Someone was in the garden. In *our* garden. Someone was in our garden who wasn’t supposed to be in our garden.
He was walking along the inside of the fence line as if, for all the world, he owned the place.
“Err, excuse me?” I called out. “Can I help you?”
I could feel myself feeling affronted, concerned, slightly threatened.
My nervous system was preparing for a possible “fight” response.
And then I woke up.
I don’t often remember my dreams. But I remembered this one. It was around the time I was doing a lot of thinking and reading about land and land justice. Around the time I was involved in the LION quilt fundraiser with Jess Bailey (of Public Library Quilts). I’d been reading The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and Who Owns England by Guy Shrubsole. I’d been reading about how enclosure marked the origins of capitalism. I was listening to podcasts in which people discussed the commons and debunked the “tragedy of the commons”.
And even though I don’t believe we ever truly *own* land - I believe that we are just passing through and caretaking whilst we are here - and even though I intellectually understood that land justice and land reform doesn’t mean taking people’s back gardens away from them, I wondered whether my dream spoke to deeper, ingrained beliefs and fears that are hard to shake (and which those who like to close these conversations down prey upon).
We’ve created a society that manufactures scarcity and encourages hoarding (of wealth, resources, land, property…). In our culture many strive to own property and, if fortunate, land in particular - it’s the ultimate marker of “success”. I remember, in my early adulthood, an independent outdoor/adventure brand that had the strap line/Twain quote “Buy land, they aren’t making it anymore” stitched in their t-shirts. We have it instilled in us that land is scarce and we should strive to own and hoard it for our own benefit.
“In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold.”
~ Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
So why should we care about land justice? Will we risk having something taken away from us? How do we speak up for land justice if we have a garden, or land, or property? If we have personal investment in ownership? Isn’t that a bit tricky, a bit hypocritical?
I wonder how much this kind of fear and our entrenched beliefs of how land functions and our disconnection from it, stops many of us from taking part in these conversations or opening ourselves up to even thinking about them in the first place. Keeping us silent and apparently apathetic.
It reminds me of simplistic, base and distracting rebuttals of similar conversations on big issues confronting us such as: stopping the granting of new fossil fuel licences (don’t you drive a car? Are you wearing a plastic rain jacket made with fossil fuels?); treating migrants and refugees humanely (why don’t you give up space in your home to house them then?); questioning the legitimacy of billionaires (why would people be motivated to work if they couldn’t become a billionaire? Why would anyone innovate if we didn’t have billionaires? Wouldn’t you want to be a billionaire?).
Such reactions miss the point and distract from the bigger issue. Issues that impinge on the health and wellbeing of all of us and life on this planet.
Land access and land ownership are grossly unequal and unjust in our society.
Homeowners’ share of England amounts to just 5% of the land. And for many, especially the younger generation - home ownership is a distant, if not unattainable, dream. The reality is that land ownership in England is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few: half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
As Guy Shrubsole points out: “When you crunch the stats on how much land is now owned by homeowners, you start to see that we don’t really live in a property-owning democracy. It’s certainly true that far more people own some land today than a century ago: the freehold to their house, and if they’re lucky, a garden too. But the total area of land owned by England’s 14.3 million homeowners remains a tiny fraction of the whole country.”
This matters because, as Brett Christophers articulates in The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, “…the power invested in landownership is momentous. In mediating terms of inclusion and exclusion, of access and use, landownership confers the very power to shape and facilitate, or alternatively constrain, the social, economic and political development of communities, regions and nations.”
“...I had no interest in the gardens of strangers, but in the rest of the wide, open landscape, I couldn’t see a single place I was allowed to be.
‘You have no right to be here’ moves easily, with the slip of a comma, to ‘you have no right to be, here, there, or anywhere’. If those that own the land can dictate what happens on the land, then this private elite can conduct those in society who have nowhere else to be but the land. Race, class, gender, health, income are all divisions imposed upon society by the power that operates on it; if this power is sourced in property, then the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people, but the very cause of it.”
~ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us by Nick Hayes
Land is a big and complex issue, many people are tackling it and generating interesting debate elsewhere and I have been reluctant (slash, lacking in energy in all honesty) to cover it here so far. But I’ve been conscious of this neglect and it’s probably time to address it more directly, or at the very least, signpost you to places where you can find out more and uplift those doing the work. Land is so integral to other justice issues: social, climate, environmental, racial. And it holds so much meaning, history, emotion, life, spirituality and belonging.
I’m going to begin by sharing some places you can start below if you’re new to this subject. I would also love to get some pieces written for this newsletter in the coming year ahead.
If you’re interested in contributing or being involved, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
To read/watch/listen to:
Land, Race and Empire talk from ORFC 2022, with Corinne Fowler, Sam Siva and Josina Calliste
Unearthed by Claire Ratinon
Green Unpleasant Land by Corinne Fowler
Green Dreamer Podcast Ep. 302: John P. Clark: Dreaming of liberation and a world beyond domination [on the “tragedy of the commons”]
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, by Nick Hayes
The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, by Brett Christophers
Who Owns England, by Guy Shrubsole
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece! I remember when I was a kid we lived next door to this old farmer who lived in converted railway carriages. I loved him, his name was Ephraim and he was so interesting but he used to tell my mum every day without fail how he owned 4ft of our garden which would make my mother wild! When I was studying for my law degree one of our core modules was 'Land law' and I found it incredibly boring but the bit I did like was learning about 'adverse possession' which I found so interesting. I agree, owning land is and fencing it off is so capitalist and it goes against everything I believe in, youre right - we are just caretakers passing through but I always think about how if I owned a tonne of land would I think differently?