Samuel Firman is a freelance writer and budding trespasser based in the UK.
NORFOLK, England — It’s too late by the time I hear the engine. I twist in the hammock to see a white pickup truck bouncing across the yellow grass in the low-hanging late-summer sun, tracing the fence line toward my camp on the edge of a small woodland. Moving now would surely alert the driver, so I hide in stillness.
The truck draws near enough to reveal two people in the cab. A few seconds later I can identify a harvest-dusted man driving, a younger female passenger and a wagging dog behind them. Then they are level with me, 50-some feet away, the driver gesticulating and scanning the treeline. My pulse races as I prepare to explain why, exactly, I am trespassing on their farm.
The New English Trespass Movement
“I believe, as do many of my constituents, that this country is full.” — Richard Drax, ex-Member of Parliament and current resident of Charborough House, which features 700 acres of private grounds surrounded by the two-million-or-so-brick “Great Wall of Dorset.”
My explanation begins with “The Book of Trespass”: an irreverent travelog documenting a series of trespasses in which author Nick Hayes walks, paddles and camps across notable English estates. Hayes interweaves these infiltrations with the story of England’s unequal, secretive, entrenched system of land ownership. This regime underpins a host of social and environmental indicators, from housing prices (historically high) to biodiversity (historically low). So what kind of sorcery, Hayes asks, results in under 1% of the population owning 50% of the land while some 92% of land and 97% of rivers remain illegal for the public to access under the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act — with scarcely a peep of political resistance?
Published in 2020, when readers were in Covid-19 lockdown and acutely aware of the unequal access to nature, Hayes’ book became a bestseller. That same year, Hayes and Guy Shrubsole co-founded Right to Roam: a campaign demanding a “default right of responsible access” in England. Modeled on Scotland’s right to roam and the Nordic “everyman’s right,” this right would grant permission-free access to all land and rivers, private or otherwise, providing individuals followed certain rules like respecting the landowner’s privacy and leaving no trace.
Right to Roam has generated widespread debate about land access and justice in England and beyond — in large part thanks to its use of trespass as direct action. Making the case for a right to roam, and proactively modeling what it could look like, hundreds have mobilized to walk, swim, play and protest in off-limits locations around England: Kinder reservoir, Cirencester Park, Englefield Estate, Dartmoor National Park, Berry Pomeroy and Scots Dyke (an earthwork built in 1552 in the so-called Debatable Lands to mark the border between the kingdoms of Scotland and England).
In 2023, some 3,000 people gathered in the small village of Cornwood in southwestern England to protest (without trespassing) the restriction of “wild camping” — camping without payment or landowner permission — in Dartmoor National Park. Regional groups have organized trespasses in localities like Greater Manchester, Bristol, Norwich and Sussex. A “Trespass Trip Advisor” even encourages trespassers to upload reports, capturing a fraction of the ad hoc transgressions that unfold.
This English story is a microcosm of a bigger tale. To hop a wall with England’s trespassers is to confront the ongoing violence of enclosure: the seizure and depletion of collective resources for private power and profit. It’s to meet a vanguard of voices demanding a more democratic relationship with land. It’s to remember that walking is a political act. And it’s to cross what Hayes calls a “mindwall” into a realm of prefigurative possibility, populated by a mycelial network resisting enclosure by building (or “prefiguring”) alternatives through the resurgent practice of commoning: bringing collective resources under collective stewardship for the collective good. Unlikely as it is that I’ll have time to explain to the farmer, I am trespassing in the name of all these possibilities.
Trespassing Home
“If you think England is beautiful, you should look behind its walls.” — Nick Hayes, “The Book of Trespass”
The day begins bathed in morning sunshine in the village of Bawburgh. Carrying supplies for a night and two days outdoors, I plan to trespass 10 miles home to Wymondham, tracing the River Yare to Barford before following field boundaries southeast to Hethersett. This is the political constituency of South Norfolk, part of the rural county of Norfolk: a flat patchwork of fertile farmland enjoying big skies and England’s ninth-lowest population density.
But what sounds like a land of bountiful countryside access is actually an “access desert,” according to Right to Roam; a pitiful 0.5% of South Norfolk is publicly accessible. According to the grassroots mapping project, Who Owns Norfolk?, which is plotting out the county’s land ownership in the absence of a complete or accessible national registry, my route will traverse the Lombe estate — one of the constituency’s largest landholdings.
“Right to Roam has generated widespread debate about land access and justice in England and beyond — in large part thanks to its use of trespass as direct action.”
But trespassing proves difficult. A rumble of farm vehicles blocks the obvious track to the Yare, so I search in vain for a hole in the unruly August hedgerows — ramparts ripe with tart blackberries, drooping elderberries, plump damson plums and danger-red rosehips. Only after an hour do I infiltrate a copse near Marlingford and find a fallen trunk bridging a stagnant brook into a riverside field. I pick up a purple plastic bag that a bumblebee appears to have mistaken for a flower. As orange damselflies hum overhead, I wade illicitly in a shallow bend in the River Yare covered in cattle hoofprints.
The afternoon proves easier. I skirt harvested fields, snooze in an empty woodland reserved for paid horseback riding, and pass paid fishing ponds fortified with locked gates and barbed wire. A buzzard calls overhead, and another lays splayed underfoot. I use my phone to identify plants that I’m ashamed not to know but feel a little more grounded upon learning: white bindweed flowers posing in hedgerows, Himalayan balsam invading in fuschia, yellow smooth hawkweed sprouting in grass verges. Near Great Melton Cricket Club I vault a fence, trespass among squabbling pheasants (around 50 million of which will soon be released for the shooting season) and set up camp.
Thus I await my fate, lying still as the pickup truck approaches, pulls alongside me, and … continues on its way. The dog barks — at me? — but the driver barks back without stopping. I thank my leaf-green tent and hammock as I skulk into the woods and hide behind a shaggy fir tree. I feel pathetic as the truck departs, this time at a safe distance along the opposite edge of the field. By the time two roe deer creep into the field in the gloaming, my heart has returned to its resting rate.
The Cult Of Exclusion
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
— From the poem “The Goose and the Common,” author unknown
Why does trespass evoke such fear?
William the Conqueror has much to answer for. After invading Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, he enclosed swathes of common land for his Norman lords, kickstarting an unbroken chain of enclosure that continues to this day. Notable links include Henry VIII’s dissolution of the Catholic monasteries and the seizure of their land in the 16th century. Revolutionary parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell deposed the monarchy in 1649 before rewarding his loyalists with royal land. Legislation from 1604 to 1914 enclosed around 6.8 million acres of common land — slightly more than a fifth of England. More recently, economic geographer Brett Christophers’ book, “The New Enclosure,” calculates that the UK government has privatized a gobsmacking 10% of the entire British land mass since 1979.
Trespass germinated in the 13th century in the form of laws compensating owners for damaged property. Over the centuries these evolved into a legal apparatus conferring upon landowners an exclusive “bundle of rights” to use, exclude from and even destroy land. John Locke’s theory of individual property rights helped nurture this consensus. And geographer Nicholas Blomley has documented how 17th-century surveying practices helped “territorialize” land from common spaces characterized by social customs into geometric domains of absolute individual ownership. “The cult of exclusion hardened into common law,” Hayes wrote. “It had precedence.”
Contemporary trespass laws hold that simply entering land without permission damages the landowner. The sanctity of private property has become doxa: a deep structuring belief. England’s walls “possess a grandeur and authority that has somehow overridden the violence and theft, the malevolence they enacted to build them,” Hayes argued. “The wall presents itself as a blank statement of authority, and we obey it because we see it without its context.”
“To hop a wall with England’s trespassers is to confront the ongoing violence of enclosure: the seizure and depletion of collective resources for private power and profit.”
Enclosure has English roots but wreaks ongoing global damage. Enclosure permits privately owned public spaces, or “POPS” to masquerade as civic squares while private guards enforce unpublished rules. It explains how authorities can invoke trespass to remove pro-Palestine campus encampments. It enables the persecution of traveling communities, homeless people, migrants, wild campers and other unacceptably itinerant groups. It forces indigenous cultures to fight to protect and reclaim their ancestral homes. And it runs through the commercialization of everything from clean air to social networks and personal data. Enclosure, in short, is everywhere — and ever contestable.
The Call Of Resistance
He called me a louse and said “Think of the grouse”
Well I thought, but I still couldn’t see
Why all Kinder Scout and the moors roundabout
Couldn’t take both the poor grouse and me
— From the folk song “The Manchester Rambler,” Ewan MacColl
I break camp at dawn and retrace my tracks through the woodland, picking up shotgun cartridges and plastic waste as I go. A public footpath carries me past more razor-wired angling ponds and into Hethersett, where I pad down Lynch Green Road, named after a historic tract of common land, and pass Flowerdew Close. Then I follow the B1172 to one last landmark on the edge of Wymondham: a gnarled, 500-year-old English oak tree known as Kett’s Oak.
On Monday, July 8, 1549, after a weekend feast honoring St. Thomas Becket, a group of Wymondham locals marched to Hethersett to dismantle the enclosing fences and hedges of landowner John Flowerdew. But Flowerdew bribed the men to target another Wymondham landowner, instead: Robert Kett. After hearing the saboteurs’ case, Kett not only helped them level his own hedges but proceeded to rally them under his leadership. A rebellion was born and mustered the next day by what would become known as Kett’s Oak. From there they marched to the city of Norwich, established a camp that swelled to an estimated 16,000 rebels, issued 29 demands as redress for enclosure and other social ills to Edward Seymour, then Lord Protector of England for the minor King Edward VI, and seized England’s then second-largest city by force. When the insurrection was defeated seven weeks after it started on August 27, Robert Kett, his brother William Kett, and dozens of others were hanged for treason.
Kett’s Rebellion was part of a spate of similar uprisings in the region, and one chapter in a rich lineage of anti-enclosure resistance. This includes the Fen Tigers, a 17th-century guerrilla group that sabotaged efforts to drain and enclose the low-lying East Anglian Fens, which was then a vast wetland ecosystem but is now a fertile patchwork of farmland; the Diggers, who in 1649 formed communistic communities to cultivate common land as a protest against enclosed food systems; and groups of trespassing poachers called the Blacks, whose persecution through the 1723 Black Act spawned hundreds of new capital offenses designed to protect enclosed land.
This lineage also features mass trespass actions. In 1896, the largest mass trespass in British history involved around 10,000 Boltonians trespassing Winter Hill to protest the enclosure of a moorland path. But England’s most famous trespass occurred in 1932 when three rambling groups convened on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout plateau and clashed with police. Five trespassers, including 20-year-old organizer Benny Rothman, a Jewish Communist, received prison sentences. The episode is now considered an important step in securing the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, which improved public access to nature and provided a framework for the official establishment of protected areas like national parks, nature reserves and areas of outstanding natural beauty. “That’s the lineage that trespass keeps alive,” Right to Roam organizer Jon Moses told me. “It keeps saying: ‘There’s no consensus for this, there’s no justification for this. It’s not something that happens with a social license.’”
Trespass As Democracy
“To know one’s place in a democracy is to know that one’s place is often on the other side of someone else’s fence.” — Tim Waterman, in “The Landscape of Utopia”
To trespass is to risk conflict, prosecution, even physical danger. Depending on who and where the trespasser is, trespass is not always advisable and certainly no panacea. Nonetheless, the power of trespass as a form of direct action helps illuminate the possibilities of both a more democratic relationship with nature and the prefigurative practice of communing.
“The power of trespass as a form of direct action helps illuminate the possibilities of both a more democratic relationship with nature and the prefigurative practice of communing.”
Trespass makes good political theater, generating headlines and debate around enclosure and nature access. For Waterman, a landscape theory professor at University College London, this theater feeds on the dangers of trespass. “When it’s obvious that people are willing to put their bodies on the line and to put their bodies into danger in the process of making a public statement,” he told me, “I think that has incredible power.”
But trespass doesn’t just argue for a right to roam; it models it. Trespass is prefigurative direct action: what the late David Graeber, an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, defined as “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Geographer Blomley understands trespass as a subversive “performance” of property, which is never a fixed fact but a shifting social construct shaped by actions, walls, laws and other “performative” elements. Viewed through either Graeber’s or Blomley’s lens, trespass breaches deeply held norms, illuminating and challenging them. It momentarily lifts the spell of private property, literally and figuratively bringing what is off-limits into play as a space of liminal possibility, or what the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault calls “heterotopia.”
On this liminal stage, England’s trespassers have been prefiguratively performing a potential version of both greater access to nature and more democratic engagement with nature, rooted in commoning. They have used trespass — i.e. a proto-right to roam — as a tool for learning about, connecting with and caring for land.
As my trash collecting, muddled rambling and novice botanizing demonstrate, this needn’t be grandiose. “To cheer a man for walking through heather and likewise to beat him up for it are both absurdly disproportionate to the act itself,” Hayes wrote.
Modest or dramatic, Waterman has argued that trespass is a democratic imperative because it reasserts collective agency over how we access and use land. “As instruments of control and compliance — from policing and surveillance to obfuscating bureaucracy — become ever more entrenched and limiting,” he wrote, “the necessity for trespass as an assertion of democratic principles becomes more and more the only option to effect change at any scale.”
Trespassers are modeling the benefits of more eyes, ears and hearts in the landscape through the democratization of nature. Trespassers spot ecological hazards, report environmental crimes, sabotage illegal fox hunts and conduct citizen science like water testing to aid conservation work. Shrubsole’s latest book, “The Lie of the Land,” juxtaposes such vigilantism with a litany of environmental harms perpetrated by legal landowners, making a compelling case for a more diverse and democratic cast of nature stewards (including the many ecologically responsible landowners out there).
It’s no coincidence that citizens of the River Wye, one of England’s few rivers with access rights, have spearheaded a national campaign around river pollution. People tend to protect what they love. The growing need to mitigate and manage the impacts of climate change only escalates the importance of having skilled stewards in nature, Waterman told me. But as he wrote elsewhere, access is a prerequisite to this benefit. “Publicity — the ability to be public, to operate in public — requires a knowledge of one’s own place, even if that place is transgressive, or perhaps especially if that place is transgressive.”
Repopulating empty landscapes can help landowners, too. Automation and economic centralization have depopulated farms, helping to make farming one of England’s loneliest and most mentally challenging jobs. On Aug. 7, 2022, some 150 trespassers donned fantastical folk attire and gathered for music, dance, storytelling and protest on what was once common ground but is now the 12,000-acre Englefield Estate, owned by the ex-government minister in charge of public access to nature, Richard Benyon.
Moses told me it recalled a kind of “Shakespearean showdown with the gamekeepers beneath an oak tree.” One gamekeeper, he remembered, seemed to be enjoying the discussion with activists equally passionate about the land. Such interactions should be commonplace, Moses told me as he recounted a recent trip to Romania, where farmers were more likely to beckon walkers over for tea and conversation than shout them away.
Trespass also models an engaged mode for navigating nature. Rather than passively obeying permissive signage or footpaths (what Hayes calls “thin strips of legitimacy”), the trespasser navigates by imagination. During my own trespasses I have been surprised at the extent to which moving in conversation with the land — Where does the river lead? What’s behind that hill? — fosters immersion, education and awe, even in familiar local landscapes.
“Rather than passively obeying permissive signage or footpaths … the trespasser navigates by imagination.”
Walking As Politics
“Paths are the habits of a landscape.” — Robert Macfarlane, “The Old Ways”
Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” traces the idea that how we walk shapes how we think. Much of modern, technological life moves “faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.” But walking is sufficiently slow and embodied to help us think clearly and attune to landscapes. “Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city,” she wrote. “Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.” She imagines walking as an “indicator species,” signifying wider ecological health.
Solnit sees walking as inherently democratic and resistant to enclosure. “Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism,” she wrote. “Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land.”
But trespass, wary of a circulatory system imposed from above, extends this connective possibility. “The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also,” Macfarlane wrote in “The Old Ways.” Trespass refuses to let enclosure restrict these enticements.
Trespassers represent a long lineage of political walking. Mass trespasses evoke the peace marches of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and other social movements. Trespass nods to the spiritual transformation realized in the trial-and-return of pilgrimage. And trespassers echo the playful psychogeographic walking practices of postwar Parisian Letterists and Situationists. The “dérive,” or drift, theorized by Guy Debord in 1956, is a technique for navigating (urban) space in ways that discern, resist and subvert the environment’s psychological and behavioral effects. Like trespass, dérives illuminate and challenge norms. In the words of cultural critic Greil Marcus, the aim is to “encounter the unknown as a facet of the known, astonishment on the terrain of boredom.”
Wild Service
“I want to see humans live again among the full chaos of nature, healing our grief by knowing our kin once again; restoring our agency to care.” — Nadia Shaikh, “Wild Service”
A bald eagle and a pheasant lie dead, side by side. Why?
Around fifty activists, conservationists and self-appointed nature guardians stand pondering the riddle in a field near Normanton On Soar, Leicestershire beneath the broken clouds of September’s first morning sky. The corpses are stuffed toy animals — props for a workshop on identifying and preventing the illegal persecution of British birds of prey, usually by landowners manipulating ecosystems to raise game birds. The dead pheasant, it transpires, had been a poisoned trap that lured the hungry eagle to its death.
The weekend after my Lombe Estate trespass, we’re camping on a farm for a weekend of “wild service,” which is also the title of Right to Roam’s latest book, an anthology edited by Hayes and Moses: a “manifesto for a grassroots ecology, a paean to the ability of ‘ordinary’ people to act for nature despite the fences, paywalls and gatekeepers standing in their way.” The book “Wild Service” steps into the liminal space opened by trespass and sketches a new nature relationship, intimated by trespass, rooted in reciprocity, agency, and care. It marks an expansion of the Right to Roam campaign from nature access to nature stewardship.
Throughout the weekend we gather in a rustic barn and a circular canopy tent to learn skills — how to practice environmental activism, how to submit freedom of information (FOI) requests to government agencies, how trespass law works, and how to practice nature guardianship — for stepping into this relationship. As guests, we have no need to trespass, but the spirit of trespass animates the weekend.
Barrister and river guardian Paul Powlesland runs a session on how he took it upon himself to speak and act for London’s River Roding. Passionate, mischievous and dressed in blue overalls (instead of one of his signature flamboyant jumpsuits), he explains how he puttered his narrowboat upstream and moored up among the reeds — all without permission.
One of his first undertakings was to trespass the 31-mile river, mapping landmarks and threats as he went: sewage pipes, fields plowed too close to the bank, Japanese knotweed infestations. Guided by this knowledge, immersive observations and community allies, he has been speaking and acting on behalf of the Roding ever since: planting willows, building a footpath, reporting illegal sewage outflows and industrial waste, saving sandpiper nests from developments — all with successful outcomes and without prior permission. He regularly attends developer consultations, calls out the authorities online, and challenges council officers during meetings and riverside disagreements — all from the perspective of the Roding.
“Mass trespasses evoke the peace marches of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and other social movements.”
Powlesland believes anyone can be a nature guardian. Permission is largely unnecessary, he told me, especially when it would be politically embarrassing for the council, for example, to oppose an act of guardianship. He considers himself a “pragmatic trespasser,” trespassing when necessary but collaborating where possible. After all, he noted, “[guardians] often have the imagination and the crazy ambition, and [the council] the actual machinery and bureaucratic ability to execute something.”
Powlesland’s achievements are impressive and resonate with a growing network of people who have taken it upon themselves to do similar work as guardians. Guerrilla gardeners like Ellen Miles are planting and rewilding in urban spaces without permission. Rebel botanists are chalking plant names on sidewalks (literally “botanizing on the asphalt,” as the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin once urged). Renegade rewilders are building catapults and slingshots to “seed bomb” orchards into life. Ecologists and naturalists like David Bangs are trespassing to report ecological crimes and save ancient woodland. Counter-cartographers like Anna Powell-Smith are leveraging public data sets to expose systemic inequality, like martial artists redirecting their opponents’ strengths against them. Forest schools are offering heritage nature education in private woodlands. Social entrepreneurs like Rhia Davenport, founder of nonprofit shop Weven, are sustaining traditional folk crafts. And landowners like Romilly Swann are in the process of disinheriting themselves by returning private land to collective stewardship through legal mechanisms like community-managed charitable trusts.
These examples evoke the “ecological turn”: an emerging zeitgeist acknowledging the entanglement and interdependence of life. The ecological turn takes shape through scientific discoveries of agency and collaboration in non-human organisms; through new technologies enabling interspecies communication; through belated respect for Indigenous worldviews kindling a “new animism” in the West; and through the “rights of nature” movement instituting ecological governance via legal rights for non-human life forms. In their own ways, trespassers and nature guardians are answering this swelling call to ecological entanglement, which is the opposite of enclosure.
Rekindling The Commons
“What if ‘let’s play private property’ becomes ‘let’s play the commons’?” — Geographers Elsa Noterman and Nicholas Blomley, “Children’s Legal Geographies, and the ‘Make-Believe’ of Property”
This broader ecological turn helps validate the value of nature guardianship — and, in turn, trespass — as forms of constructive entanglement. But there is a bigger validating force at work here: the resurgence of commoning.
Commoning is a simple but slippery idea, at once familiar and half-forgotten. Put simply, a commons is any resource — land, water, air, knowledge — managed by and for the benefit of a community. Commoning, or recommoning, is the practice of cultivating a commons. In “Plunder of the Commons,” economist Guy Standing summarizes seven definitive features of commons: defined boundaries, democratic governance, monitoring, rules, conflict-resolution mechanisms, broad community input and local specificity.
Commons aren’t always progressive. A commons works very well if you’re included in it, but not very well if you’re excluded, Blomley told me. As a result, he sees value in talking about a “right to not be excluded.” Noterman told me that while commoning exhibits principles found across cultures, it isn’t universal. Some Indigenous communities, for instance, would likely reject the idea given its specific Western history.
Nevertheless, there is growing belief and research around the potential of commoning to address environmental and social issues — clean energy, biodiversity, community resilience, or economic inequality — more effectively than market forces or state control. An increasingly sophisticated movement of organizers, academics, designers and politicians is developing commons infrastructure, or what commons advocate-in-chief David Bollier calls a “parallel polis.”
This experimentation owes much to political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work showing how natural resources can be managed as commons. Ostrom repudiated ecologist Garrett Hardin’s infamous “tragedy of the commons” argument, which holds that commons inevitably fall to self-interest (Hardin later acknowledged that he should have called his paper “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”).
Insurgent economic frameworks have taken the baton. Standing has proposed a “Commons Charter” that inverts the burden of trespass by raising tax revenue from commons-depleting activities in order to sustain a capital fund large enough to compensate citizens through a universal basic income.
The idea echoes England’s 1217 Charter of the Forest, which defended common rights against enclosure, and existing schemes like Norway’s Oil Fund and the Alaska Permanent Fund, which redistribute oil profits through pension and welfare provision (Norway) or annual resident dividends (Alaska). Commons and households lie at the heart of economist Kate Raworth’s regenerative and redistributive Doughnut Economics model, now a thriving action lab that implements ideas around the world. And commoning is integral to the viability of degrowth thinking, which advocates for a future beyond economic growth.
“There is growing belief and research around the potential of commoning to address environmental and social issues … more effectively than market forces or state control.”
These frameworks are animated by a dizzying array of experimental commoning. Examples include communities purchasing and stewarding land, like Scotland’s 10,500-acre Tarras Valley Nature Reserve. In Europe, municipalities are pioneering public-commons partnerships: governance models built on collaboration between the state and democratic Commoners Associations comprising citizen members. Citizens are establishing solar commons that deliver clean energy, community revenue and democratic empowerment. Collective housing innovations like cluster apartments are fostering social resilience at home. As Bollier notes in “The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking,” the list could go on.
Market hegemony is a formidable barrier to commoning because it typically restricts commoning to the margins and forces a fight for legal and political recognition. This can take tremendous energy. Financing non-commercial commons is a particular challenge, with “relationalized finance” solutions — funding mechanisms that reflect and strengthen, rather than profit and detract from, the ethos of the commons — remaining in their infancy.
But commoning can avoid the ideological baggage of the state-market binary. “Commons” doesn’t scare people like “Communism” does, Waterman told me. Indeed, the capacity for commoning to foster localized resilience and self-sufficiency beyond the purview of the market or state is likely to appeal to neighbors from across the political spectrum. As more communities experience the benefits of assuming democratic agency over shared resources, the more compelling the concept of commoning stands to become as a means of addressing deepening crises.
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” economist Milton Friedman is often quoted as saying, in reference to the incubation of the neoliberal order. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
Final Stand, Or First Throes?
“A whisper that cannot be bought, that is so deep it will make holes in your pockets, that will suck you dry until you fall down, with your back to a stone, and wish you were mad.” — From the poem “Old Crockern Whispers,” by Daniel Grimston
The early October sun bursts through a browning sycamore canopy onto a gathering outside London’s Supreme Court. It lights a formation of faces, some of which I met at the wild-service weekend, framing a big Right to Roam banner stationed before news cameras and onlookers. Drum beats and fiddle lilts accompany the stick clacks and foot stomps of Morris dancers, the merriment drifting up toward a second-floor room in which landowner Alexander Darwall’s lawyer is arguing that picnicking in Dartmoor National Park is, in fact, trespass.
If the land’s highest court rules in Darwall’s favor, wild camping will become illegal on Dartmoor, and extinct in all of England. Activists are hoping for a decision by Christmas.
The scene echoes a gathering two days earlier, during which 650 protestors rallied on Dartmoor in similar style. Just as there was that day, today there is more hope in the London air than what appears to be a rearguard action might justify. Speaker after speaker — nature writer Robert Macfarlane, Right to Roam’s co-founder Guy Shrubsole, ex-Green Party leader Caroline Lucas — lament the case but also revel in the energy of England’s insurgent land-justice movement. Shrubsole even thanks “comrade Darwall” for his galvanizing effect.
Something is happening here. It runs through the speeches, the music and the spirit of Old Crockern — the folkloric guardian of Dartmoor — summoned in a stirring poem by Right to Roam’s so-called “poet in non-residence” Daniel Grimston. And it spreads through the zeitgeist, far beyond this court, London or England. It’s the steady stirring of the commons: an old idea with the new potential to breach the brick walls and mindwalls that enclose us.
