On Land as Our Common Inheritance
Land, like air and water, cannot be individually owned. It can only be God’s. It is the common property of the people and should be equally distributed.
— Acharya Vinoba Bhave, speech in Nagpur, India (1952)
What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?
— Massasoit, Wampanoag Sachem (1620s)
It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulphur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, black and white, not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” speech in Columbia, South Carolina (1946)
No amount of legalization of absolute ownership can provide honest title to any portion of the Earth.
— Ralph Borsodi, SSeventeen Universal Problems of Man and Society (1968)
Supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth—either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry—I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others. The rest of my wealth belongs to the community and must be used for the welfare of the community.
— M. K. Gandhi, Trusteeship (1960)
The earth belongs to the living. No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison (1789)
The land belongs to the future.
— Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)
The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and live on.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison (1785)
There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe—such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property—the invention of men. In the latter, equality is impossible; for to distribute it equally, it would be necessary that all should have contributed in the same proportion, which can never be the case …. Equality of natural property is different. Every individual in the world is born with legitimate claims on this property, or its equivalent.
— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.
— Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity on any part of it…. It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.
— Thomas Paine, 1796
The story of land is older than the story of man. Land came first; no man created it. Every society, large or small, must devise ways in which its members will share this gift.
— Robert Swann, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972)
On Land as a Source of Power and Prosperity
If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. But if you give him land, he will grow his own food.
— Fannie Lou Hamer (1967)
Conventional wisdom says that wealth is having a job. Let’s bring in Wal-Mart, let’s bring in IBM, and they will give the people jobs. That’s not real wealth. Real wealth means you have some assets. It means you build on something that the community owns or that the individuals in the community own. There’s no more valuable asset than land. Farmers know that; we know that. The land is the ultimate source of wealth.
— Greg Watson, “The Wisdom That Builds Community” (17th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture, 1997)
Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality.
— Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in Detroit, MI (1963)
Same America that refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today, many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies to the farm and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speech for Poor People’s Campaign (1968)
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)
Among material resources, the greatest, unquestionably, is the land. Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.
— E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973)
In a sentence, decentralism as a way of living means reliance on the land, not on the machine.
— Earle Hitch, Rebuilding Rural America (1950)
On the Harms of Commodification and Speculation
Industrial society speaks a language of inanimate nouns. Even words for the land are becoming inanimate. Jerry Mander discusses this idea in The Absence of the Sacred when he talks about the ‘commodification of the sacred.’ Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects, and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, ‘man’ can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. This behavior is also related to the linear way of thinking.
— Winona LaDuke, “Voices from White Earth: Gaa-waabaabiganikaag” (thirteenth annual E.F. Schumacher lecture, 1993)
The landed monopoly that began with [enclosure] has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
In public talks and private discussions, E. F. Schumacher often pondered ‘the land question.’ An economic system that treats land as a commodity to be bought and sold on the market fails to foster the respect for land necessary to encourage its proper use. When an individual is allowed private ownership of a limited natural resource, that individual has an unfair economic advantage. The scarcity of arable land and a growing demand for its use result in an increase in the value of land through no effort on the part of the landowner. This potential for speculative gain places tremendous pressure on the landowner to maximize the dollar value of the land through excessive development and erodes the landowner’s commitment to community and place. A further result of the ability to make land a commodity is that a community’s capital is tied up in the land. Credit for the small-business owner tightens. The region loses its diversity of enterprises, which is the basis of a more sustainable economy and a more environmentally responsible business sector.
— Robert Swann in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered: 25 Years Later…with Commentaries (2000)
The question, however, is this. Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? And the answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the ‘cornering’ of land…. No one can exist without some land base. With growing numbers – growing mobility, growing production, growing trade – there’s no doubt that (quite apart from inflation) land values move on a one-way street. Anyone who corners land only has to wait to grow rich. I suggest it follows that the type of private ownership that may be appropriate for many man-made goods – the supply of which can be increased by human work and invention – cannot possibly be appropriate for land.
— E.F. Schumacher, “Think About Land” (1973)
Enclosure is an old-fashioned word for privatization. At first it meant privatization by the landed gentry; today it means privatization by corporations. Either way, it means that what once belonged to many now belongs to a few. Enclosure is usually justified in the name of “efficiency.” And sometimes it does result in efficiency gains. But what also results from enclosure is the impoverishment of those who lose access to the commons and the enrichment of those who take title to it. In other words, enclosure widens the gap between those with income-producing property and those without.
— Peter Barnes, “Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right” (twenty-third annual E.F. Schumacher lecture, 2003
The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches?
— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848)
On Reimagining Property Relationships
We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” speech in New York, NY (1967)
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
The first step in the movement was that no person should be left landless in the village. The last is that there should be no ‘land-owner’ in the village. All land should belong to the Community.
— Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1952)
Can we find an ownership model with respect to land (and perhaps even with respect to some of the structures on land) which first of all eliminates private land speculation; which secondly eliminates the private windfall gains that inevitably arise and that accrue to anyone who corners the land; which thirdly does not call for compensation payments to those owning the land now; and which fourthly causes the minimum of disturbance to those who now manage and utilise the land in any manner whatsoever provided it is permitted by law?
— E.F. Schumacher, “Think About Land” (1973)
In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of life is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change.
— E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973)
Nekhlyudov first of all explained his views in regard to personal property in land. ‘The land, according to my view, can neither be bought nor sold, because if it could be, a man with money enough could buy up all the land, and exact anything he liked for the use of it from those who have none.’ … ‘I have come here because I no longer wish to possess any land, and now we must consider the best way of dividing it.’
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection (1899)
On a wider view, however, the land is seen as a priceless asset which it is man’s task and happiness ’to dress and to keep’. We can say that man’s management of the land must be primarily orientated towards three: goals health, beauty, and permanence. The fourth goal – the only one accepted by the experts – productivity, will then be attained almost as a by-product.
— E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973)
In many ways the commons is like the dark matter of the universe. It’s everywhere, but we don’t see it. The only economic matter we see is the kind that glistens with dollar signs. In my mind, the great challenge for the twenty-first century is to make the commons visible, to give it proper reverence, and to translate that reverence into property rights and legal institutions that are on a par with those we currently give to private property.
— Peter Barnes, “Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right” (twenty-third annual E.F. Schumacher lecture, 2003)
Both the Community Land Trust (CLT) movement and the environmental movement have in common the notion of trusteeship of stewardship of land, rather than the traditional concept of ownership. While the land trust movement of the environmentalists is aimed at protection of the land only, however, the CLT movement is aimed at increasing the productivity of the land by reducing speculation and providing access to land by individuals and families who lack such access.
— Robert Swann, “Alternatives to Ownership: Land Trusts as Land Reform” (1976)
The CLT is not merely a method of holding land in common; it is a way for the community to hold land for the ‘common good.’
— Susan Witt & Robert Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity” (1995)
Even though government programs and private investment institutions favor private development, there are at this point no tangible legal or economic barriers to the trusteeship approach to land tenure. The community land trust represents a means by which a legitimate alternative institutional expression of landownership may be found, thereby contributing to the much-needed social and economic reconstruction of America.”
— Robert Swann, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972)
We can understand a great deal of our history—from Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521 to the bulldozer attack on the coalfields four-and-a-half centuries later—by thinking of ourselves as divided into conquerors and victims. In order to understand our own time and predicament and the work that is to be done, we would do well to shift the terms and say that we are divided between exploitation and nurture…. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)
Cooperation can be used to effect a redistribution of land and to provide homesteads to the millions who are today propertyless and entirely dependent upon industrial and commercial employment. While we are trying to act politically upon the land question—to end the present speculation and concentration of ownership of land—-we can use cooperation as they did in Denmark for immediate action. If homestead projects leading to individual ownership through cooperative purchase of land and cooperative building construction, such as are being developed in Rockland County, New York, under the auspices of the School of Living, were to be multiplied in sufficient numbers, we might need little political action.
— Ralph Borsodi, in Free America (1938)
We maintain that the ideal of society — that is, the state towards which society is already marching — is a society of integrated, combined labor. A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshop; where every aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources — it may be a nation, or rather a region — produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce. Of course, as long as society remains organized so as to permit the owners of the land and capital to appropriate for themselves, under the protection of the State and historical rights, the yearly surplus of human production, no such change can be thoroughly accomplished.
— Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
We discuss Aldo Leopold at dinner parties and clean up riverbanks on weekends but still reserve the right to sell the land we own and care for to the highest bidder. We have yet to fully imagine and embrace a culture in which land use is allocated by social and environmental contract rather than by checkbook. The Community Land Trust is a proven tool for change. When shall we dare to use it?
— Susan Witt & Robert Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity” (1995)
On Regional and Democratic Governance
There is no way to piece together any politics unless we begin with its most elementary forms: the villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities in which people live on the most intimate level of political interdependence beyond private life. It is on this level that they can begin to gain a familiarity with the political process, a process that involves a good deal more than voting and information. It is on this level, too, that they can go beyond the private insularity of family life–a life that is currently celebrated for its inwardness and seclusion–and improvise those public institutions that make for broad community participation and consociation.
— Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism (1980)
Minimally, if power is to be socially redistributed so that the ordinary people who do the real work of the world can effectively speak back to those who run social and economic affairs, a movement is vitally needed to educate, mobilize, and, using the wisdom of ordinary and extraordinary people alike, initiate local steps to regain power in its most popular and democratic forms. Power of this kind must be collected, if we are to take democracy seriously, in newly developed institutions such as assemblies that allow for the direct participation of citizens in public affairs.
— Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism (1980)
It is important never to lose sight of the primary purpose of the community land trust: to acquire land and hold it in trusteeship. Thus, the trust should not be deeply involved in the development of the community, population selection, site planning, or institutional development. These concerns affect the interests of the trust only to the extent that the long-term value of the land and its resources are enhanced or depleted, or to the extent that the fundamental principles of its trusteeship charter are affected. The development functions should be performed primarily by the actual and potential users of the land through separate community-based organizations, such as a community development corporation.
— Robert Swann, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972)
We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
— Students for a Democratic Society, “Port Huron Statement” (1962)
Libertarian municipalism proposes that land and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of the community–more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils. . . . In such a municipal economy–confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not simply technological, standards–we would expect that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, and the like would be melded into a general interest in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.
— Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism (1980)
We work hardest to protect places we know and love. “Nature” is an abstraction, but the urge to protect one’s home is powerful. That is why place-based conservation efforts (such as local land and farm trusts, community parks, and publicly managed commons) are often more effective than campaigns by distant city dwellers to save rainforests and emblematic species on the far side of the planet.
— Richard Heinberg, Museletter 323 (August 2019)
Community land trusts are, at heart, more than simply another gimmick for lowering the cost of housing and cultivating a new crop of homeowners. What they are ‘really about’ is equitably and sustainably replanting the contested ground at the intersection of property, power, and place. That may not be something to which all CLT practitioners aspire. That may not be something of which all CLT practitioners speak. But whenever land is controlled by a community within the participatory framework of a CLT, the transformative potential is present to nudge the places where people reside toward greater security and opportunity for all. Common ground provides a versatile platform for promoting development with justice — and justice that lasts.
— John Emmeus Davis, “Common Ground: Community-Owned Land as a Platform for Equitable and Sustainable Development” (2017)