Reconceiving the relationship between private property and the environment is a major challenge of our time. Ecological restoration is one construct that is being used to reimagine this relationship. While preferable to more exploitative human-nature relationships, ecological restoration in Australia is generally aimed at reinstating pre-1788 habitats, which may be neither desirable nor feasible, and perpetuates an anthroparchic approach to management. Environmental laws may similarly engender maladaptive behaviours, and perverse consequences include frustrated aims, landholder resistance and poor penetration of the broader neo-liberal imperative to maximise profit. This paper critiques some dominant approaches to restoration and considers an alternative – reconciliation. We illustrate its potential by drawing upon the narratives of landholders whose agricultural land use practices are place-based. Their approaches de-centre the human, and the environment is not an end-point but a relational-material co-becoming. Instead of restoration, there has been reconciliation between human and nature, and between European agricultural practices and Australian landscapes. The farmscape is the result, and a similar way forward for environmental law is proposed, one that is dynamic, reflexive and place-based, that aims to reconcile humans with nature rather than at humans restoring a ‘nature’ that is external and prior to us.

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision‐making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship.