Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 2

Other things are important about this common meadow. It links local
people with nature, and as it is used and valued as a common, so it
connects rights owners and users with one another. In recent years, though,
both of these types of connection have been widely neglected and
consequently eroded - to our loss, and to the loss of nature at large. As
food has become a commodity, most of us no longer feel a link to the
place of production and its associated culture. Yet agricultural and food
systems, with their associated nature and landscapes, are a common
heritage and thus, also, a form of common property. They are shaped by
us all, and so in some way are part of us all, too. Landscapes across the
world have been created through our interactions with nature. They have
emerged through history, and have become deeply embedded in our
cultures and consciousness. From the rural idylls of England to the diverse
satochi of Japan, from the terraced rice fields and tree-vegetable gardens of
Asia to the savannahs of Africa and forests of the Amazon, they have given
collective meaning to whole societies, imparting a sense of permanence
and stability. They are places that local people know, where they feel
comfortable, where they belong.
When we feel that we have ownership in something, even if technically
and legally we do not, or that our livelihood depends upon it, then we care.
If we care, we watch, we appreciate, we are vigilant against threats. But when
we know less, or have forgotten, we do not care. Then it is easier for the
powerful to appropriate these common goods and so destroy them in
pursuit of their own economic gain. For more than 100 centuries, cultiv-
ators have tamed the wilderness - controlling and managing nature, mostly
with a sensitive touch. But all has changed in the last half per cent of that
time. The rapid modernization of landscapes in both developing and
industrialized countries has broken many of our natural links with land
and food, and so undermined a sense of ownership, an inclination to care,
and a desire to take action for the collective good.
Sometimes the disconnection is intentional. The state has special terms
for people who use resources without permission and for land not
conforming to the dominant model. They are wild settlers, poachers or
squatters, they are traditional or backward, and their lands are wastelands.
Landscapes are cleaned up of their complexity, and of their natural and
social diversity. Hedgerows and ponds are removed, but so are troublesome
tribes and the poorest groups. In these landscapes, both real and meta-
phorical commons exist. Most of the 700,000 villages of India have, or
had, commons - officially designated by name, but vital sources of food,
fuel, fodder and medicines for many local people. In northern Europe,
open-field or common farming sustained communities for millennia; in
southern Europe, huge tracts of uplands are still commonly grazed. In