"Mackenzie Country," Plains Folk #470 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

All khaki and leather, kneeling on one knee, Alistair France points with one hand to features in the map lying on the ground, gestures with the other toward the corresponding landmarks in all directions. France is the proprietor of Holbrook Station, and this is the Mackenzie Country, Canterbury, New Zealand.

"Mackenzie Country" is a place name with mystique enough that it is used as a marketing label by clothing manufacturers and other purveyors of yuppie goods. The area is a high, inland basin of tussock grassland. Its name derives from James Mackenzie, the Scottish sheep-stealer (or was he?) who discovered it and put flocks on it a century and a half ago. The Mackenzie is sheep country yet today.

Well, that's not exactly true. As France points out, there aren't any sheep on it right now. Look at it, some thirty thousand hectares of country once beautiful, once productive--now a virtual desert.

Two things, an animal and a plant, did this. The first, the animal, is an old enemy--the grey rabbit. The semi-arid Mackenzie is sadly subject to rabbit infestation. Some ten years ago, when the New Zealand government cut back on pest control programs, the rabbits began to get out of hand. Now about half the Mackenzie basin is covered--I mean blanketed--with rabbit droppings.

The rest of the ground is carpeted with hieracium, an aggressive mat plant so low-growing that sheep can't eat it. Not even the rabbits can get much of a bite on it. It's grey, and fuzzy, and looks like indoor-outdoor carpet from some sleazy discount warehouse.

The sad state of the Mackenzie, disheartening to France, is also the subject of national debate. It reminds me of the national clamor over the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s, when all sorts of people had great plans for the Great Plains, but didn't bother to ask the people on the scene what would work. The debate seems somehow divorced from the situation on the land.

New Zealand's Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says that the problem is exploitive land use by the pastoralists. The answer, then, seems to be, take the sheep off, and the sheep men with them. This plays well with urban environmentalists.

Well, the sheep are off, have been for years, and the situation is only getting worse. The land will not heal itself. Conservation, it seems, requires much more than merely resolving not to mess with mother nature.

In the first place, conservation includes people. People, and their ways of life, are a part of the landscape (which is what this column has been about for the past nine years). You conserve land by conserving ways of life, such as the pastoral way of life in the Mackenzie.

Wilderness can take care of itself, but we have no more wilderness. What we have, on the American plains and in the New Zealand high country, is more like a garden--something that our other New Zealand friends, the aptly-named Gardens of Avenel Station, know well. If you abandon the garden, it doesn't go back to being wilderness. It becomes a desert. As France says, "Abandoned land is the most expensive land a nation can have."

I've seen the garden, and I've seen the desert. Maybe I'll go back and look at the Mackenzie again in ten years. Maybe I won't want to. I do not envy Alistair France.

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