Thriving requires space. But most of our public imagination indicates that the way we think about land as privately owned space is natural. It is not, and that idea has colonized the world, and has colonized our imaginations. This lecture offers some history and some steps forward for re-imaging our relationship with space.
George Monbiot begins his Schumacher lecture with a single question: why is it even possible to own land? He sets out to answer this question by tracking the history of our modern conception of land ownership, starting with the British philosopher John Locke. By the end of his lecture, Monbiot is calling for a democratizing of land ownership and democratization of land use decisions through an incremental placing of land into a Commons.