New Zealand Hut Heroes: Mick Abbott

by Sam Demas, September 2018

(Note: this is part of the larger work New Zealand Huts: Notes towards a Country Study)

Towards the end of our time in New Zealand I realized I’d heard very little about the long range future of huts, and that I hadn’t found any academics studying the world’s largest hut system.  The many passionate Kiwis I spoke with were, understandably, focused on how to preserve the huts they have and ensure equitable access to them.  However my curiosity was finally satisfied when, of all places, I was at the Canterbury Art Museum.  Asking directions to my next destination, the Lincoln University Library.  Serendipitously, this lead to an interesting chat about baches and huts with museum staff member Janet Abbott.   She said I should talk with her brother-in-law Mick Abbott at Lincoln University.  What a fortuitous meeting! I have published some of Janet’s great work about baches in Canterbury on my web site, and just before leaving NZ, I had an inspirational conversation with Professor Abbott about the future of huts!

Mick is a hard-core tramper deeply involved in NZ conservation issues, a creative and provocative thinker, and a landscape architect.   He seems to relish asking questions, but insists on not getting stuck on finding immediate answers or mired in ideologies.  His thinking represents the kind of idealism and insistence on aspiration that I imagine makes many pragmatists impatient or dismissive, and/or seems hopelessly unrealistic.  My sense is that he is always striving to stretch our thinking towards the future, towards new, seemingly impossible, possibilities.  In my experience, folks who take this approach often make earnest folks feel defensive, uncomfortable or frustrated.  Nevertheless, we need people who help push us “use the future to imagine today”.

What follows is a brief profile to give a sense of the range, interests and ideas of the man.

A long walk and community engagement

This guy’s sense of what is actually possible in the world is way beyond what most of us will consider.  Again, he strenuously presses the limits of normal inquiry and aspirations.

An incredibly  concrete example of this comes from the world of tramping.  In 1989 he  famously completed the first-ever, full-length, solo traverse of the South Island.  He didn’t just follow trails and roads south to north; he walked up and down the mountain ranges, off-track, bush-bashing almost half the way through incredibly dense forests, climbing up and down amazingly steep mountains, and picking his way across glaciers checkered with crevasses, and more!  He persisted in this daunting quest for 130 days, walking 1,600 km, crossing the Main Divide 32 times and climbing 58,000 vertical meters, equivalent to seven ascents of Mt Everest.

Over The Top (New Zealand Geographic, no. 4, Oct. – Dec. 1990) is his harrowing account of a heroic (and many said impossible) journey to prove it could be done and that he could do it, and to fully immerse himself in the wild.  Reading this adventure account helped me understand his conviction, his unrelenting exploration and creativity, and his and indelible sense of being deeply steeped in/imprinted by the experience of wilderness.

He has served the tramping community and the conservation estate in much tamer ways, but with equal ambition and perseverance, as  chair of the Canterbury Aoraki Conservation Board;  working with the Walking Access Commission; as co-founder, with this partner Carli Richter, of Kiwi Ranger, an family environmental education center and a kids program adopted by DoC; and as a regular columnist for NZ Wilderness Magazine.

Professor of Landscape Architecture

Mick is Associate Professor of the School of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, and is co-leader of Landscope DesignLab. The goal of this research and design group is to connect people to nature, and to connect nature to people.  The focus is on developing an innovative  “pallete” of nature-based interactions and interventions in real-world settings, including work with national parks, trails and tracks strategies, social housing and more.  Mick’s research investigates how social, cultural and economic value can be built out of strategies that increase biodiversity.  As a landscape architect he uses the design charette as a way of exploring ideas and how they might be be translated into real-life designs, and as a writer he is constantly putting out new ideas and suggesting new approaches to long-standing challenges.

He is an editorial board member of Landscape Review.  Mick has a long list of publications and presentations, and has co-edited at least three books on landscape themes including Wild heart: the possibility of wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand.  This rather dry recitation of his credentials is simply to provide some context for a small selection his ideas.

Creative thinker and provocateur 

Whats important about Mick is his ideas, a few of which are highlighted here.  To begin, Mick kindly provided a copy of his essay  From Preserve to Incubator: giving a new meaning to wilderness  included in Wild Heart, which you can read here as an example of his writing.  In it he bemoans the reduction of the wild to mere scenery as a backdrop to tourism.  He criticizes DoC’s approach to visitor management as missing the point by making people feel like outsiders, and, invoking environmental historian Geoff Park’s writings,  calls for strategies that promote mutual flourishing of people and nature.

Following are 15 somewhat random highlights (from my perspective) of Mick’s ideas.  These come from my conversation with him and from reading some of his publications.  I have taken the liberty of both freely quoting and paraphrasing his views(and at times freely inter-mixing these two) in hopes of quickly giving the reader a flavor of his thinking, in particular about huts and wilderness.

• We need to shift thinking about huts from recreation to conservation and education.  Lets use huts in part as places of innovation and experimentation, e.g. to “activate people”, to train and employ trampers for conservation work.
• How do we design huts as catalysts for change?
• “It will take 7.5 million people working together to achieve DoC’s lofty and good conservation aims”.  When asked how this could happen in a nation of 3.5 million, he points out that it is the sum of the NZ population plus the number of annual international tourists to NZ.  How do we engage them in conservation, give them a memorable experience of “100% pure”?
• We need to figure out how to build huts and tracks that make an area more robust ecologically, that support biodiversity at scale.
• Conservation is too often about looking back; it needs to be about looking forward.
• Mick is critical of the uniformity of DoC’s approach to design of huts and tracks, of their use of non-native materials and treated wood, and of their visitor management strategy.  Each hut should be unique and reflect the place.
• When Kiwi trampers complain about “flash” huts and losing them to tourists, they are essentially saying that DoC does not value what they value.
• Now that DoC is no longer in an expansion mode in relation to huts, how else, besides the continuing the excellent Backcountry Trust initiative, can they respond in designing/maintaining/using huts so they truly reflect the place, the heritage, and what Kiwi’s really value?
• Hut talks are a boring annoyance.  How can they be used to generate conversations, to engage people?  How can we make huts centers of participatory storytelling?  How can we get people talking about what they value, observe and are curious about the place and the experience?  E.g. “Tell us about a moment on the trail today”
• “How do we redefine the human place in nature….re-integrate the human into the non-human world in a way that isn’t terminally destructive of that world?”
• “The fastest growing outdoor recreation in this country is conservation — planting, trapping, citizen science, drawing kids into the wild…..we should be focusing on the experiential value people gain from the conservation estate.”
• “The main thing for me is that you have to remain optimistic and ambitious about our relationship with nature in this country, rather than pessimistic and defensive and always seeing nature as being diminished and demeaned.  We just have to look at the way nature is celebrated by increasing numbers of New Zealanders — it’s wonderful.”
• We need to see the conservation estate for its social and economic value, not just for preservation.  We have this view that the only use for the wild is for tourism or biodiversity.  We need to imagine an economy based on mutually fulfilling relationships with nature.
• “So with the election set for September, it’s worth asking: will we match our appetite for enjoying Wilderness with a similar desire to vote for it?”
• On the concept of pilgrimage: “Perhaps that’s the greatest thing that multiple years of tramping can give – the prospect that the place we are traveling to is also the place we are traveling from. There seems little need to fly to another continent to look for something that is waiting to be discovered in the journeys that lead from our back door.  That’s why the long pathway, Te Araroa, isn’t some route than spans from the north to the south. It’s the sum of journeys that span our very first tramps to the last. In this we are all in the midst of a pilgrimage – one that is gently taking us into the wild, rather than merely through it.”