Land is power. A power that should be redistributed.
Land is power. Political power. Financial. Owned by white, wealthy, older men as a commodity. Half of England is possessed by less than 1% of the population. Spiritual possession refers to taking control of the body and mind of another, which is seen as an abomination in the Bible. Yet humanity tries to force nature’s freewill into a state of unconsciousness. We are not often successful. Nature cannot be controlled. But we expect it to bend to our will as if it were only a part of ourselves. The loss of access to native land drives a wedge between nature and humanity, cutting through ancestral connections. Is access to land not an inherent right? Should we not have freedom to identity and belonging? Does fair distribution of land not encourage a more sustainable source of local food produce? The land justice fight encompasses many issues including food insecurity, health inequality and environmental injustice. As a central beacon combatting inequality, this cause must be highlighted more in the public eye.
Absentee landlords, who accumulated wealth via involvement with the slave trade (Scottish Parliment :Plantation Slavery and Land Ownership), own large agricultural land holdings. This separates local communities from their native lands both physically and emotionally. It also internally separates communities, when they move into other areas for work.
The Land Reform Acts in Scotland (2003, 2015 and 2016) made it possible for registered communities to collectively purchase land from a private landowner. This theoretically allowed them to create community gardens, but the price of the land was often too high. Community land acts as a gift.The joint custodianship of the land encourages shared responsibility. It also promotes the members of the community to unite in activity. A reparation for previous displacement. The carbon credit scheme financially reimburses landowners and farmers for every tonne of CO2 which their land sequesters. The carbon credits given can then be sold to high-carbon release companies or back to the government. This scheme increased investment in land as an asset and drove up the prices of land beyond what is affordable by local communities, again further promoting land as a commodity and a business.
The view that wildlife is profitable is part of the reason that 80% of worldwide biodiversity exists in indigenous communities, rather than capitalist societies which have plundered nature to profit themselves. Colonialism fought to separate nature and humans where conservation was used as a means of military exploitation and displacement. Consequently, generations of people displaced from their site of origin have a lack of knowledge about the location of their homelands. This has left many of us in a painful position. But instead of searching for the fragments of ancestral connection, we must give ourselves permission to create new traditions and cultivate our own sense of belonging, while supporting those who still remain in their homelands.
After the devolution of the central government in 1999, The Scottish Commission established the ‘right to roam’, diversifying the land for recreational, instead of agricultural,purposes.. This is still not law in England. Dartmoor National Park was the the last place left in England where you could wildcamp legally, without permission of the landowners. Recent disputes however, have led to an agreement where ‘owners’ further financially profit off the land. Dartmoor National Park will give an undisclosed payment to landowners to ‘allow’ wild camping to continue. Why should landowners further use their possession of nature for restriction of freedom and financial gain? The right to roam is a fundamental human liberty, and one for which we should never be prepared to give up the fight.
The ‘right to roam’ enables people to enjoy the land but not to make active use of it for purposes of agroecology: the application of ecological principles to agricultural systems and practices.. This would require purchase. The Scottish land market is relatively unregulated with few restrictions on who can own land, how much they can own and the price they can sell it for. This suggests that land is a commodity and further enforces the disparity caused by ownership.
As an alternative, custodianship promotes a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. The semi-nomadic Maasai tribe of Kenya have lived this reality for centuries: ‘I have never seen a friendlier environment than the soil I have devoted my life and generation to’ -Member of the Maasai Tribe as represented by ‘Defensoras de la tierra’ in ORFC 2023**. Not only do they live by this, many of them will die for it. The Maasai tribe affirm their belonging to the land rather than to a state. It is the state that try to take their land. Yet without a state, without land, all human rights become inaccessible.
This is demonstrated in the landless families of the ‘MST’ (Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Alliance formed by those fighting for land reform and against inequality in rural areas) which settle on land in hope to win the locality through its consistent occupation. Over more than two decades, in excess of 370,000 families have settled on 7.5 million hectares of land won through occupation, in an act to support agrarian reform. The fact that the landless families have the room to settle, building makeshift hospitals and schools, prove it is unused, uncared for, and unloved. For another, this could be a home. And for this home, with land to plant crops, landless families risk starvation and malnutrition. The families rely on the food they grow, donations and some food from the goveronment. But this often is not enough.
The roots of inequality are built on the uneven distribution of land. Agrarian reform – the redistribution of land to farmers who are landless including the use of alternative arrangements to increase production and distribution of stocks to all land workers – would return the land to nature by distributing legal ownership among diverse communities. This would increase the chance to cultivate belonging. Destruction of cultural practices and ancestral duties have made us forget the brother and sister found in nature.
So get your hands in the soil, feel the sweat as you contribute to care for the land. Land is not yours. Land is not ours. Land belongs to nothing but itself. Contribute and receive. Belong, and create belonging. Land is power. It is the power of generosity and kindness that desperately cries to be redistributed.
**ORFC (The Oxford Real Farming Conference) is the largest agro-ecological movement on the planet, dedicated to transforming farming systems and food for good.