Regenerative Agriculture Versus Native Regeneration: Spaces of Negotiation in the Organic Landscape of Canterbury, New Zealand

This paper discusses contentions in the relationship between small-scale organic farming and the restoration of native forests in urban and periurban Christchurch. I use a series of fifty interviews with small scale organic farmers, WWOOF hosts, land managers and urban gardeners, conducted between January and July, 2004, to explore ways in which the desire to engage with competing environmental narratives and processes are balanced. The potential for mobilizing an existing urban, organic gardening tradition is weighed against the desirability of restoring an indigenous landscape largely obliterated by imported landscape ideals. Discourses of sustainability undergird both land uses, and these same discourses are also used to support and plan the mainstream agriculture and imported British produced nature against which ‘organic ’ and ‘native ’ are defined. By considering the overlaps and disjunctures in people’s stories about sustainable agriculture and the regeneration of the native forest, we can better understand some of the underlying assumptions and premises of sustainability, especially in terms of who benefits from particular sustainabilities. As public support is mobilized for social and environmental activism under the rubrics o