Environment – Roadside rights

Winter is on its way out, but the nights are still cool, and across the country fires are keeping families warm and houses cosy. But firewood is expensive and it burns quickly on cold nights. So, out on rural roads, resourceful people with chainsaws and trailers are helping themselves to bermside ti-tree, standing and fallen.

But that also raises the ire of adjacent landowners. Roadside maintenance is the responsibility of landowners – who sometimes graze their stock on the “long acre” of often lush grass, supplementing winter feed. Where ti-tree and grass grow across the fence from a farmer’s paddock, doesn’t he or she own the resource? If anyone’s going to harvest the ti-tree for firewood, isn’t it the farmer’s prerogative? But how do you balance the benefits for society in retaining roadsides framed with ti-tree and all its habitat and ecological values with an adjacent landowner’s claims. And how do landowners justify and defend their claims to the resource, against harvesters who may come at any time of day or night, and who believe the ti-tree belongs to no-one? And if it belongs to no-one, what right does anyone have to harvest it?

If, in fact, roadside corridors are Crown land, maintained (mown and sprayed) by Council for public safety that means there’s been alienation and enclosure of otherwise free lands at some time in the past – or lands that were owned or under the stewardship of Maori. So if anyone has first claim to ti-tree then maybe it should be local iwi.

In England, the 1217 Charter of the Forest evolved from the Magna Carta. It protected the forest commons (and heathland, grasses and wetlands) for public pannage (pig foraging), estover (firewood harvest), agistment (grazing) and turbary (cutting of turf for fuel), so long as these actions didn’t harm anybody else. The charter was to protect not just the poor and their access to fuel and food, but to protect the free.

Usufructuary rights covered use without ownership – allowing extraction and beneficial access so long as others’ rights were not impinged. One could access resources as long as enough was also left for others. In a world of finite resources overflowing with people, it’s hard to see how extraction and use could leave as much resource and as good a resource for others.

The Tragedy of the Commons argues that people pursuing their own self-interest leads to optimum stewardship by private owners. But privatisation is the ultimate denial of rights of access by others, and doesn’t prove overall benefits in common.

At present, competing claims to free firewood are unresolved. It’s first in, first served. A landowner can protect and nuture roadside ti-tree for it to be destroyed by opportunistic harvesters. Alternatively, the landowner can chop it down themselves or graze it to death. The intrinisc value of roadside habitat has no advocates at all.

Christine Rose
christine.rose25@gmail.com