Land tenure is the legal agreements by which someone can access land.
In our culture, the main form of legal access is by owning land, either outright or in partnership with a bank, or renting or leasing it from the owner. It is a strict and narrow system with rules made by banks, governments and large landowners, in ways that don’t always serve everybody else.
This approach has a very long history, where those with the most wealth, weapons, and/or power did what they wanted with land, while everybody else dealt with it or suffered the consequences without a lot of say in it. Violent conquest, or machinations by kings and other powerful landholders are the two main ways land has been acquired and controlled in Western history and in numerous other cultures.
But there are a number of notable exceptions, one which is the concept of the “commons.” This is land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community. This concept became popular through how people managed land in medieval Europe.
Commons farming combined with grazing, when managed well, gave landless people a way to survive.
Over time, rules were developed for an area of land that multiple people had access to and could use to grow food and graze animals on. These spaces were usually tightly managed to prevent overgrazing. If not managed well, people could starve, so there was incentive to be intelligent about it and to work together to ensure the land stayed healthy.
The English version of “commons” extended to invisible structures like the legal system (common law, which was an organically derived community agreement about what is fair, written down as “law”). Common law became the basis for the legal system in the United States, where laws are made, but precedent is important, as are jury trials - considered to be the collective wisdom of the people.
“Enclosure laws” in England gradually decimated the commons used by people to feed themselves. Lords took control of and fenced in lands for private hunting or if they felt they were being mismanaged. This forced peasants into cities for work, which accelerated during the industrial revolution.
Later, forests, lakes and groundwater became considered “commons” and sometimes these were formally protected, as in State or National forests.
Today, there are digital commons, knowledge commons, urban commons - virtually anything that is a shared resource. But land as a commons in the sense that Medieval Europe used it, or in the sense that many tribes throughout the world have used it, is a foreign concept for most people in the developed world today.
Land access is perceived very differently in different cultures and throughout history. Throughout most of history, land has been stewarded or controlled on a tribal, not an individual level.
Many indigenous people have felt (and still feel) their role was to steward and care for the land, not own it. Access was determined by ability to care for the land.
Cultures died out when they neglected this or failed at it. Those that persisted over many generations on the same land understood that caring for the health of the land would in turn provide abundance for them and future generations. There was a strong relationship between the people and the land and everything in it.
Some tribes, like the O’odham in Arizona, had medicine men who were given authority to protect certain parts of the land, to preserve water supply or some other ecological resource. Where these cultures remain intact, these practices and viewpoints often continue.
Many tribes had councils that made decisions in relation to how the land they depended on was doing. Tribes would migrate or switch crops or change other aspects of their impact on the land in response to the health of the land and the abundance it could provide.
Cultures that lasted centuries without pillaging from others were and are acutely aware of ecological health and made decisions regarding their care of common areas accordingly. We’ve discussed some of the water management and farming methods of tribes around the world throughout the course - this level of observation and management of watersheds and bioregions can only be done in a coordinated group.
The Pauite tribe’s water management methods kept the Owens Valley drylands on the Eastern slope of the Sierras lush and productive for hundreds of years.
In modern times, we still have groups that track these things, like the EPA, NOAA, regional flood control organizations, or marine organizations. Most people have very little idea of what these groups actually do, how well they are doing, or what it takes to keep a watershed or bioregion healthy.
In many cultures, kids grew (and grow) up learning these points from a very young age via observation, experience, close connection to the land, and storytelling. What if more people in modern society understood how to care for their bioregions? What if kids grew up learning these things? Would we see the same kind of pressure to harm, degrade and pollute them that we do now?.
We're sharing these viewpoints about land because most people in modern culture feel they don't have full access unless they own land. There are many ways to view one's relationship to the land.
Many permaculturists have established creative relationships and agreements between landowners and land stewards, by understanding the wide range of ways that people have chosen to relate to the land around them and designing their own versions of it.
We'll discuss some creative ways of accessing land, including modern commons, later in this section.