permaculture

[Judith Hanna <jehanna@gn.apc.org>]

Dear Toby

Hope the book gets off saafely and does well. On the related 'ownership'
concept you flag up: 

One of the cliches of community work is the need for people to feel
'ownership' -- that a project is theirs, under their control, not being run
by a removed 'Them' who can be blamed if it all goes wrong -- as it will,
if the people it's for aren't fully on board.

Lack of 'ownership' and feeling of belonging and the responsibility that go
with it is immensely destructive, as you pointed out: 

 >> if people don't have a
personal stake in something--own it in some way--that thing gets abused.
It's Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons. Rental housing gets beat up by
tenants the way their own place never would; public land is overgrazed and
logged while the big ranchers and timber companies are often in the
forefront of good land management on their own property; public housing
projects get vandalized by their own residents; we litter roadsides but keep
our front yards clean. The environmental problems in the former Soviet bloc
show what happens when no one feels a sense of ownership. The problems
attributed to ownership itself are deeper problems--insecurity, greed, and
desperation. I think it's simple human nature to take better care of what we
have a stake in. 

In a perfect world, we'd all understand that we have a stake in everything.<<


Land rights -- traditional ownership and control of the commons -- are a
live issue where there is a tribal people still clinging to, or recently
displaced from, land. The reason there has been little consciousness of
land rights in Britain and Western Europe is, of course, because the
traditional ownership relationship was done away during andafter medieval
feudalism and the invention of capitalism. As the old enclosures rhyme put it:
"They catch and jail the common felon
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."

However, there's a renewal of land rights debate here now, due to The Land
Is Ours campaign which was founded by journalist/anthropologist George
Monbiot and merging into the RTS mob that set up the Guerilla Gardening
event. 

Judith Hanna
jehanna@gn.apc.org
15 Jansons Rd, Tottenham, London N15 4JU