An engaging nuisence: Weka, flipping and farmers

Abstract

The interaction between society and the environment has become a significant topic of study in recent decades due to the suggested impacts humans are now having on their local, and the global environment (Clayton & Radcliffe, 1996; Naveh, 1995). In New Zealand, one such impact is the changes agricultural development has had, and is having, on the country’s indigenous ecosystems. In the Cape Foulwind area, near Westport on the northern west coast of the South Island, such development has been rapid in the last decade. This development, using a land development technique called flipping, has turned significant areas of rough pasture and scrub into pure exotic pasture grasses. Land development on private land at Cape Foulwind peninsula is reducing the habitat, and potentially impacting on the population of an endangered, flightless, indigenous rail, the western weka (Gallirallus australis australis). The first part of the study involved developing an individual based model (IBM) to evaluate the impacts of land development on the western weka population on the Cape Foulwind peninsula. The second part of the research implemented a qualitative investigation of the significance to landowners of western weka. It investigated the importance of this relationship and its impact, if any, on landowners’ land use practices. In doing this the study used, and also explored the usefulness, and limitations of, fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) in social science research. FCMs are digraphs that are used to map and model participants’ understandings of physical, causal connections. Qualitative in-depth interviews are used in parallel with FCMs to explore these interactions further. These methods are used to meet a primary aim of the research; to develop a socio-ecological system (SES) model to help understand the ongoing interactions of people and weka. The contemporary systems-based, Resilience Theory (Gunderson & Holling, 2002), is used as a way to understand and analyse the notion of socio-ecological systems. Philosophically this research is based in developments within Continental phenomenological and post-structuralist thought. It follows this tradition through Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the neo-realism of Giles Deleuze and relates this to systems theory. The notion that people are foremost embodied, affective and immersed in the world that is in an ongoing process of unfolding, is central these approaches, and is in contrast with people being understood primarily as either objective observers or subjective interpreters. Consequently, the focus of this research is on people’s relationships with weka. This is based in their embodied practices and everyday activities and interactions, and the networks and epistemologies that ensue from these relations, rather than the values they assign to weka. The ecological fieldwork and IBM shows the weka population is being impacted by land development, along with a number of other pressures. The study finds embodied interaction with weka as central to the participants’ relationships with them. These relationships are found to be affectively based and complex. Weka are active agents in these relationships and their behaviour impinges on the networks of significance of the Cape Foulwind peninsula, influencing it in both positive and negative ways. A normative understanding lies with these relationships and at the basis of the desirability of outcomes within a Resilience Theory approach to managing the SES. The research suggests that Resilience Theory needs to more fully account for these relationships in its analysis of SESs. This in turn impacts on the role of governance in SESs.