Community stewardship of the Commons

(water, land, woods)

 

Vinoba Bhave, the spiritual successor to Gandhi, was concerned with inequity in land distribution, which prevented the landless from constructing homes and earning a livelihood. To address this concern, Vinoba journeyed from village to village to ask those with more land than they could use to share that land with their brothers and sisters in need. Many owning excess land assigned title deeds to Vinoba, who would reassign them to the poor. Much of India's land was redistributed in this way. But without tools to work the land or capital to build, the land lay unused. The new owners sold their titles back to the wealthy, perpetuating the pattern of unequal distribution. So Vinoba initiated a new practice where the title to the land was transferred to the village instead of to individuals and then leased for productive use. If the lessee left the region, the use rights reverted to the village for redistribution. This brought about a peaceful land-reform initiative in India.

 

The economy is the place where human labour transforms the natural world into products for use by others. All production requires access to land and natural resources. However, what creates wealth is the transformation of those resources into products needed by others. Land and natural resources are the base, the givens of an economic system, but they are not themselves suitable commodities. When land and natural resources are treated as commodities and traded on the market, as in our current system, an imbalance occurs in the economy. A few people can then profit from the need of all for access. No new wealth is generated, only a speculative value with all the consequences of a speculative economy, including social inequity and ecological degradation.

 

Today Community Land Trust (CLT) is one of the tools citizens are using to implement a new economy that meets social, ecological and cultural criteria. A community land trust is a form of ownership for the common good with a charter based on the principles of sustainable and ecologically-sound stewardship and use. It is an open-membership organization where members make a social contract with the community. The board of directors is elected from the membership. The goal of the CLT is to acquire land by gift or purchase, develop a land-use plan for each site according to social need and ecological constraints and then lease that land on a 99-year basis. The land trust communities started in 1967 in Albany, Georgia (USA) so that Afro-American farmers could gain access to land. There are now hundreds in the United States and the movement is spreading to Europe and other parts of the world. The lease specifies minimum crop production and natural growing methods. Individual leaseholders own the buildings and other improvements on the land created by their labour and investment, but do not own the land itself. The CLT provides a system of land tenure that takes the Commons (land, water, forests, etc.) out of economic exchange and encourages a new land ethic as land is seen as a community to which we belong, and so it is used with love and respect.

 

The community land trust movement has grown slowly, acquiring one tract at a time.  To bring about a worldwide level of change in our relation to land will require dramatically increasing community holdings of land. It will necessitate the willingness of individuals to gift land out of the market and back into its rightful place in the Commons. The new movement of community trust land may appeal to engaged citizens who, alarmed by the deterioration of social conditions and eco-systems resulting from land speculation and industrial agriculture, recognize the injustice of the current system for distributing land. Starting with localized examples of land gifting, CLT can grow into a broad cultural revolution for the Commons. 

 

Source: http://centerforneweconomics.org/e-newsletters/spinning-commons