Bob Swann called prison his university. It was a federal prison in rural Kentucky. Bob had refused to cooperate when his Ohio draft board called him to fight in World War II. His prison mates included Bayard Rustin, who later famously trained Martin Luther King, Jr. in non-violent strategies. And there were also other draft resisters and moonshiners and tax evaders.
It was a segregated prison and Bob spent a good deal of time in solitary, a penalty for sitting at meals with his Black friends.
The conscientious objectors in prison shared books and asked questions about why wars continued in a world where there was bounty for all. During his thirty-month stay, a time of deep reflection, Bob came to understand that the root causes of war lay in the economic system itself.
Economic value is created when human ingenuity organizes labor to transform the natural world into new products for use by others. It is not land itself that creates economic value. Land and other natural resources are a given — our common inheritance. It is not labor itself that represents economic value. To commodify labor degrades the human. Rather it is the product of labor transforming nature that creates the new value.
Bob recognized that when land and minerals can be bought by the highest bidder an imbalance occurs in the economic. A few people benefit from the need of all for access. Poverty ensues. Wars are fought. Injustice multiplies.
Instead, Bob imagined a network of regional nonprofit, quasi-public trusts that hold land and lease it to individuals and cooperatives for use for housing, farming, forestry, manufacturing, shops, and offices on long term leases. The lessees would own the buildings and other improvements on the land, but the land would remain a community asset with access by social contract rather than through the market.
Bob and Civil Rights activist, Slater King, modeled the first of these trusts in 1967 in Albany, Georgia to provide Black farmers secure access to land in a segregated South. They coined the term “community land trust.” A movement was born.
A community land trust differs from conservation land trusts which were formed to hold ecologically sensitive sites. Community land trusts (CLTs) were designed to hold working lands — the lands needed for village life and its activities. CLTs marry private ownership of buildings with community stewardship of the land, retaining income from its use for the general welfare of all in the region.
These local community land trusts would in turn, Bob envisioned, allocate the mineral rights on their lands to a World Resources Trusteeship to fairly distribute the Earth’s precious resources for the benefit of all peoples — not just for the benefit of those where the oil/gas/gold/and other rare resources were found. The idea for a World Resources Trusteeship was patterned on the “Law of the Seas,” which was a United Nations attempt to fairly allocate the rich treasure of minerals found in the Earth’s oceans that are not the province of any one nation.
Bob was not calling for the state to take over ownership of land — a socialist concept — but rather voluntary land gifting into community land trusts and other forms of commons holdings — motivated by the moral imperative to free land from the market.
In his 1977 article A World Resources Trusteeship, he writes about gifting land:
A further note needs to be added here to underline the importance of land as a gift or gift money to purchase land. The point is simply this: in its widest or deepest concept, the Community Land Trust movement is designed to reduce the cost of land or the cost of access to land towards zero, or as close to zero as possible. This does not mean that the yearly leasehold charge should be reduced to zero. The lease is the individual’s payment to society for the use of land and resource which are limited and cannot be equitably distributed in any other way. Land, which was originally given without cost by God or nature, should be returned to society (the general welfare) without the addition of a price, which as Henry George pointed out represents “unearned increment.” Thus, gifts of land (or money) have a very important economic role and should be treated as a partial return to nature or God, the spiritual part of humankind from which it originally came.
Such an attitude or feeling about land is very widely felt among human beings and was clearly expressed by native Americans, indeed native people all over the world, before the commercial spirit of the “industrial revolution” overtook Western civilization in the last 200 years. But the original spirit remains in many people and today we see it manifest in different ways. We must not ignore this spirit as the classical (and Marxist) economists have done and assume that land must be sought and paid for as a commodity or taken forcibly away from individuals and placed in the hands of the state. For it is on this spirit, this instinctive need to protect and care for land that resides deep inside all of us, it is on this spirit which the future of the human race depends – gradually returning land to its original place in economics, a gift from God or nature.
Please consider a gift of land to a community land trust in your region. Find a CLT near you through the Schumacher Center’s community land trust directory. Or let your gift trigger the creation of a new CLT. The buildings on the land can be transferred separately to an individual or entity with instructions that the lease of land should go to the new building owner with appropriate restrictions on resale. Or a gift of land can accompany a general instruction that the site be leased to a farmer, or an essential worker, or a creative artist.
Alternatively, gift land to an indigenous community — freely, without instructions on how it should be used — recognizing the wisdom of the tribe to so determine. The objective is to cultivate a broad spirit of land gifting by voluntarily moving land out of the market into a commons.
Our thanks to all those who have contributed to the Schumacher Center over its forty-two years in support of educational programs advocating for a re-envisioned role for land, money, and labor in the economic system. Tax-deductible gifts of stock, BerkShares, and crypto are most welcome for continued support. US dollar donations can be made via check or credit card.