A rich array of projects that regenerate and embrace landscape
The Landscape Foundations first publication Kia Whakanuia te Whenua is Maori led. As Dame Anne Salmond says in her forward to Kia Whakanuia te Whenua
“This book records a rich array of projects that regenerate and embrace landscape as dwelling places for plants and animals as well as people.”
For Maori the whenua is taonga. It holds ancestral connections and it provides the root of belonging – turangawaewae and whakapapa. It is the source of Kai, shelter and manakitanga. The physical environment is the key component of our wellbeing and as we all know, we are faced with many environmental challenges as we face the realities of enormous global biodiversity loss, continued population growth and climate change. A paradigm shift is needed to encourage care for our environment.
Frontispiece work – INCEPTION/CREATION/RESURRECTION
An abstract work. A fresh Maori beginning for the land – the sun, the air, the water, the sky, the clouds, the earth made anew.
Samuel Butler writing in The First years in Canterbury settlement summed our exploitive relationship with the land - after waxing eloquently about the beauty of Mount Cook by saying:
I am forgetting myself in admiring a mountain (Mount Cook) which is of no use for sheep. This is wrong. A mountain here is only beautiful if it has good grass on it. Scenery is not ‘scenery’ unless it is ‘country’ sub audit voce. ‘sheep’. if it is good for sheep it is beautiful, magnificent and all the rest of it. If not, it is not worth looking at.
This book vividly explores the connection Maori and other indigenous people worldwide have with the land – a connection based on thousands of years of experience. It brings life and meaning to elements in the landscape as places of spiritual and historic significance and through this, it creates an understanding of how we might work with the land rather than continuing the top down, exploitive abstract relationship most of the world has with the whenua.
