“Something is wrong here, and I suspect it is the conservations cultures' inability, first, to recognise that what orders their day-to-day actions is, essentially a modern political desire, and then to look back into the past to locate the roots of that desire: the-turn-of-the-century scenic urge that cut Maori out of nature and cast them as pillages.” - Theatre Country, p.107/108
Notes:
- British imperialism sees countries as 'landscape' ...an established way of looking - we see the landscape as a 'framed painting' or as a scene in a play
- Nature as scenery vs nature as homeland, "nature becomes an object to be gazed at...the consequences of what we call tourism and conservation"
- The scenery of NZ is singled out here as theatrical, seen as a kind of landscape a painter would depict, rather than the landscapes of Australia etc. The idea of NZ's 'original ' bush - a valuable commodity
- Before the strike of western imperialism, landscape, Park implies, didn't exist. this idea of object was non-exist. Western ideologies vs indigenous ideologies
- Again, as much of my previous research (such as Michel Danino's essay on ---) have stated, Park says that christianity has contributed in detaching humans from nature - "ancient gods of the forests and mountains were considered evil spirits"
Danino states that the root of this consumeristic orientation instituted from the biblical basis of The Old Testament and Genesis. This system, based upon the ideology of ‘man’s supremacy over nature’ declares non- human beings unworthy of human acknowledgement; they must be ruled over and controlled, by ‘man.’ This accumulates to a significant percentage of what colonisation escorted to the rest of the world: a notion that allowed humans to perceive the earth as a commodity, as declared by Jehovah to “fill the earth and subdue it.” ---- Citation: Danino, Michel. Nature in Indian and Western Traditions. In “Two essays on India and Nature,” Excerpted from Indian Culture and India’s Future. New Delhi, DK Printworld, 2011
- European industrial age. Nature becomes a "theatre" for spectators, separating from the ideas that nature and humans were intrinsically interconnected. Park states that landscape was not part of British culture until they encountered land of other countries. Also the influence of art - Poets in particular; poets portrayed and described nature as a painting , romanticised and valued it as a commodity -- the educated taste of an Englishman found elements within nature aesthetic.
- England, states Park, was the most beautiful near the closing decades of the 18th century, and the beginning of the 19th -- because humans had taken control of these terrain without 'spoiling' it.
- Park claims conservation is a Colonial project -- before these lands were Maori whenua.
- From Wordsworth's poetry, scenery had become a tourist attraction. in present day this comes across as souvenirs and other mementos to collect as proof that you had been there, "the anti-thesis of home"
- Liberals depict Maori land as attractive scenery to be preserved -- "conservation is one of NZ's most pakeha areas ...the good work of saving species"
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