Using the well-loved peri-urban cultural landscape of Taylor’s Mistake, on the outskirts of Christchurch, NZ, as a case study backdrop, we will focus on 3 questions:

1) Who holds interests in ecosystem services on public land?

2) How do property interests correspond to ecosystem services when mapped to a localised landscape? and

3) What might different property arrangements mean for ecosystem services themselves?

Theoretically, this paper will build on ideas of ecosystem services in landscapes, property plurality, and the legal geography of localised place. Using Taylors Mistake as a backdrop will highlight and draw on ideas such as Nicholas Blomley’s ‘diversity of property on the ground’ or Hanoch Dagan’s ‘lived experience of property.’ We hope the paper will start a scholarly conversation about the practical, on the ground, implications of property rights arrangements for ecosystem services.

This paper places Aquarian ideas of property in the context of emergent (principally American) property theory that sought to ‘subvert the dominant paradigm.’ The radical potential of property, articulated by jurists such as Charles Reich, Christopher Stone, or Joseph Sax, was given substance and form in places where the counter-cultural experiment flourished, including the green, sub-tropical landscape of the NSW Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Aquarius Festival. In both theory and practice, the normative ideals of Aquarian property demonstrate that property is more diverse and multivalent than the private liberal paradigm would suppose.

To ‘see’[5] property diversity in land is to escape a limiting ‘centrality of logic’[6], and to recognise the breadth of individual and collective relationships between people, community, and land. Property diversity recognises that communities are ‘intensely propertied’ places that the orthodox ownership models fail to represent.[7] The paper uses as a case study a regional community in northern New South Wales, Australia, defying the industrialization of its rural landscape through coal seam gas (CSG) exploration and mining. The refracting lens of this volatile land use conflict reveals ‘several [alternative] futures of property’[8]that have the effect of uniting rather than dividing this community. It also reveals the deficiencies of dominant paradigms that are abstract and de-objectified. How community is conceived, and how it operates, are issues with property implication. The perspective of property diversity further enhances that seeing by challenging dominant conceptions of property uniformity, and unleashing the potential of Sax’s ‘eclectic’

[1] Joseph L. Sax, ‘The Rights of Communities: A Blank Space in American Law’ presented July 11,

1984, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado, School of Law.

[2] Joseph L. Sax, ‘Ownership, Property and Sustainability’ 2010 Wallace Stegner Lecture, 13.

[3] G S Alexander & E M Penalver Property and Community (2010) xxxiii..

[4] Joseph L Sax, ‘Do Communities Have Rights? The National Parks as Laboratories of New Ideas’, (1984) 45 University of Pittsburgh LR 499, 509.

[5] Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion Essays on the Histoory, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (1994).

[6] A J van der Walt, ‘Property & Marginality” in Property and Community (G S Alexander & E M Penalver eds., 2010)

[7] Nicholas Blomley, Unsettling the City Urban Land and the Politics of Property (2004)

[8] Carol M. Rose, ‘The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems’ (1998) 83 Minnesota Law Review 129.