold in many
other jurisdictions. In landownership contexts, these ‘in cash’ and
‘in kind’ benefactors are saving some of their corporeal land-
scapes, or salting away some of their ethereal wealth, for a land-
trust cause. Nature Conservancy acquisitions and actions assuage
‘settler guilt’ about past enclosures, and their feel-good character
can be uplifting to settler descendants, although to the likes of
black Americans and indigenous first-nation peoples, they mostly
engender indifference or annoyance. Indeed behold the Euro-
wrath which descends upon indigenous peoples reaching for the
settler’s exploitation practices, doing as the settlers have done
previously, namely cashing in the forest tracts and mineral potentials! And, of
course, most nature reserves are beyond the means and access capability of a
majority of the populations they have been set aside for. Nevertheless conservancy
societies are a societally ‘acceptable’ way for the sensitive rich to contribute ‘now’
to the conservancy estate of the ‘future’ through the provision of greenways, bio-
reserves and watershed protections.
Owners of landed property are conditioned by the fact (Denman 1962) that ‘What
a landowner has is not the land itself, but an amalgam of rights over the land’.
The issue this exposes concerns the nature of what is usually characterized as the
‘bundle’ of ever-continuing interests which ‘go with the land’ supplemented by
those shorter-term rights which ‘go with the landowner’. There has arisen a slowly
altering perception of community entitlement, in particular the public enjoyment
of rural and wilderness landscapes. This is also the case with foreshore and river-
ine public land reservations where changes in attitude emerge: for example,
moving away from free-for-all sand and gravel quarrying and refuse dumping,
toward clean-up and conservation. The ownership of private user rights and
public enjoyment interests are being continuously layered upon, and re-sectored
throughout the rural-regional landscape. Such proprietorial changes emerge
slowly.
Indigenous peoples – Maori in New Zealand, Aboriginal in Australia and
native North Americans – have quite different resource-owning perceptions from
the settler-incomers. The resources historically most compromised include the use
Growth Pattern Management 153The Nature
Conservancy website is
http://www.tnc.org. Additional
to the Nature
Conservancy is the
WCED (World
Commission on
Environment and
Development); the
UNEP (United Nations
Environmental
Programme); and the
WWF (World Wildlife
Fund).
The Australian private
enterprise company
Earth Sanctuaries offers
a negative investment
opportunity to
participate in land
restoration.
http://www.esl.com.au