moving out of interventionist regulation toward integrated management: to
achieve through proactive conservancy with development, and education, the out-
comes and effects which are socially intended.^29 The entropic results of coastal
wear-down calls for the regulation of adverse human effects, generating formal
plans and guidelines and an interactive management process which is locked into
a public coastal policy guided by scientific prognosis and an educational aware-
ness programme. This must, as noted earlier, be followed up with an educational-
informational policy package which improves usage patterns and provides design
guidelines.Agriculture and forestry
Pastoral, horticultural and silvicultural land use practice on separately parcelled
freeholds is a feature of the humanized open-area landscapes of the New World.
The enclosure of what is now humanized rural landscape was the consequence of
a remarkably swift land capture, followed by an also rapid evisceration of indige-
nous forests, grasslands and their fauna. The early settler emphasis was on lumber
(timber) needs with occasional shelter-belt and erosion-control tree planting
relieving the landscape’s bleakness as well as providing stock
shelter. This pattern contrasts with the rural landscapes of Europe
which benefited from slower rates of enclosure, slower exotic
plant infestation, and slower technological invasion. Monocrop
business agriculture in settler societies – agribusiness – is a style
of food and fibre production bound to wither as soils decline in
quality. When agribusiness fights against nature it will, eventu-
ally, atrophy; and as soils salinate or dry out and erode, or blow
clear away, agribusiness simply loses out.
Enlightened New World farmers and agricultural officials seek to establish a
better balance with nature, one approach being to retire rough, desiccated,
infested, nitrogen-polluted, salinated and depleted patches of land and remnant
wetlands into protected reserves.^30 Some farmers covenant remnant areas of
indigenous forest and bush land to their local authorities or the state, seeking and
obtaining some land tax relief as an accessory benefit. Another approach is to
convert lands exhausted to the margin of agricultural productiv-
ity to plantation forestry or agro-forestry. Farm forestry is well
suited to rain-sufficient regions, particularly the less intensively
cropped, steeper graded and poor-soil farmscapes and the more
remote sub-regions. This is a conservation approach to sustain-
able management of the overall rural estate, also, but separately
driven by its tourism-commercial potential. The character and
some aspects of the aesthetics of agro-forestry is the face of a New
Agriculture, to fit alongside New Urbanism.
Agro-forestry is a triple-braided longer-term (25–35-year ini-
tially, thereafter ongoing) activity. The three braids are profitabil-
ity,sustainabilityandaesthetics. In the mind of the agro-forester166 Practice
Agriculture and Forestry
figures largely in
Chapters 9, 10 and 11 in
the Hawken, Lovins,
Lovins book Natural
Capitalism, 1999viz.- ‘Nature’s Filaments’
- ‘Food for Life’
- ‘Aqueous Solutions’
‘Plantation timber
production is regarded
negatively by large
consumers in response
to pressure from
environmental groups.
This has given rise to an
accreditation process for
confirming the
sustainable management
of forest production.’
Forest Stewardship
Council http://www.fscus.org