[permaculture] personal access to land

Rain Tenaqiya raincascadia at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 1 19:08:29 EDT 2008


As a food forester who advocates planting trees and has lived in various communities, I can vouch for the necessity of personal access to land in order to create sustainable systems, for multiple reasons.  Though I have personally created food forests on land I did not have permanent access to, it has been pretty futile to get others to plant trees on land they don't own.  Renters generally don't want to invest in land that they might not always live on, or that might be taken away, even if they have been there for 25 years.  And the food forests that I created were destroyed or neglected, anyway, once I left.  Annuals definitely have some advantages for people that don't have permanent access to land.  Perennial systems require a long-term view, and are often of a complexity that requires intimate, long-term relationships.  People are most likely to devote their energies to land when they feel they have permission to, and when they know they will
 be around to benefit from their work.  In addition, it is often hard to meld the different strategies of different managers.  As is many things, a project often thrives best when one person is mainly responsible for it.
 
Maybe my opinion is too heavily shaped by living in a capitalist, individualist culture where even the nuclear family is almost a thing of the past.  I would love to know more about the food forest ownership and management styles of other cultures (such as in Kenya, Kerala, Java, etc), but we should at least be realistic about what currently works in our own culture.  I have seen way too many idealistic projects fail because of the above.
 
Rain


      


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