The Land.Qxd
THE LAND Issue 1 Winter/Spring 2006 An occasional magazine about land-rights, incorporating The Land Is Ours Newsletter and Chapter 7 News. The Land Spring/Winter 2006 THE LAND: A MANIFESTO In all the hoo-hah surrounding the G8 summit last summer, did you hear anybody with access to a microphone mouth the word “land”? All the demands to “make poverty history”, and the responses from those in power, revolved around money: less debt, freer and fairer trade, more aid. That is because economists define wealth and justice in terms of access to the market. Politicians echo the economists because the more dependent that people become upon the market, the more securely they can be roped into the fiscal and political hierarchy. Access to land is not simply a threat to landowning elites - it is a threat to the religion of unlimited economic growth and the power structure that depends upon it. The market (however attractive it may appear) is built on promises: the only source of wealth is the earth. Anyone who has land has access to energy, water, nourishment, shelter, healing, wisdom, ancestors and a grave. Ivan Illich spoke of ‘a society of convivial tools that allows men to achieve purposes with energy fully under their control’. The ultimate convivial tool, the mother of all the others, is the earth. Yet the earth is more than a tool cupboard, for although the earth gives, it dictates its terms; and its terms alter from place to place. So it is that agriculture begets human culture; and cultural diversity, like biological diversity, flowers in obedience to the conditions that the earth imposes.
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