Before Landscapes Die
Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination.
I have been thinking a lot about that sentence. This place where I live, the Kāpiti Coast, is full of water: the sea, rivers, wetlands squeezed between dunes and stitched into the margins of roads, low-lying paddocks that still remember being swamp, streams whose courses make no sense unless you imagine where they once spread wide. It is a damp, breathing landscape, even now. But much of it has been trained not to look like one.
Years ago, while driving through England and Ireland, we kept saying, half joking, half homesick, this looks so much like home. Green paddocks. Sheep. Hedges and fields falling downhill in familiar ways. But what we were recognising was not the land itself. It was the pastoral image we had learned to love — a particular way of seeing land as orderly, productive, improved. Wetlands drained. Rivers straightened. Water made to behave. Water made to serve.
That image travelled. It travelled with settlers, with legislation, with schoolbooks. And once you learn to see land that way, other ways of seeing quietly fall out of focus.
“Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination,” Bhavani Raman wrote of the Ennore Creek in Chennai — a wetland that disappeared first from maps and bureaucratic language before it was physically destroyed. Reclassified, surveyed, drained, renamed. The creek did not stop being alive all at once. It stopped being imagined as alive. The damage followed.
This is not just an environmental story. It is an educational one.
Because something similar happens when imagination is squeezed out of schooling. Before whole ways of learning die, they vanish first from what we recognise as real learning. Before children lose capacities for curiosity, empathy, and deep understanding, those capacities are quietly reclassified as optional, inefficient, or indulgent. Nice, but not necessary. Misguided.
We are told this is what the science requires.
But when “the science” is presented as settled, narrow, and beyond argument, something else is happening. A partial reading of research is being elevated into common sense. Complex developmental evidence is being flattened into technique. What cannot be easily measured is treated as if it does not quite exist.
As with wetlands, the erasure begins in language.
Imagination becomes disruptive. Play becomes a reward, then a distraction. Story becomes a privilege. Creative inquiry is tolerated if there’s time left over.
And very quietly, a certain landscape of childhood disappears.
This is strange when you step back. Because contemporary cognitive science does not treat imagination as decorative or optional. It describes imagination as foundational — to executive function, to empathy, to self-regulation, to social understanding. Perspective-taking is an imaginative act before it is a moral one. Counterfactual thinking — the ability to think what if — is essential not only for storytelling but for planning, reasoning, and ethical judgment.
Children do not develop these capacities by accident. They develop them through play, story, pretend worlds, movement, and talk — through forms of learning that look, from the outside, inefficient, hard to nail down with success criteria and almost impossible to explicitly instruct.
Phenomenologists noticed this long before psychologists measured it. Gaston Bachelard wrote that the image precedes thought — that we daydream before we reason, and that abstraction is built on a prior life of imagination. Strip that away, and you don’t get more rational children. You get children who can perform tasks without inhabiting meaning.
This is why so many teachers feel, in their bodies, that something is being lost — even when the policy language sounds reasonable.
It is not simply that there is less art, less play, less time. It is that the world children are invited to inhabit becomes thinner.
Here in Aotearoa, this thinning carries particular weight.
We live in a place where wetlands were, and continue to be systematically erased — not because people lacked intelligence or data, but because they lacked an imaginative framework that could see water as alive rather than wasted or inconvenient. Swamps are “problem land”. Draining them is improvement. Ninety percent have disappeared.
We also live in a place where another way of imagining land has always existed.
Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. I am the river, and the river is me.
This is not poetry added on to science. It is an ontology — a way of understanding relationship, responsibility, and knowledge itself. Mātauranga Māori does not treat imagination, observation, ethics, and environmental understanding as separate domains. They arise together. You cannot be kaitiaki of something you do not imagine as living and related to you.
When the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood, the law did not invent a new idea. It belatedly recognised an old one.
An education system that struggles to make space for imagination struggles, inevitably, to make space for this kind of knowing too. Not out of malice, but out of habit. A habit of seeing only what fits a familiar template.
The pastoral imagination that could only see wetlands as waste is not unrelated to the policy imagination that can only see achievement where it can be sequenced, benchmarked, and ranked.
What kind of readers are we trying to teach children to become? Readers who can decode, yes — but decode what, and for whom? Readers of instruction manuals only, or readers of landscapes, histories, relationships, and futures? What kind of thinkers? What kind of citizens?
Teachers already know the stakes. They feel them every time a child’s question wanders — about a river, a story, a fear, a possibility — and there is no sanctioned space to follow it.
Imagination is not the opposite of knowledge. It is how knowledge becomes meaningful — how facts turn into understanding, and understanding into care.
Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination.
We know what happens when we cannot imagine a wetland as alive. We know what is lost when land becomes only what can be measured and “improved”.
The question before us now is quieter, and more uncomfortable: what are we willing to imagine for our children — and what kinds of worlds will become possible, or impossible, as a result?
References
Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. Jossey-Bass.
Holloway, B. (2024). How a special interest group took over the refresh of the NZ curriculum. https://bevanholloway.com/2024/08/28/how-a-special-interest-group-took-over-the-refresh-of-the-new-zealand-curriculum
Kushnir, T., Gopnik, A., Chernyak, N., Seiver, E., & Wellman, H. M. (2022). Imagination and social cognition in childhood. WIREs Cognitive Science, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1603
Macfarlane, R. (2025). Is a river alive? Hamish Hamilton.
Raman, B. (2017). The curious disappearance of the Ennore Creek. The Wire (Science). https://science.thewire.in/environment/curious-disappearance-ennore-creek/
Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (NZ).
Thomas, P. L. (2021). Dismantling the “science of reading” and the harmful reading policies in its wake. Radical Scholarship. https://radicalscholarship.com/2021/04/22/dismantling-the-science-of-reading-and-the-harmful-reading-policies-in-its-wake/