Land is power

Land is key to multiple systems, including a store of wealth, recreation, environmental/ecological stewardship, food production, spiritual re-creation, familial stability and political power (see McGee and Boone 1979, Zabawa 1991).

For the land conservation movement, ownership, control, protection and stewardship of lands has accrued power and privilege: social, economic, environmental and political. Conservation tools have been developed and public and private resources have been secured to advance our collective missions. The Western science roots of land conservation focus on biological diversity and yet, as a movement, we have unintentionally, but functionally, excluded the diversity of humankind that can both contribute to and benefit from conservation successes.

The 2020 National Land Trust Census has documented more than 61 million acres protected by 565 land trusts across the country, with almost 8.5 million acres owned by land trusts.

Indigenous Peoples and Nations had, for millennia, stewarded the 2.43 billion acres of lands that comprise what is now called the United States. While myths of vast pristine wildernesses untouched by humans have been told and retold, the reality is that when Europeans came to this land, Indigenous peoples had already established extensive trade networks and roads.

They had sustained populations by both adapting to natural environments and adapting nature to suit human needs, using fire, for example to create havens for wildlife. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes: “Rather than domesticating animals for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear and other game. They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both.” (see An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States).

Land was stewarded by Indigenous peoples, and then seized and used to oppress and enslave Indigenous nations, Hispanic communities and survivors of the African Diaspora. It is sought by some as a source of great material wealth and by others for individual and communal sustenance, self-sufficiency, self-determination and sustainability.

In the years since colonization, government agencies have violated treaties, taken treaty lands, declared those lands “surplus” and given them to white settlers. In addition to acts of outright genocide, public policies and governmental actions decimated tribal populations and the theft of lands also stole the means of self-sufficiency and self-determination.

Kyle Whyte, who is an author on the study, “Effects of land dispossession and forced migration on Indigenous peoples in North America,” and an environmental justice professor at the University of Michigan, said the history of land reduction and forced migration has resulted in unintended environmental consequences for tribes. The study found that present-day tribal lands experience more extreme-heat days—those with a maximum temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit—and nearly 23 percent less precipitation annually, compared to the historical period.

The Indian Land Tenure Foundation has identified the complex land tenure issues and explains the systemic racism at the root of those issues.

The root causes of these conditions are found in governmental policies, racism and injustices, many of which impacted land ownership or control. The forced relocation of Indigenous nations from ancestral homelands has been well-documented, though the resulting starvation, disease and loss of languages and culture may be less well-known. The enslavement of African, Indigenous, Hispanic and other peoples produced great wealth for the enslavers and, in many cases, created the generational poverty and wealth gaps we see today.

While it is tempting to categorize the impacts on low-income and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities as “broken systems” or “systems failures,” grassroots and BIPOC conventional wisdom would argue the system is working exactly as it was designed to work, to benefit the few at the expense of the many. However, reactive “backlash” policies gave powerful non-BIPOC individuals the upper hand, resulting in the loss of land. For example:

• Indigenous Nations were forced by federal actions from ancestral homelands, with treaties benefiting white negotiators as well as settlers who received lands seized by the federal government. In the 1950s, Congress adopted policies aimed at terminating federal obligations to tribes. Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program, over 33,000 American Indian and Alaska Native people were removed from reservations and villages and relocated to urban centers for “training and employment.” Over 100 tribes were terminated and over a million acres of land were removed from trust status when Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 (HCR 108) in 1953.

• The descendants of slaves overcame Reconstruction, sharecropping, lynchings and other efforts to acquire, own and farm 16-19 million acres of land by 1920. But Jim Crow laws—state and local statutes that codified racial segregation and barred African Americans from voting, holding jobs and more—were in effect for almost 100 years following the Civil War. Racially discriminatory practices by federal agencies and private lending institutions led to the loss of 90 percent of those farmlands, livelihoods and, in too many cases, lives. Numerous family lands were seized when African Americans fled to the North to escape these conditions.

• Landowners in Appalachia lost wealth and power with the sale, for pennies on the dollar, of mineral rights to family lands, resulting in the wholesale depletion of the region’s natural resource base in the name of economic development. A 1978 review of land deeds from 80 counties in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia found that 40% of the property and 70% of the mineral rights in sampled counties were owned by corporations, and less than half of the individual-owned lands were owned by “local individuals.” This loss of local control led to “…patterns of inadequate local tax revenues and services, lack of economic development, loss of agricultural lands, lack of sufficient housing, the development of energy and land use.” (See Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force. Land Ownership Patterns and Their Impacts on Appalachian Communities: A Survey of 80 Counties.)

• “The Mexican War brought not only soldiers to the lower border country, but also a host of Anglo-Americans who began almost immediately to challenge the Mexicans for control of the land. … Anglos ultimately took advantage of their growing economic power, used new laws to gain land, and occasionally resorted to devious means to subvert the Mexicans’ position as dominant landholders.” Armando C. Alonzo

While we can’t change the past, land trusts can change the future by acknowledging the wrongs and using their leverage to make amends. Land is power and land trusts are privileged to have this power.