Grounds for change

“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” – Aldo Leopold

Pose almost any of the major social, economic and environmental questions surfacing on the world’s freighted list. Ask how to foster economic sustainability, limit climate change, narrow inequalities, and ensure food security. Or how to boost agricultural production, reduce conflicts among and within nations, and protect ecosystems and biodiversity. Or how to improve human health, and address the exodus from withering farming communities to urban centres struggling to cope with the influx.  

No matter the question, it seems, the answer and the conundrum are land. 

The ground below our feet increasingly reveals the strains of unprecedented demand and change. Satellites ply the heavens documenting losses of permafrost, glaciers, and forest cover. At ground level, people flee forest fires of unprecedented proportions, floods of apocalyptic scale, and the slow death of once-productive lands. Even the dark and mysterious soil itself, the “living skin of our planet”, shows signs that its basic integrity is being compromised. 

Land is a proxy for power, a source of cultural identity, a place of spiritual significance, a wellspring of human inspiration. Throughout time, contests have been waged over land over how to use it, who controls it, and who profits – from the use of ground itself, any riches beneath its surface, and the proximity to something else of value, encapsulated in the real estate slogan, “location, location, location”. Now, as the world confronts a changing climate, old tensions are taking on new urgency and new forms of tension are coming to the fore.