Thank you so much for helping me to think about land ownership in a different way! I feel in my bones that I belong to the land, rather than the other way around, but I’d never stopped to think about all of the ways in which the system of land ownership causes and perpetuates so much of both the ecological harm and social injustice in our world. Your invitation to imagine a different possibility is so beautiful. It’s easy to get hung up on the barriers to change and put off the imagining until some future time when the barriers are gone, but of course, without a world in mind to strive toward, we aren’t likely to do the hard work of removing barriers and dismantling harmful systems. This is such a beautiful and thought-provoking piece, Priscilla, and I’m so glad to have read it!
I'm so glad you found something useful here, Lisa! I'm new to thinking this way too, though of course we all have probably spent years wishing things were different. But I had just never taken the time to sit down and take the wishing seriously enough to spin it out a little. Even if we're not economists most adults have enough experience in "how things work" to play around a little with the building blocks of the current system. I highly recommend playing like this! It brings the current system down to eye level. And seeing it clearly is a first step in changing it. We humans wrote the rules; we humans can rewrite them too.
Thanks so much for this, Priscilla. I think about the same issue, and how it has extended from land to water. I really appreciate the references and footnotes.
Literally as I was reading this, an email arrived in my inbox announcing that Lyla June will be speaking right here at our Whidbey Island Center for the Arts on Friday!
Wow, that's timely! Lucky you to enjoy her speaking in person. I hope you let us know how the evening goes. When I looked her up on the web I discovered she's a musician and poet too.
I'm hopelessly in love with research and love to pass on good info to others. Regarding land in particular, there are so many justice movements popping up in recent years, as you no doubt know. So many people thinking about better ways of relating to land—lots of places to go for inspiration.
Great food for thought, Priscilla! Do you live on Maui now? We are going to be there April 28 through May 5. My sister has lived on Maui since 1996 and is a victim of the housing shortage crisis. She is now looking for another place to rent as her landlord is selling the house she’s renting a room in. I would love to get in touch with you to do a story about land use and housing on Maui when we arrive. A friend, John Lovie, forwarded me your blog after reading an article of mine about Lyla June’s upcoming lecture. Kate Poss, thisiswhidbey.com
Yes, I live here on Maui and would be delighted to meet/speak with you when you're here, Kate! Though I don't have much more info than what is available on the web. Let's DM for contact info. Looking forward to it!
Priscilla, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this -- twice! It does my heart and head good to see all these ideas laid out so clearly. Sometimes (often) I feel I'm just mucking around with something so airy fairy and unreachable it seems silly to be spending so much time on it. But then I read this and think, "Yes! This is it exactly!" You explained John Locke's ideas wonderfully, and it's immensely frustrating to have read his writing on property and realize how much of our laws *and the dominant societal sense of self as "individual owners or strivers to own property"* are based on such a crumbling sand castle of ideas. There's no there-there.
Loved watching that webinar on un-propertying land alongside you! And really glad we're mucking around with these incredibly important ideas together. 💪💚
I'm so delighted to hear this, Antonia! For an explanation of John Locke, I have historian Ellen Meiksins Wood to thank; her book The Origin of Capitalism explains him in the context of early capitalism and colonialism so clearly! And with so few pages. Am in awe of writers who can summarize briefly yet with nuance.
I don't think I had quiet gotten it, until researching this piece, just how fixed the world system is in the historical contingency of 1600s England—how the whole freakin land system goes back to land barons wanting to justify their greed at that moment in time. I mean, I've studied the origins of capitalism; I've read Smith and Hobbes and Locke and Marx. But I still held the mental picture of a whole amorphous system that developed over a long time, a system that's untouchable just because it's so hazy and complex. Like it was inevitable. But to find out that the whole legal edifice of private landownership was built *consciously* on the land barons wanting to justify more profit at the precise moment in time just tipped me over into a new place. Understanding history saves me every time. :-)
And I too am grateful that we're dreaming and scheming together for a better world!
I have to admit I found Wood's book more of a struggle than some others. A lot of Marxist theory tends to be self-referential and I get a bit lost! (Not as lost as when reading Peter Linebaugh--I try to look for interviews with him because his books can be all over the place.) But I liked how she explained that, and especially dug into the origin of capitalism being exactly in the way that land was privatized in England. Did you ever read Nick Hayes's "The Book of Trespass"? He gets into how entwined Locke was with landowning elites and their interests, too.
I'm totally with you on the mind-boggle of seeing how many of our structures are rooted in a lot of philosophies, legal arguments, etc., is rooted in 1600s England. It's almost bizarre. Maybe more than almost. Because I felt similarly, like surely I'd find in all this reading some large network of ideas and movements that built up over time, but it really feels like the landowning elite looked at the bloody rebellions being fought against enclosure, and decided to bring down the hammer hard and in as many was as possible to just crush the life out of resistance.
Structural inequality was the start. It's at the bottom of everything, isn't it. A small class of people having way more than everyone else and using it to keep things that way. And to this day people think it's normal.
I learned a lot about this and how these relatively new ideas undermined the old systems or shared land stewardship in Scotland while studying my family's history. I've written about it. Check out this podcast that Nia turned me on to about that topic: https://farmerama.co/landed/. The phrase that has not left me is "the family farm is a colonial concept."
Yes, and all these colonial concepts built on the feudal structure. The family farm was such a liberating concept because land was held so unequally, the vast majority of it in the hands of the king's few big men and their families.
I'll never forget what happened when I read a page in Vine Deloria Jr's *Custer Died for Your Sins*: "When we talk about European background, we are talking about feudalism, kings, queens, their divine right to rule their subjects....American Indians do not share that heritage....The Cherokee did not create English common law. The Pima had no experience with the rise of capitalism and industrialism....No tribe has an emotional, historical, or political relationship to events of another continent and age" (11).
It was like a wind blew the top of my head off. Suddenly I GOT IT what it must be like not to drag the history of feudalism around in one's mind and heart. How different the world would look! I suddenly saw how early modern European history was a series of reactions to that unequal world stretching back in Mediterranean society to before the Roman Empire—the aristocrats of early modern Europe fighting to maintain their economic privilege, the peasants fighting for equal access to land. And we white folks inheriting an unbroken history of inequality that shapes EVERYTHING. Still grateful to Deloria for such sharp vision.
Scotland had a pattern of communal land stewardship that lasted for millennia. Although the feudal lords had formal oversight and gathered tithes, particularly after the Norman conquest, there was no attempt to exert ownership in the modern sense until the enclosures for sheep rearing and the subsequent clearances.
But yes, that shared history of inequality is baked into the whole of western society and beyond. Have you read Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade", another Antonia Malchik recommendation? It doesn't have to be that way.
Yes, I read Chalice when it came out in the late eighties. Great vision but so gender dualistic that I had trouble with it even at the time (I was in a doctoral program centering feminist theory). And I was already poking around in prehistory and knew that feminist archaeologists too had serious questions about Gimbutas, on whom Eisler depended for her argument. Over time it's been fascinating to watch which elements of Gimbutas hold up in the field of archaeology and which don't.
Great ideas! It's hard to imagine our system changing, yet the practice of imagining is necessary for us to improve our world. Climate leader Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson suggests being guided by love and by possibility, rather than hope: https://onbeing.org/programs/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-what-if-we-get-this-right/. I like that framing. She suggests that we start by focusing on our love for what it is we want to save. By asking the question, “What if we get this right?” we can focus on possibility — and even learn to love the future.
Oh, thank you, Rosana, for adding Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson here! I appreciate so much how she talks about needing to imagine a better future—to fill in the outlines of the future for one another so it's not just a scary blank canvas that we're heading toward. Because being able to see it more clearly entices us to run toward it instead of running toward the abyss. The future could be way better than what we have now!
I suspect what she calls "possibility" and what Dr. Lyla June Johnston calls "hope" are not so different—both about focusing on solutions, on what we already know and can do. And of course, as you say, on love. My fave line from that interview: "For me, it’s all about how do we build the future that we want to live in, where there’s a place for us and the people and the things that we love?"
Pricilla, this piece filled in so many gaps in my understanding of land ownership, enclosure of the commons, and possibilities for the future. I’ve been really compelled by the ideas in Antonia Malchik’s newsletter, but feel like I connect with them poetically, without being able to wrap my mind around what it means pragmatically. Your piece fit like a puzzle piece into what I was struggling to grasp. I’m sure I’ll be returning to it.
I feel like there’s so much power in inviting people to imagine, to desire, a different way of being in the world. It’s so wonderful to see so many of us exercising the unique capacity of our own voice to extend the invitation. Thank you so much for this piece
Shaina, I’m so delighted to hear this! Researching and pulling it together was helpful for me too. Before, I had the impression that our landowning system just kind of “developed,” the way things do over time. But when I learned how brazenly the system was designed by a few men to cement the wealth of their class, I saw just how arbitrary the rules are—and therefore how they can be changed. Yes, invitations galore to envision a better world! And help bring it about! Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much for helping me to think about land ownership in a different way! I feel in my bones that I belong to the land, rather than the other way around, but I’d never stopped to think about all of the ways in which the system of land ownership causes and perpetuates so much of both the ecological harm and social injustice in our world. Your invitation to imagine a different possibility is so beautiful. It’s easy to get hung up on the barriers to change and put off the imagining until some future time when the barriers are gone, but of course, without a world in mind to strive toward, we aren’t likely to do the hard work of removing barriers and dismantling harmful systems. This is such a beautiful and thought-provoking piece, Priscilla, and I’m so glad to have read it!
I'm so glad you found something useful here, Lisa! I'm new to thinking this way too, though of course we all have probably spent years wishing things were different. But I had just never taken the time to sit down and take the wishing seriously enough to spin it out a little. Even if we're not economists most adults have enough experience in "how things work" to play around a little with the building blocks of the current system. I highly recommend playing like this! It brings the current system down to eye level. And seeing it clearly is a first step in changing it. We humans wrote the rules; we humans can rewrite them too.
Thanks so much for this, Priscilla. I think about the same issue, and how it has extended from land to water. I really appreciate the references and footnotes.
Literally as I was reading this, an email arrived in my inbox announcing that Lyla June will be speaking right here at our Whidbey Island Center for the Arts on Friday!
Of course I'm going.
Wow, that's timely! Lucky you to enjoy her speaking in person. I hope you let us know how the evening goes. When I looked her up on the web I discovered she's a musician and poet too.
I'm hopelessly in love with research and love to pass on good info to others. Regarding land in particular, there are so many justice movements popping up in recent years, as you no doubt know. So many people thinking about better ways of relating to land—lots of places to go for inspiration.
Great food for thought, Priscilla! Do you live on Maui now? We are going to be there April 28 through May 5. My sister has lived on Maui since 1996 and is a victim of the housing shortage crisis. She is now looking for another place to rent as her landlord is selling the house she’s renting a room in. I would love to get in touch with you to do a story about land use and housing on Maui when we arrive. A friend, John Lovie, forwarded me your blog after reading an article of mine about Lyla June’s upcoming lecture. Kate Poss, thisiswhidbey.com
Yes, I live here on Maui and would be delighted to meet/speak with you when you're here, Kate! Though I don't have much more info than what is available on the web. Let's DM for contact info. Looking forward to it!
When you write let's DM for contact info., I ask you what DM stands for.
I'll Direct Message you right now... You can find it under the Chat tab.
I found the chat tab, but was unable to write to you. You can email me at poss@whidbey.com
Priscilla, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this -- twice! It does my heart and head good to see all these ideas laid out so clearly. Sometimes (often) I feel I'm just mucking around with something so airy fairy and unreachable it seems silly to be spending so much time on it. But then I read this and think, "Yes! This is it exactly!" You explained John Locke's ideas wonderfully, and it's immensely frustrating to have read his writing on property and realize how much of our laws *and the dominant societal sense of self as "individual owners or strivers to own property"* are based on such a crumbling sand castle of ideas. There's no there-there.
Loved watching that webinar on un-propertying land alongside you! And really glad we're mucking around with these incredibly important ideas together. 💪💚
I'm so delighted to hear this, Antonia! For an explanation of John Locke, I have historian Ellen Meiksins Wood to thank; her book The Origin of Capitalism explains him in the context of early capitalism and colonialism so clearly! And with so few pages. Am in awe of writers who can summarize briefly yet with nuance.
I don't think I had quiet gotten it, until researching this piece, just how fixed the world system is in the historical contingency of 1600s England—how the whole freakin land system goes back to land barons wanting to justify their greed at that moment in time. I mean, I've studied the origins of capitalism; I've read Smith and Hobbes and Locke and Marx. But I still held the mental picture of a whole amorphous system that developed over a long time, a system that's untouchable just because it's so hazy and complex. Like it was inevitable. But to find out that the whole legal edifice of private landownership was built *consciously* on the land barons wanting to justify more profit at the precise moment in time just tipped me over into a new place. Understanding history saves me every time. :-)
And I too am grateful that we're dreaming and scheming together for a better world!
I have to admit I found Wood's book more of a struggle than some others. A lot of Marxist theory tends to be self-referential and I get a bit lost! (Not as lost as when reading Peter Linebaugh--I try to look for interviews with him because his books can be all over the place.) But I liked how she explained that, and especially dug into the origin of capitalism being exactly in the way that land was privatized in England. Did you ever read Nick Hayes's "The Book of Trespass"? He gets into how entwined Locke was with landowning elites and their interests, too.
I'm totally with you on the mind-boggle of seeing how many of our structures are rooted in a lot of philosophies, legal arguments, etc., is rooted in 1600s England. It's almost bizarre. Maybe more than almost. Because I felt similarly, like surely I'd find in all this reading some large network of ideas and movements that built up over time, but it really feels like the landowning elite looked at the bloody rebellions being fought against enclosure, and decided to bring down the hammer hard and in as many was as possible to just crush the life out of resistance.
Structural inequality was the start. It's at the bottom of everything, isn't it. A small class of people having way more than everyone else and using it to keep things that way. And to this day people think it's normal.
ugh, it's too true!
I learned a lot about this and how these relatively new ideas undermined the old systems or shared land stewardship in Scotland while studying my family's history. I've written about it. Check out this podcast that Nia turned me on to about that topic: https://farmerama.co/landed/. The phrase that has not left me is "the family farm is a colonial concept."
Yes, and all these colonial concepts built on the feudal structure. The family farm was such a liberating concept because land was held so unequally, the vast majority of it in the hands of the king's few big men and their families.
I'll never forget what happened when I read a page in Vine Deloria Jr's *Custer Died for Your Sins*: "When we talk about European background, we are talking about feudalism, kings, queens, their divine right to rule their subjects....American Indians do not share that heritage....The Cherokee did not create English common law. The Pima had no experience with the rise of capitalism and industrialism....No tribe has an emotional, historical, or political relationship to events of another continent and age" (11).
It was like a wind blew the top of my head off. Suddenly I GOT IT what it must be like not to drag the history of feudalism around in one's mind and heart. How different the world would look! I suddenly saw how early modern European history was a series of reactions to that unequal world stretching back in Mediterranean society to before the Roman Empire—the aristocrats of early modern Europe fighting to maintain their economic privilege, the peasants fighting for equal access to land. And we white folks inheriting an unbroken history of inequality that shapes EVERYTHING. Still grateful to Deloria for such sharp vision.
Scotland had a pattern of communal land stewardship that lasted for millennia. Although the feudal lords had formal oversight and gathered tithes, particularly after the Norman conquest, there was no attempt to exert ownership in the modern sense until the enclosures for sheep rearing and the subsequent clearances.
But yes, that shared history of inequality is baked into the whole of western society and beyond. Have you read Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade", another Antonia Malchik recommendation? It doesn't have to be that way.
Yes, I read Chalice when it came out in the late eighties. Great vision but so gender dualistic that I had trouble with it even at the time (I was in a doctoral program centering feminist theory). And I was already poking around in prehistory and knew that feminist archaeologists too had serious questions about Gimbutas, on whom Eisler depended for her argument. Over time it's been fascinating to watch which elements of Gimbutas hold up in the field of archaeology and which don't.
Ah, now you've got me heading back for a reread. It seems to be hard to find solid ground here!
If we can’t find better old stories, we'll have to create new ones.
Great ideas! It's hard to imagine our system changing, yet the practice of imagining is necessary for us to improve our world. Climate leader Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson suggests being guided by love and by possibility, rather than hope: https://onbeing.org/programs/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-what-if-we-get-this-right/. I like that framing. She suggests that we start by focusing on our love for what it is we want to save. By asking the question, “What if we get this right?” we can focus on possibility — and even learn to love the future.
Oh, thank you, Rosana, for adding Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson here! I appreciate so much how she talks about needing to imagine a better future—to fill in the outlines of the future for one another so it's not just a scary blank canvas that we're heading toward. Because being able to see it more clearly entices us to run toward it instead of running toward the abyss. The future could be way better than what we have now!
I suspect what she calls "possibility" and what Dr. Lyla June Johnston calls "hope" are not so different—both about focusing on solutions, on what we already know and can do. And of course, as you say, on love. My fave line from that interview: "For me, it’s all about how do we build the future that we want to live in, where there’s a place for us and the people and the things that we love?"
Pricilla, this piece filled in so many gaps in my understanding of land ownership, enclosure of the commons, and possibilities for the future. I’ve been really compelled by the ideas in Antonia Malchik’s newsletter, but feel like I connect with them poetically, without being able to wrap my mind around what it means pragmatically. Your piece fit like a puzzle piece into what I was struggling to grasp. I’m sure I’ll be returning to it.
I feel like there’s so much power in inviting people to imagine, to desire, a different way of being in the world. It’s so wonderful to see so many of us exercising the unique capacity of our own voice to extend the invitation. Thank you so much for this piece
Shaina, I’m so delighted to hear this! Researching and pulling it together was helpful for me too. Before, I had the impression that our landowning system just kind of “developed,” the way things do over time. But when I learned how brazenly the system was designed by a few men to cement the wealth of their class, I saw just how arbitrary the rules are—and therefore how they can be changed. Yes, invitations galore to envision a better world! And help bring it about! Thanks for being here.
Hey, Priscilla, check out Anne Helen Petersen today on land ownership's evil twin, rugged individualism: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-dark-heart-of-individualism