Woodland Community Land Trust: An Antidote to Extraction in Rural Appalachia
The Woodland Community Land Trust was incorporated in 1979, making it one of the oldest Community Land Trusts (CLTs) established in the United States. Located in the Clearfork Valley of northeastern Tennessee, a low-income Appalachian community dominated by extractive industry and concentrated land holding, economic, and political power, Woodland recently marked its 40th year in operation. Today, Woodland’s vision of community ownership still resounds in possibilities for Appalachian people and confronts the realities of peasant land dispossession throughout U.S. history and worldwide.
Looking Back to Look Forward: Expanding the Toolbox to Create Equitable, Secure & Affordable Access to Land
That these farms are going to change hands is inevitable; that the next generation of farmers who so desperately want to farm them cannot afford to buy them is a stark reality. How can land trusts help turn the tide against the mounting barriers faced by our nation’s farmers?
Where We’ll Will Be This Fall & Winter 2018: Agrarian Trust Newsletter
We hope you’ve been enjoying the changing of the seasons. We’re looking forward to the crackle of leaves and harvests of autumn—and to the many upcoming events where we’ll have the opportunity to meet and share more on our work to create a Agrarian Commons. As we travel the land, meeting with farmers and communities, we’ve been sharing our vision and documenting successful stories that inform our approach to land stewardship and equity…
Land and Water: A Long Term Perspective
In the context of global warming, issues of access to land and water have been revived at a moment of disappearing land, mass migration, foreclosures, evictions, rent hikes, land grabs, and the privatization of clean water. We believe that now is a vital moment for academics and activists to enter a shared conversation about control and access to land and water, naming the most formidable challenges, the utopian models, and the important historical analogues for our present moment.
Building Power: Advancing a People’s Agenda for Food Sovereignty & Climate Justice
What does an equitable food system look like in world that values corporate profits over people, health, and the environment? What would a grassroots movement of people look like—a movement large enough to fight those interests and win? What does it look like for a national food movement to “build power”? These are just some of the larger questions that arose at the US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA)’s Northeast Regional Assembly…
Creating an Agrarian Commons
How do we cooperatively own and steward land for food sovereignty, soil and ecosystem health, community benefit, service to the watershed, and more? Agrarian Trust’s proposed method is a new form (legal, cultural, and financial) of land ownership to support land access for the next generation of farmers, and we make the path by walking it.
Re-imagining Politics Through the Lens of the Commons
Why are the more wholesome alternative visions so scarce and scarcely believable?
How Indigenous Land-use Practices Inform the Current Sharing Economy
How Indigenous Land-Use Practices Inform the Current Sharing Economy by Aaron Fernando The concept of ownership is a social contract that allows certain individuals and groups to have rights to certain resources or items while excluding others from that access. Under the mainstream conception of private property, both the ownership of land and anything built […]
Violence in Amazon Centered around Land
In a remote area in Brazil, a dispute over who, if anyone owns the land has lead to killings. On the 71.3 million hectares of public land in the country, land users say “the only document is our presence here.” The worst land-related slaughter Brazil has seen in 21 years reflects a chronic ambiguity around […]
Building Democratic Ownership in the US South
Save the date! From the Federation of Southern Cooperatives: On October 4-6, 2013 the CoopEcon 2013 conference will be held at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund’s Rural Training & Research Center in Epes, Alabama. This is not a conference for developers, although we are sure some will come. “This is mainly meant to […]