Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the UK, farming is the least diverse profession, with 98.6% of farm managers and holders being white British. The events of the last few months have brought these conversations to the forefront and we have realised we need to act now if this is going to change.
Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in wealth, land and power that has circumscribed black lives since the end of slavery in the U.S.
Acquiring more land for CLTs dedicated to African-American cultural use would be a great way to address a colossal historic wrong.
It’s worth remembering how acts of commoning can have lasting consequences, including legacies that we may not even remember. Bernard Marszalek, who has lived in Berkeley, California, since the 1980s, brought to my attention the near-forgotten history of Ohlone Park in his city. The park is a fairly large patch of greenery that a forgotten corps of enterprising commoners in effect gifted to later generations.
In this article we’d like to offer some new thinking: a policy proposal that we feel has the potential to be transformative. At its simplest, our proposal involves providing self-selecting unemployed public housing residents with a basic, living wage.
Members of Earthseed describe themselves as a group of “black and brown parents, activists, artists, educators, business owners, farmers, and researchers, who came together to remember our relationships to land, to livelihood and to each other,” and to cultivate a “transformational response to oppression and collective heartbreak: A model of community resilience through cooperative ownership of land and resources.”
Located in the Bocas del Toro region of Panama, the Naso have held steadfast to their goal. Like the nearby Ngäbe-Buglé kingdom, they want to create a comarca indígena or demarcated territory that would cover 160,000 hectares of their ancestral homeland. Unfortunately, they have encountered some resistance; because their vision of a secured territory conflicts with the government’s interests in the land the Naso call home.
In the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “No one of us can be free until everybody is free.” When we move away from domination by supporting and uplifting those who have been most impacted by the worst of it, we are able to move toward equity. Where there is equity there is balance, and where there is balance all life flourishes.
The disappearance of land from ruling economic theory may account for why the collapse of smaller heartland communities is greeted with a shrug by writers for the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also helps to explain its absence from the Green New Deal, for all its social-democratic, capitalist-critical leanings.
There is a very powerful reason we are currently unable to move toward a simpler and sustainable society: the costs of securing access to land for housing often mean only the relatively affluent can afford such “green lifestyles”.
In response to this problem, we offer some ideas to show how public land could be used for sustainable forms of community-led development.
The report, “Land for the Many: Changing the Way our Fundamental Asset is Used, Owned and Governed,” lays out a rigorous, comprehensive plan for democratizing access and use of land.
These proposals, we hope, will make the UK a more equal, inclusive and generous-spirited nation, characterised not by private enclosure and public squalor, but by private sufficiency and public luxury. Our land should work for the many, not just the few.
