The subject of the Enclosures is interesting to me. I do not yet know nearly enough about the history.
Property (the ability to say "this thing is exclusively mine") is essential for human life. The alternative—contra the communists—is not paradise, but hell. This must also include land. Otherwise, people could come sleep in your house and just say, "Hey, all property is common, remember?"
But the common land that got enclosed in the Enclosures seems to me to have been the property of the people using it. That had never been formalized because it never needed to be.
How would you say it should have been handled? I wish I knew more about the Enclosures. One argument might be to say that they violated the Lockean Proviso…
I answered this somewhere else just now so it must be on your thread. Every human being has the inalienable right to live freely on land they deem to be their own but more in the sense of the Indigenous Peoples who care for and tend for their land rather than presume to own it. The problem is people who have commandered more land or property than they rightfully 'need' to bring up their family and pass that same land down through the generations. What has happened here is that ALL the land is being hoovered up by wealthy people - just look at what happened in the economic crash, lockdown, etc - engineered to steal property to enrich portfolios entirely for profit.
Then you have the WAY landowners use the land as if they have a right to destroy it for gaming, development, mass-farming to produce low quality processed food and such like. I have spoken to Marc Horn about this and under Natural Law, the amount of land or property you own must be proporionate to your current and future needs (taking into account growing families, growing businesses, security for the future, etc) - this needs to be brought back into proportion. There would be 'limits' to negate greed and stealing land through economic faillures (I mentioned Bill Gates before buying up all the farm land in America) and there would be 'obligations' to tend to the land in harmony with Nature for the benefit of planet Earth which is our collective home.
There is also the travesty of mortgages which are unlawful and result in no one really ever owning anything. This, of course, is another story to be unravelled and remedied as we move into our new system.
I am absolutely shocked and appalled by what they're doing with vacuuming up all the land, pricing people out and turning them into renters, etc. A lot of it is abetted by government or would only be possible with government, though probably not all of it.
That said, this notion that natural law only allows what is proportionate to current and future needs… how would such a thing be determined? And who would make the determination, and how would such determinations be enforced?
I know, I think we must start with those who are being forced out of their homes and with homeless people. It's a tragic situation that cannot go on. I don't know the answer, just talking basic principles here but a good place to start would be with Marc Horn (founder of Peace Keepers), there is a rationale which needs to be brought to the table at some point for discussion.
I really do think that 75% of these sorts of problems vanish instantly when government is no longer in the picture, and then they even get better over time as the market heals many of the remaining wounds.
One hundred percent and this must include the royal family over here who ruin the lives of millions, hand in pocket with the WHO and the global agenda.
I couldn't disagree with you more, though I profoundly respect the heart and integrity of why you believe what you believe. I do think Davos should go first in owning nothing and being happy, however in the end, we are all guests in the body of a living organism who is herself sovereign and divine - Gaia/Earth. Ownership of any piece of Gaia is slavery. We were meant to garden her and care for her, not possess her. Think of her as a wife or a mother and then imagine how the concept of women has evolved from something to own and use to propagate versus Someone who honor, love, cherish and be noble in defense. of if necessary..as is the only way for the masculine to be right relationship with the feminine, both within ourselves and in our love for our planet. If you've read my stuff on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, I was hoping you might put two and two together that if we correct the original sin of land theft from the Turtle Islanders here before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it would lay the foundation for what Nevermore Media describes as Ethnogenesis, which fits well with your ideas in terms of being free...without necessarily adding the enslavement of a sovereign divine being - Mother Earth. Peace!
<3 Thank you for being you and for being receptive! Hey, FYI I didn't get notified that you responded to this comment and I tried to tag you on something but it wouldn't tag.
IOW, vis-a-vis God and the Earth, we are just borrowing the land. But vis-a-vis each other, we need discrete property rights or all is chaos and horror. The history of the 20th century attests.
Think of it this way…
If I go into the woods and find a nice piece of wood and spend a month carving it into a beautiful flute, it cannot be everybody’s flute. It has to be mine in order to be of any use to me. If I cannot exclude others from using it, then everyone owns it, which means it is useless, or everyone is fighting over it, which also means it is useless.
And it IS mine. It is a result of my labor, which is an outgrowth of my self-ownership, which is what makes me a person. Taking it from me is an attack on my fundamental nature and existence as a human person.
Now, let us say I let one person borrow it, in exchange for a broom. That is our private arrangement. And then I use that broom to clean the flute-teacher’s house every Wednesday, in exchange for flute lessons. I am trading an outgrowth of my self-ownership for an outgrowth of the teacher’s. The skill she has developed has value. And now, I have worked to develop some of that skill myself. That too is an outgrowth of my self-ownership.
So then I go and entertain people in the village with my flute playing. And they give me coins. And one of them falls in love with me, and I with her, and we use the coins to buy a small plot of land to farm and raise children and some chickens.
Now, someone comes along and says that this land is not ours because it belongs to God. And the chickens are from the Earth, so everyone should get to have a chicken dinner. So they take the chickens and they seize the land.
What we have poured our self-ownership into—our very personhood itself—is now sacrificed on the altar of some abstract idea that sounds lovely, but that ends in our starvation and our children never being born.
The land is no different than the flute or the broom or the flute playing or the flute teaching. It is no different than the morsel of food you are about to put into your mouth, which must be yours in order for you to live. It is all rooted in natural self-ownership.
This is the only system that has ever worked and respected the human person. The modern alternative resulted in the democide of millions.
The tribal alternative exists, but only in circumstances where there is far more land than anyone can possibly use (a tribe in a jungle, e.g.). And even there, your hut is still your hut.
There is a difference here between property in the form of land - which everyone has the inalienable right to 'own' as their home (as it is also an inalienable right to have free access to clean air, clean water, good food, etc) and items of property which would of course be yours if you bought it, created it, had it given to you or brought it into being.
I can understand your paradigm, and in terms of how we view value from a relative perspective, when it comes to things we make with our hands, things we put our energy into, including tending the land as through gardening and farming that is personal, rather than corporate, I agree...in relative terms. But for the long game, I cannot, nor can ultimate truth be ignored as we reach to solve global issues. The land is your mother, you cannot own her. You took the wood from the tree to make it into a flute. Yes, you poured yourself into it and it has value, and in a small community where people no one another and operate from a place of integrity and love, they will have natural reciprocity and respect, rather than greed and exploitation. Intelligence is innate but when we think can can conquer we disconnect from it. The kidney cells in a healthy body stay in the kidney but they do not forget to value the heart. Your foot doesn't weirdly end up in your head unless you are putting your foot in your mouth. Natural boundaries are honored. So too when we acknowledge our oneness with nature/Nature, God, Sophia, the Christ...we will honor others AS ourself, including the energy they have put into what they have created that is of value. We will value ourselves and others as parts of one whole that are all equally precious. Your very body is made of earth and light and water that you did nothing to earn. The land has been claimed - you did nothing to make it unless you already died and your body decomposed into the Humus!
All of this is good. These are crucial beneficial/aspirational principles.
Yet we also cannot ignore what we know. Even if in some spiritual, cosmic, and infinite sense, the property is not "ours," it must be ours vis-a-vis other humans. Attempts to the contrary (communal ownership) have not only failed, they have inevitably produced chaos and horror.
I am not sure whether human beings are perfectible. I do believe we can get better, and adopting the sorts of things you have expressed will be a part of that improvement. But we must be patient in our pursuit of this improvement.
I agree, and as said, everyone is entitled to their own home/property/land and clean air, water, food, etc. These are our inalienable rights as humans who are an intrinsic part of Nature. I only aspire to common ownership of that commons belong to the community, the bits in-between privately owned/public works as it were. These areas could then accommodate homeless people, organic communal farms, Peace Keeper offices, Community Courts, home schooling and healing centres, etc. We envisage Community Assembly Hubs in every city, town and village as outlined on the CABI website. https://www.ca-britishisles.com/community-assembly-hubs
Technically, though, these would be owned by CABI, though, right? The planet is completely owned now—there is no possibility of truly open/unclaimed land, except for out in international waters. Either the government owns it or a private entity does. So I presume CBABI would technically own these, and then use them in the common way you describe?
I think they have only failed where consciousness did not support it. If you take someone who thinks of themselves as separate and fearful, of course you have problems. If you take a group of people who deeply sense they are ONE yet individual, you will honor one another naturally without any force. Titles and deeds go back to centralized power. How else would it be determined if an individual or a group "owned" the land? I would love to hear some indigenous voices on this issue. When I was in Peru I noticed the beautiful crafstmanship of the architecture preindustrialization and the shittty shanti looking dwellings and businesses after. I commented that the older looked more beautiful they the newer using my very broke and grammatically incorrect Spanish. My driver said, "Money ruined everything. Before money, people worked together. After money, people only work for themselves, and now everyone is poorer."
But from a practical standpoint, how do you stop someone from installing a 25,000 gallon pool in your back yard if you do not have property rights to that back yard? How do you stop them from sleeping in your living room?
There are subtle nuances here. Everyone should be entitled to our their own piece of land/home which is not mortgaged by banks or licenced by governments who never owned it in the first place and who can so easily take it away from you. Indigenous Peoples believe that no human can 'own' land as it is a living being that requires love and care for the benefit of those who care for it, as Alicia so rightly says. You could say in that sense they do most certainly 'own' their lands as caretakers and have every right to live there freely through the generations.
The current system is so utterly corrupt in every regard and the whole thing requires a new approach so that yes, we own our own property in order to feel safe and secure (within the parameters I spoke of above) but with the proviso that we care for it in harmony with Nature and do not abuse it (as this would be causing harm in some way).
It is a hugely complex issue and my first port of call would be to reclaim our Commons and any public land that is either being abused or has been abandoned. Let's start with the land we know is rightly ours in each of our communities. As a collective operating under Natural Law, we would be the best people to look after it and utilise it for the good of all and to meet the needs of everyone in the community..
How far back would it be feasible to go, in order to find those commons? It really began with the Norman Yoke, didn't it? So that would be tough. I wonder how far it is feasible to go back…
I think for it to be right and fair to go right back to before the enclosures, this will be especially important for Indigenous land. There would have to be a way to make it fair for those who have bought such land perhaps through our Community Courts where evidence is provided and fair assessments are made ( from the top of my head). First is to make full disclosure of land ownership the law (to include the royals, states, governments, councils, military, etc) as in the work of Who Owns England - lots about this on their website.https://whoownsengland.org/tools-and-resources/
Maybe there are some aspects of English history that would make the process more reasonable when it comes to certain common spaces.
Here in the States, we would not need to do any of that, though, now that I think about it—the Federal and State governments "own" the vast majority of the land. Open that up and everyone who wants a chunks can have one. There are millions upon millions of acres of Federal, Bureau of Land Management, and state land!
This kind of effort is far more difficult than it initially sounds.
Ultimately, the piece of land upon which my house sits was once occupied by people who, though they did not have "deeds" to the land, certainly lived here and used the land and its benefits. But they are long gone. Do I have to give my home up? To whom? To the descendants of the indigenous peoples who lived in this area? (Tonawanda, maybe). To which descendants? And what of the tribespeople whom they drove off this land, as happened many times between the ice age and the arrival of Europeans here? What tribe gets first dibs? And which living descendants from that tribe?
Part of healing may be to stop the disease—to end the act of force being deployed unfairly on behalf of some to the detriment of others, almost always at the hands of, or with the help of, government. But not to then go on initiating some effort to redistribute everything based on past grievances. (Which grievances? How far back? What living people suffer for the crimes of long dead people, and what living people benefit from that suffering?)
I don't think figuring this out is an easy task, and it is fraught with its own perils.
Long game versus short game. But we have to play the short game with the long game in mind. The land theft is continuing RIGHT now against indigenous people/peoples based on The Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Ruth Bader GInsberg affirmed it as late as 2005. It's happening over all the world over as corporations and countries in bed with them use this genocide-rationalizing, land-stealing, dehumanizing Roman Catholic BULL collection that got integrated into the law in all Colonialized countries and then passed onto their governments even after "independence" in places ranging from US to Suriname - and it's happening now, for Lithium, for gold, etc. Have you read @Peter d'errico's stuff yet or watched his videos? I cannot recommend Sarah Augustine's book The Land is Not Empty enough.
If you were to undo the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and work together with the Indigenous people to set all people free to live - in a way that honors the earth and works in harmony create natural boundaries based on respect, reverence, co-creation, humility, love, appreciation, honor, love, oneness of all life and sovereignty of both groups and individuals who chose to live in them - without believing we can own mother earth or have the right to conquer one another or HER, a huge karmic wrong would be corrected if those of European descent first assisted the Indigenous to get their property rights back and then we all moved forward BEYOND property rights to honoring one another as our whole self.
Music to my ears, we have done ourselves the greatest dis-service by being 'convinced' that we are separate from Nature and do not need Mother Nature for our absolute and optimum health, wellbeing and happiness. This madness to think we can in any way shape or form replicate Nature has to be brought to an end. Yes, use her ingenuity to make things that work well for us but not to completely try and take over and remove her which is an impossibility in itself.
Lady Sue, that is a concept I've never heard of! Here in the US there is no such right to roam, there is only laws to punish trespassers. I think they get around it by having some kind of forest preserve in each town.
That sounds about right. It's the same over here and those places get ruined with so many people tramping through. Walkers and hikers go more off the track but I see very few people on my explorations. They are restricting our rights over here all the time. Landowners hide the fact they have public paths on their land. Hence the Ramblers campaign to make sure they are not removed from the map..
Landowners here get property tax breaks in exchange for conservation easements but if you don’t know that you assume it’s private property. They should make those lists well known
This is what the Who Owns England people are doing. It's hard work when royalty and the gentry, for example, don't have to declare land they have acquired or commandered through hand-me-downs, off-shore trusts, etc. It's the scale of it that is so daunting and all the land grabbing that continues unabated all over the world. Important to note that all of us having our own private property should be a given, it is an inalienable right, as it is for Indigenous Peoples who don't claim to 'own' their land but to live freely on it and tend to it as they know best in harmony with Nature through the generations as an integral part of their culture, etc.
It was to "Christian Princes" that the Pope originally gave the right of "Discovery" and to enslave, convert at point of sword, kill and conquer the peoples living in the places discovered by those considered noble by extension.
The Doctrine of Discovery (also known as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery) is an international legal concept that has borne out a number of Catholic laws (called ‘papal bulls’) issued by the Vatican in the 15th and 16th centuries. It gave the monarchies of Britain and Europe the right to conquer and claim lands, and to convert or kill the native inhabitants of those lands.
It's easy to forget just how dangerous these monarchy's are, especially here in England whereby the royal family own a vast amount of the land and charge extorionate rent and rates making up a large proportion of their £500 million annual income. More interesting links, thank you, hard to keep up but I will get there!
The subject of the Enclosures is interesting to me. I do not yet know nearly enough about the history.
Property (the ability to say "this thing is exclusively mine") is essential for human life. The alternative—contra the communists—is not paradise, but hell. This must also include land. Otherwise, people could come sleep in your house and just say, "Hey, all property is common, remember?"
But the common land that got enclosed in the Enclosures seems to me to have been the property of the people using it. That had never been formalized because it never needed to be.
How would you say it should have been handled? I wish I knew more about the Enclosures. One argument might be to say that they violated the Lockean Proviso…
I answered this somewhere else just now so it must be on your thread. Every human being has the inalienable right to live freely on land they deem to be their own but more in the sense of the Indigenous Peoples who care for and tend for their land rather than presume to own it. The problem is people who have commandered more land or property than they rightfully 'need' to bring up their family and pass that same land down through the generations. What has happened here is that ALL the land is being hoovered up by wealthy people - just look at what happened in the economic crash, lockdown, etc - engineered to steal property to enrich portfolios entirely for profit.
Then you have the WAY landowners use the land as if they have a right to destroy it for gaming, development, mass-farming to produce low quality processed food and such like. I have spoken to Marc Horn about this and under Natural Law, the amount of land or property you own must be proporionate to your current and future needs (taking into account growing families, growing businesses, security for the future, etc) - this needs to be brought back into proportion. There would be 'limits' to negate greed and stealing land through economic faillures (I mentioned Bill Gates before buying up all the farm land in America) and there would be 'obligations' to tend to the land in harmony with Nature for the benefit of planet Earth which is our collective home.
There is also the travesty of mortgages which are unlawful and result in no one really ever owning anything. This, of course, is another story to be unravelled and remedied as we move into our new system.
I am absolutely shocked and appalled by what they're doing with vacuuming up all the land, pricing people out and turning them into renters, etc. A lot of it is abetted by government or would only be possible with government, though probably not all of it.
That said, this notion that natural law only allows what is proportionate to current and future needs… how would such a thing be determined? And who would make the determination, and how would such determinations be enforced?
I know, I think we must start with those who are being forced out of their homes and with homeless people. It's a tragic situation that cannot go on. I don't know the answer, just talking basic principles here but a good place to start would be with Marc Horn (founder of Peace Keepers), there is a rationale which needs to be brought to the table at some point for discussion.
I really do think that 75% of these sorts of problems vanish instantly when government is no longer in the picture, and then they even get better over time as the market heals many of the remaining wounds.
One hundred percent and this must include the royal family over here who ruin the lives of millions, hand in pocket with the WHO and the global agenda.
I used to think that a largely ceremonial monarchy was an okay thing. But the more I hear about the House of Windsor, the more skeeved I am.
I couldn't disagree with you more, though I profoundly respect the heart and integrity of why you believe what you believe. I do think Davos should go first in owning nothing and being happy, however in the end, we are all guests in the body of a living organism who is herself sovereign and divine - Gaia/Earth. Ownership of any piece of Gaia is slavery. We were meant to garden her and care for her, not possess her. Think of her as a wife or a mother and then imagine how the concept of women has evolved from something to own and use to propagate versus Someone who honor, love, cherish and be noble in defense. of if necessary..as is the only way for the masculine to be right relationship with the feminine, both within ourselves and in our love for our planet. If you've read my stuff on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, I was hoping you might put two and two together that if we correct the original sin of land theft from the Turtle Islanders here before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it would lay the foundation for what Nevermore Media describes as Ethnogenesis, which fits well with your ideas in terms of being free...without necessarily adding the enslavement of a sovereign divine being - Mother Earth. Peace!
All of that said, I do understand the vibe of what you are saying.
<3 Thank you for being you and for being receptive! Hey, FYI I didn't get notified that you responded to this comment and I tried to tag you on something but it wouldn't tag.
Yeah, sometimes I do not get notified of certain things. I hope it's just little glitches!
Did you try to tag me in a note or comment? I do not think tagging works in comments.
Hahah - I didn't get this one either.
That is somewhat unnerving. I have PTSD from being censored on other platforms, so now I always assume the worst!
I tagged you a few times, FYI.
IOW, vis-a-vis God and the Earth, we are just borrowing the land. But vis-a-vis each other, we need discrete property rights or all is chaos and horror. The history of the 20th century attests.
Think of it this way…
If I go into the woods and find a nice piece of wood and spend a month carving it into a beautiful flute, it cannot be everybody’s flute. It has to be mine in order to be of any use to me. If I cannot exclude others from using it, then everyone owns it, which means it is useless, or everyone is fighting over it, which also means it is useless.
And it IS mine. It is a result of my labor, which is an outgrowth of my self-ownership, which is what makes me a person. Taking it from me is an attack on my fundamental nature and existence as a human person.
Now, let us say I let one person borrow it, in exchange for a broom. That is our private arrangement. And then I use that broom to clean the flute-teacher’s house every Wednesday, in exchange for flute lessons. I am trading an outgrowth of my self-ownership for an outgrowth of the teacher’s. The skill she has developed has value. And now, I have worked to develop some of that skill myself. That too is an outgrowth of my self-ownership.
So then I go and entertain people in the village with my flute playing. And they give me coins. And one of them falls in love with me, and I with her, and we use the coins to buy a small plot of land to farm and raise children and some chickens.
Now, someone comes along and says that this land is not ours because it belongs to God. And the chickens are from the Earth, so everyone should get to have a chicken dinner. So they take the chickens and they seize the land.
What we have poured our self-ownership into—our very personhood itself—is now sacrificed on the altar of some abstract idea that sounds lovely, but that ends in our starvation and our children never being born.
The land is no different than the flute or the broom or the flute playing or the flute teaching. It is no different than the morsel of food you are about to put into your mouth, which must be yours in order for you to live. It is all rooted in natural self-ownership.
This is the only system that has ever worked and respected the human person. The modern alternative resulted in the democide of millions.
The tribal alternative exists, but only in circumstances where there is far more land than anyone can possibly use (a tribe in a jungle, e.g.). And even there, your hut is still your hut.
There is a difference here between property in the form of land - which everyone has the inalienable right to 'own' as their home (as it is also an inalienable right to have free access to clean air, clean water, good food, etc) and items of property which would of course be yours if you bought it, created it, had it given to you or brought it into being.
I can understand your paradigm, and in terms of how we view value from a relative perspective, when it comes to things we make with our hands, things we put our energy into, including tending the land as through gardening and farming that is personal, rather than corporate, I agree...in relative terms. But for the long game, I cannot, nor can ultimate truth be ignored as we reach to solve global issues. The land is your mother, you cannot own her. You took the wood from the tree to make it into a flute. Yes, you poured yourself into it and it has value, and in a small community where people no one another and operate from a place of integrity and love, they will have natural reciprocity and respect, rather than greed and exploitation. Intelligence is innate but when we think can can conquer we disconnect from it. The kidney cells in a healthy body stay in the kidney but they do not forget to value the heart. Your foot doesn't weirdly end up in your head unless you are putting your foot in your mouth. Natural boundaries are honored. So too when we acknowledge our oneness with nature/Nature, God, Sophia, the Christ...we will honor others AS ourself, including the energy they have put into what they have created that is of value. We will value ourselves and others as parts of one whole that are all equally precious. Your very body is made of earth and light and water that you did nothing to earn. The land has been claimed - you did nothing to make it unless you already died and your body decomposed into the Humus!
All of this is good. These are crucial beneficial/aspirational principles.
Yet we also cannot ignore what we know. Even if in some spiritual, cosmic, and infinite sense, the property is not "ours," it must be ours vis-a-vis other humans. Attempts to the contrary (communal ownership) have not only failed, they have inevitably produced chaos and horror.
I am not sure whether human beings are perfectible. I do believe we can get better, and adopting the sorts of things you have expressed will be a part of that improvement. But we must be patient in our pursuit of this improvement.
I agree, and as said, everyone is entitled to their own home/property/land and clean air, water, food, etc. These are our inalienable rights as humans who are an intrinsic part of Nature. I only aspire to common ownership of that commons belong to the community, the bits in-between privately owned/public works as it were. These areas could then accommodate homeless people, organic communal farms, Peace Keeper offices, Community Courts, home schooling and healing centres, etc. We envisage Community Assembly Hubs in every city, town and village as outlined on the CABI website. https://www.ca-britishisles.com/community-assembly-hubs
Technically, though, these would be owned by CABI, though, right? The planet is completely owned now—there is no possibility of truly open/unclaimed land, except for out in international waters. Either the government owns it or a private entity does. So I presume CBABI would technically own these, and then use them in the common way you describe?
I think they have only failed where consciousness did not support it. If you take someone who thinks of themselves as separate and fearful, of course you have problems. If you take a group of people who deeply sense they are ONE yet individual, you will honor one another naturally without any force. Titles and deeds go back to centralized power. How else would it be determined if an individual or a group "owned" the land? I would love to hear some indigenous voices on this issue. When I was in Peru I noticed the beautiful crafstmanship of the architecture preindustrialization and the shittty shanti looking dwellings and businesses after. I commented that the older looked more beautiful they the newer using my very broke and grammatically incorrect Spanish. My driver said, "Money ruined everything. Before money, people worked together. After money, people only work for themselves, and now everyone is poorer."
When humans are free to have money if they want, but also learn to go back to those better ways, then we will really be cookin' with gas!
But from a practical standpoint, how do you stop someone from installing a 25,000 gallon pool in your back yard if you do not have property rights to that back yard? How do you stop them from sleeping in your living room?
There are subtle nuances here. Everyone should be entitled to our their own piece of land/home which is not mortgaged by banks or licenced by governments who never owned it in the first place and who can so easily take it away from you. Indigenous Peoples believe that no human can 'own' land as it is a living being that requires love and care for the benefit of those who care for it, as Alicia so rightly says. You could say in that sense they do most certainly 'own' their lands as caretakers and have every right to live there freely through the generations.
The current system is so utterly corrupt in every regard and the whole thing requires a new approach so that yes, we own our own property in order to feel safe and secure (within the parameters I spoke of above) but with the proviso that we care for it in harmony with Nature and do not abuse it (as this would be causing harm in some way).
It is a hugely complex issue and my first port of call would be to reclaim our Commons and any public land that is either being abused or has been abandoned. Let's start with the land we know is rightly ours in each of our communities. As a collective operating under Natural Law, we would be the best people to look after it and utilise it for the good of all and to meet the needs of everyone in the community..
How far back would it be feasible to go, in order to find those commons? It really began with the Norman Yoke, didn't it? So that would be tough. I wonder how far it is feasible to go back…
I think for it to be right and fair to go right back to before the enclosures, this will be especially important for Indigenous land. There would have to be a way to make it fair for those who have bought such land perhaps through our Community Courts where evidence is provided and fair assessments are made ( from the top of my head). First is to make full disclosure of land ownership the law (to include the royals, states, governments, councils, military, etc) as in the work of Who Owns England - lots about this on their website.https://whoownsengland.org/tools-and-resources/
Maybe there are some aspects of English history that would make the process more reasonable when it comes to certain common spaces.
Here in the States, we would not need to do any of that, though, now that I think about it—the Federal and State governments "own" the vast majority of the land. Open that up and everyone who wants a chunks can have one. There are millions upon millions of acres of Federal, Bureau of Land Management, and state land!
This kind of effort is far more difficult than it initially sounds.
Ultimately, the piece of land upon which my house sits was once occupied by people who, though they did not have "deeds" to the land, certainly lived here and used the land and its benefits. But they are long gone. Do I have to give my home up? To whom? To the descendants of the indigenous peoples who lived in this area? (Tonawanda, maybe). To which descendants? And what of the tribespeople whom they drove off this land, as happened many times between the ice age and the arrival of Europeans here? What tribe gets first dibs? And which living descendants from that tribe?
Part of healing may be to stop the disease—to end the act of force being deployed unfairly on behalf of some to the detriment of others, almost always at the hands of, or with the help of, government. But not to then go on initiating some effort to redistribute everything based on past grievances. (Which grievances? How far back? What living people suffer for the crimes of long dead people, and what living people benefit from that suffering?)
I don't think figuring this out is an easy task, and it is fraught with its own perils.
Long game versus short game. But we have to play the short game with the long game in mind. The land theft is continuing RIGHT now against indigenous people/peoples based on The Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Ruth Bader GInsberg affirmed it as late as 2005. It's happening over all the world over as corporations and countries in bed with them use this genocide-rationalizing, land-stealing, dehumanizing Roman Catholic BULL collection that got integrated into the law in all Colonialized countries and then passed onto their governments even after "independence" in places ranging from US to Suriname - and it's happening now, for Lithium, for gold, etc. Have you read @Peter d'errico's stuff yet or watched his videos? I cannot recommend Sarah Augustine's book The Land is Not Empty enough.
So true, Alicia, I am about to read Peter's article and thank you for another great book recommendation!
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LOVE!
I have not read his stuff, no.
If you were to undo the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and work together with the Indigenous people to set all people free to live - in a way that honors the earth and works in harmony create natural boundaries based on respect, reverence, co-creation, humility, love, appreciation, honor, love, oneness of all life and sovereignty of both groups and individuals who chose to live in them - without believing we can own mother earth or have the right to conquer one another or HER, a huge karmic wrong would be corrected if those of European descent first assisted the Indigenous to get their property rights back and then we all moved forward BEYOND property rights to honoring one another as our whole self.
Music to my ears, we have done ourselves the greatest dis-service by being 'convinced' that we are separate from Nature and do not need Mother Nature for our absolute and optimum health, wellbeing and happiness. This madness to think we can in any way shape or form replicate Nature has to be brought to an end. Yes, use her ingenuity to make things that work well for us but not to completely try and take over and remove her which is an impossibility in itself.
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Lady Sue, that is a concept I've never heard of! Here in the US there is no such right to roam, there is only laws to punish trespassers. I think they get around it by having some kind of forest preserve in each town.
That sounds about right. It's the same over here and those places get ruined with so many people tramping through. Walkers and hikers go more off the track but I see very few people on my explorations. They are restricting our rights over here all the time. Landowners hide the fact they have public paths on their land. Hence the Ramblers campaign to make sure they are not removed from the map..
Landowners here get property tax breaks in exchange for conservation easements but if you don’t know that you assume it’s private property. They should make those lists well known
This is what the Who Owns England people are doing. It's hard work when royalty and the gentry, for example, don't have to declare land they have acquired or commandered through hand-me-downs, off-shore trusts, etc. It's the scale of it that is so daunting and all the land grabbing that continues unabated all over the world. Important to note that all of us having our own private property should be a given, it is an inalienable right, as it is for Indigenous Peoples who don't claim to 'own' their land but to live freely on it and tend to it as they know best in harmony with Nature through the generations as an integral part of their culture, etc.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493
Fascinating, Sue! Who Owns England sounds deeply tied to "Who REALLY owns the rest of the world."
https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/03-10-2019/the-right-to-conquer-and-claim-captain-cook-and-the-doctrine-of-discovery
It was to "Christian Princes" that the Pope originally gave the right of "Discovery" and to enslave, convert at point of sword, kill and conquer the peoples living in the places discovered by those considered noble by extension.
The Doctrine of Discovery (also known as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery) is an international legal concept that has borne out a number of Catholic laws (called ‘papal bulls’) issued by the Vatican in the 15th and 16th centuries. It gave the monarchies of Britain and Europe the right to conquer and claim lands, and to convert or kill the native inhabitants of those lands.
It's easy to forget just how dangerous these monarchy's are, especially here in England whereby the royal family own a vast amount of the land and charge extorionate rent and rates making up a large proportion of their £500 million annual income. More interesting links, thank you, hard to keep up but I will get there!
Lady Sue, sounds like a big job trying to undo that bullshyte!