Land / Justice
This is part of the ‘key terms’ series. Short pieces to explain how I am using certain terms. As my understanding changes, I may revisit and re-write these pieces.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I started thinking about ‘land’ for the first time. Reading Soil and Soul by Alastair McIntosh, threads started to weave together - threads of place, of belonging, of spirit and the more than human, of ownership and property, of inequality and injustice, of soil and soul.
When thinking about the concept of ‘land’ it can feel quite hard to pin down - I’ve been trying and failing to write this piece for months now. And yet it also feels like a concept at the core of my work. So whilst incomplete and far from final, I want to try to capture the ways I understand ‘land’ and the ways I am using it in this project - at the root.
Technically, land refers to the parts of the planet Earth not covered in water. Etymologically, ‘land’ is from the Indo-European (I.E.) root ‘lendh’ meaning open land. In Land, Earth, Soil, Dirt: Some Notes Towards a Sense of Place, Tom Jay says ‘Land is a relatively abstract term that refers to boundaries. Its basic idea is open or closed space. Its root does not refer to any other specific aspect of landscape except its openness or closedness. At heart, it's about "land shape", about surface, not soil.’
In conversations with Mama D Ujuaje, founder of Community Centred Knowledge, we spoke about land as a verb - the earth is ‘landed’ when it becomes property, when the earth becomes something that is considered owned by those who claim it. Tom Jay agrees, saying ‘Land’s meaning for us is owned topography. The idea of property is the word's current context.’ The turning of the earth and all that lives upon it into a space that can be owned shapes much of the world around us - especially in the Global North and in places that have been colonised the world over.
In her book, The Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Brenna Bhandar outlines the processes by which land becomes property, earth becomes landed. She does this through outlining how settler colonial projects change our understanding and relationship to land/place through a range of mechanisms from abstraction, use, commoditisation, but also change our understanding of the people living on/in that place depending on the ways in which they relate to that land. Her ‘main argument is that modern property law and racial subjects mutually produce one another in colonial contexts.’ (Panosetti, Antipode)
Land is the site of entangled relationships between humans and non-humans who live upon it/within it. Over time and space, the nature of these relationships change. Perhaps at some point they are based in mutual reciprocity and systems of care with an interest in histories of use and thriving. At others they are based in extraction for the purposes of profit driving inequality and benefiting only those who can appropriate the most.
Land itself could also be seen as part of these relationships not merely the site on which relationships happen. A living entity and full of other living (non-human) beings. In the Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in the More-than-Human World, David Abram explores how the very foundations of language begin in the senses and connects us to this non-human/more-than-human world around us.
How we relate to land then becomes a key question. In debates around justice, it seems like the question of ownership of land is still at the forefront. Some forms of land justice are concerned with who owns the land and in redistributing land so that it is owned / stewarded by different people than at present. This keeps the way we relate to land in the ownership frame, even whilst distribution of that ownership is questions.
What would it look like to go further and question the ways we relate to land beyond the ownership frame? To think about spirit and the more than human, of land as sacred and connected to something deep within us - something like a soul? To see and feel the earth as something living and feeling and as worthy of reverence? To see ourselves as part of the land not above it?
Even as I write this last paragraph I notice the edges that rise in me - edges that always come when I start to bring my spirituality into my politics and my politics into my spirituality. Because it feels actually about both. About acknowledging how we have been severed and placed in a hierarchy of ownership in relation to land by hundreds of years of possession and accumulation, violence and colonisation. And that justice does require us to tend to those harms by looking at distribution and access and ownership. And something also asks us to go beyond this, as well as this to consider land as something more than that which can be owned no matter by whom.
