This is just a terrific book, Free the Land, How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos.


Although it's about much more than climate, but that is of course an important and central theme.


You write that the book grew from your realization that the commodification of land is driving many of America's most intransigent problems, ecological collapse, climate change, systemic racism, the housing crisis, economic inequality.


The book is about a lot more than the climate, as I said, but since that's right in your title, why don't we start there?


You open the book with a visit to the tar sands of your native Alberta.


Describe first what you saw.


Yeah, so this was about 10 years ago.


I was basically reporting on the climate crisis and the social movements that were coalescing around it.


So Indigenous movements, you know, Indigenous water protector movements against pipelines and oil developments.


And so, yeah, as you mentioned, I was going up to the Canadian tar sands, not far from where I grew up.


These are just really giant, really vast mines, really that cover.


It's in an area where it used to be boreal forest and it's just these, like, giant canyons, grand canyons of mines with these giant, you know, apartment-sized machines that, like, dig up the ground and try to get to that semi-solid oil, the tar sands that's underneath it.


So, you know, 10 years ago, climate talk or the way that we talked about climate change was really focused on fossil fuel consumption and the carbon emissions that went along with it and global temperature rise.


But, of course, the Indigenous water protectors, the activists, the just people who were part of these Indigenous nations in the region, they were talking about their opposition to these oil developments and their involvement with the climate movement.


They were talking about it in terms of land, you know, so, like, the land was stolen from them.


These Indigenous nations, the First Nations, still had treaty rights over these lands that the oil developments were, I mean, they claimed that these oil developments were a violation of their treaty rights, treaty rights which, you know, even though the land is no longer completely owned by them, they, you know, are still have the right to, you know, hunt, gather, fish, perform ceremonies or whatever on that land.


But these oil developments were making that impossible.


And these oil developments are also being driven by fossil fuel corporations and governments that were seeking oil profits, so seeking to profit from the land.


So, at this time, actually, I was, I mean, I was living in Brooklyn.


I still live in Brooklyn in the same apartment that I was in then.


And this was a time, you know, in the mid, in the 2010s, when the anti-gentrification movement was really popping off all around America, you know, cities all around America, but especially in Brooklyn, and, you know, in my neighborhood as well.


And the sort of loudest part of that narrative about gentrification was that it was, you know, white people moving into poor neighborhoods of color and bringing in their, you know, like, matcha oat milk lattes and pretentious $25 cocktail bars or whatever.


But the thing that I was noticing when I attended, you know, protests or just events, was that I also repeatedly heard residents and activists making sort of a more quiet claim, which is that, yes, so longtime residents of these neighborhoods were being evicted or priced out of their apartments, you know, a process that they had really no control over, you know, like an eviction notice.


A landlord would just send an eviction notice in the mail one day, and they would receive it, and that's that.


But on top of this displacement, it was, their problem, the problem a lot of these communities identified was that they were also being ignored and had no voice when they tried to raise concerns about, you know, fancy new commercial or apartment developments being proposed in their neighborhoods.


So basically, these communities were saying, we have no control over the lands we've lived in for decades or longer.


So obviously, gentrification is like not the same as indigenous dispossession at all.


But, you know, they, I noticed they shared something similar, like they both talked about how people lack control over the lands they live on and depend, and that they depend on, you know, for housing, food, whatever.


And I realized that issues over land, so like, who owns it, who controls it, who profits from land, who benefits from it, and like decides how land gets used.


You know, these questions are really, I realized, at the center of, yeah, all, many of the biggest issues of our day.


So not just climate and the environment, which was my entryway into the, into the topic, but also, you know, racial justice, inequality, housing, food, and also land, I mean, it wasn't something that was like talked about that much.


Like we now, we talked about capitalism or income inequality, wealth, housing, air, water quality, food.


We talk about capital even a lot, you know, when we talk about social issues, but like rarely was the issue of land discussed.


So that's like why I kind of wanted to, I wanted to understand the critical role that control over land has played in America.


And that's kind of what the long story of what kicked off my work on this book.


And it's interesting because, well, you mentioned the indigenous people.


I mean, of course, until capitalism, well, that's not necessarily true, but I'd say for most of human prehistory and a large portion, even of human history, human beings have lived with a completely different sense of land than is central to capitalism.


And that is that land was seen as something to use, but not to own.


But one of the central tensions in your book, actually, is how given that we are now operating and have been operating for, you know, a while in this property driven system of land ownership, people have been fighting back by using the very same forms of property.


Well, they've changed in some ways the property forms of ownership, but ownership of the land is still the way things are being thought about by and large.


So talk about how one can use this profoundly unequal way of relating to land in a way that returns sovereignty to people who have been dispossessed.


Yeah, it's a very complicated, complex questions in some ways.


And in some ways, it's actually very simple.


Yeah, the complexity is that, I mean, we now exist within a legal system that fundamentally views land as property, so something to be owned and we're the owner, the private owner, or whoever the owner is, even if it's the government.


They're the ones that really get the final say over how to use it, how to profit from it.


They're kind of like the dictator of their parcel.


And so, you know, it's almost impossible now to think about reparative ways of, you know, doing things with the land in a way that repairs these, like, historically unjust relationships, you know, Indigenous dispossession or Black dispossession of land without just returning to this, like, you know, Black communities or Indigenous nations should be owning the lands that they once owned.


But for me, one of the ways that I think, I think about this complexity a lot.


And one of the ways that I think about this is that, you know, private land ownership, or now home ownership, has always been such a central part of the American ideal, you know, of individual independence, achievement, and stability.


It's just like, it's really one of the key components of the American dream, right?


But, you know, we've seen with the foreclosure crisis and increasingly unaffordable rents in cities and rural places around the country, and just like the astronomical cost of buying a home, you know, our system that was built on private property ownership, private land ownership, is actually producing the opposite effect.


It's like producing instability for communities and even for homeowners and landowners.


It's people, regular people are unable to get ahead or keep up with rising rents.


They can barely keep up with the cost of maintaining the homes or the land that they own.


And at one point, I realized, I think what people want is actually not property ownership, per se.


A lot of people do want that, sure.


What we really want is stability and security in our surroundings and the place we live.


We want control over that environment so we can, you know, if it's a house, we can paint it whatever color we want.


We can add an addition, you know, to, you know, add another bedroom or whatever, you know, build a shed in our backyard, a pool.


We want to, parents or grandparents want to create some family wealth, you know, something that's a value that they can pass on to their children and grandchildren.


And this is something that is really, really important in our economic system where, you know, we don't have, like, a social safety net for retirement.


Our health care system is, like, not, you know, not in the best shape.


And so, yeah, it's not really property ownership that people necessarily want.


It's, like, all these other components.


And so, what I thought, what I realized is that a bunch of these, like, communities all around the U.S. who are working towards these, like, different ways of owning or stewarding or controlling land, many of them are trying to achieve stability, independence, control for individuals and families by sort of spreading the responsibilities and also, like, the responsibilities and burdens of ownership, but also, like, the benefits.


So, it's a way of kind of democratizing control of land ownership and all the, you know, all the benefits of it and just spreading the burdens and also keeping costs down, you know, removing parcels from the real estate market and just, like, the really intense market pressures that, you know, keep pushing up prices every year.


So, I think, yeah, a lot of these different solutions, they, that's how they kind of, I suppose, are, like, trying to square the circle of, you know, this contradiction of having to use the same legal tools that exist right now to try to do something radically different from what it was intended to do.


So, let's move to some examples, but first I want to introduce you to our audience, or reintroduce you.


We are speaking with Audrey Lim.


Her book is Free the Land, How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos.


So, yeah, let's, let's talk about, well, you mentioned a project that, that I'm actually fairly familiar with because my granddaughter's boyfriend works with, every summer he goes and he works on Winona LaDuke's farm up in Minnesota.


And he's, he's going to be going out there in July again this year.


So, tell us about this.


I mean, we talked about the dispossession of indigenous lands.


This is a case of bringing the land back, the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Winona's Hemp and Heritage Farm.


Yeah, this is a super, super interesting project.


I mean, I think a lot of your listeners will probably have heard of Winona LaDuke, who's, you know, this really, really brilliant activist and author and thinker who's, like, one of the, you know, faces of the indigenous environmental movement.


And she, yeah, she grew up in California, but she is part of the White Earth Nation, which is in northern Minnesota.


And this White Earth Land Recovery Project that she started in, I think it was the 80s.


So it kind of started because she realized that, so one of this idea that I think a lot of people, including myself at one point, have about Native reservations in the U.S. is that there are these, like, vast stretches of just, like, unbroken lands that just, like, belong to indigenous nations.


In reality, that's, like, very much not the case.


So for the White Earth Reservation, you know, tribal lands, lands that are owned by the tribe, really only make up, like, 10% of their reservation.


You have, like, federal lands, including, you know, a National Wildlife Refuge, National Forests, they cover something like 15%.


Then the state and counties, they own another, like, quarter of the reservation.


And the rest, I think the other half of the reservation are basically all private lands that are owned by, some of these are individual, like, tribal members, but it also includes people who are non-Native.


It includes organizations, it includes companies, like big timber companies, big farm companies as well, like big farm corporations.


So what she realized when she sort of returned to the reservation in the 80s, she looked around, the federal government had just finished this investigation about all the private lands that were kind of stolen from the White Earth people, the White Earth Nation, and now belonged to, you know, now belonged to, like, white landowners or companies.


And they were trying to figure out a way to, a federal agreement to sort of pay the White Earth Nation for all of these lands that had been taken from their people and just, like, clear up these problems with the property deeds and to just resolve all the property issues with it.


So Winona Duke sort of looked around and she told me she saw, you know, her people, like, sort of mired in poverty and they didn't own the vast majority of the land on their own reservation.


And she was like, actually, what we need is not just, you know, we don't need, like, another investigation about, it was, like, the seventh investigation or something about how lands had been stolen from her people.


She was like, we need actually the land to be returned to our people.


And so she, like, looked around and saw these conservation land trusts, like Trust for Public Land, the Nature Conservancy, that were around the country, sort of buying up lands and just preserving it, not developing it, you know, not farming it or anything.


And she was like, oh, so, like, why can't, I mean, why can't we get people to give some of our land back or these organizations who say they support us to buy, help us buy back the land?


And, like, you should help us because, you know, as she joked, she was like, your team stole it from us.


So she created this organization called the White Earth Land Recovery Project.


And, you know, she made appeals to local newspapers and radio stations and stuff, explaining the project and explaining, yeah, this is what we're about.


And, like, could you help us?


Could you help us with it?


So people actually started donating money to help them buy land.


A few people started donating land back to them, lands that were on the reservation, but that, you know, for whatever reason, they held and were not using.


It was basically land that was just sitting vacant.


And so they, you know, started acquiring some of this land that was just, like, new parcels that were on the reservation.


These are private lands on the reservation.


And then her board members, you know, as they started, like, building out this, I guess, a land portfolio, her board members told her, well, you can't, the whole point is not just for you to own the land, right?


To just, like, add, we're not just trying to create, like, a real estate portfolio and just sit on the land.


You need to do something with it.


So she created a, there's, like, a store.


They have farmland, and they have, like, organic raspberry bush, maple sugar bush, which is, like, forests for harvesting maple syrup.


And, you know...


And wild rice.


Yes.


And wild rice and stuff like that.


They started a store.


They launched a store called, I think, Native Harvest that sells some of the maple syrup and, you know, raspberries and whatever, along with a bunch of other things that just people in the community make, you know.


They got land hoodies, and they sold some of this wild rice.


And you can, you know, you can go online and you can buy it.


Now, one of their properties is, like, an old elementary schoolhouse that's on the reservation that used to belong to a nearby county or something.


So they have, like, a store there now.


You can go there and buy these things and support them.


There's, like, a recording studio in there for a radio station that's, like, for the community as well.


And, yeah, they do a bunch of just different kinds of food and agriculture work on the farm.


For instance, Winona LaDuke and a lot of the farmers that are, like, part of the project but also just in that community have been, like, trying to grow out some of these traditional foods, like types of corn that used to be a really central part of the diet and used to grow in the region.


But, you know, the whole region is now monocrop farming of potatoes and stuff.


So they started to, like, try to grow out some of these traditional foods and then, like, teach local people to grow them in their gardens.


So, yeah, that's the project.


Now, another agricultural project that I found so interesting in this book in Free the Land, How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos, Audre Lim, was a project with Somali farmers.


First, tell us what is happening to farmland.


What made it so difficult for this group of Somali Bantu families to farm?


And then you can tell us, you know, how they saved their farming project.


Yeah, this is a super, super interesting project.


So people often talk about there's, like, a crisis in- there's a farm crisis, but there's- part of that is also that there's a farmland crisis.


So when it comes to America's, like, private farmlands, there's been, like, a massive concentration of land ownership since the Great Recession.


So I think the land holdings of America's, like, 100 largest private owners has increased from 28 million to, like, 42 million acres just since 2008.


And some of these owners include, you know, timber companies or big farm companies, as well as, like, conservation groups, Ted Turner, Bill Gates.


And we have, like, an estimated 370 million acres of farmland that's, like, expected to change hands by 2035.


So that's, like, 10 years from now.


This is as an old generation of farmers retire and just, like, need to sell off the main source of wealth that they own.


But the problem is that small farmers, you know, who grow table food, small farmers from marginalized communities, like the Somali Bantu farmers in Maine, they're just being outbid by big corporations and, like, financial investors.


They just simply don't have the cash to compete in this market.


And it's not even just that they can't compete in the market.


It's also that the costs are just surging.


They've been spiking, I mean, for several decades, but especially since the pandemic.


You know, I think there was, like, an 8 percent increase in the cost of land from just 2020 to 2021.


And on top of this, you know, American farmland is being lost to development, like, urban development, at a very, very fast rate.


And, you know, climate change is also, is starting to transform these areas that were, used to be very fertile soil.


And these are becoming barren or unfarmable.


And this is just going to shrink the supply of farmland a lot further and probably also increase the cost of land.


So the Somali Bantu farmers that you asked about, this is a community that they're from Somalia.


They fled during the Civil War.


Many of them wound up in refugee camps for a long time and then landed in the U.S. And some of them found their way to Maine.


So the one activist or community leader I spoke to, his name is Leba, and he's been in the area, I think, for probably 20 years or something.


And so he talked about how back in Somalia, you know, farming is basically, like, what his people did, what his family did.


And it was like, they're from this very fertile area of Somalia called, like, the Jabba Valley around the Jabba River.


And this land was, like, super fertile.


They grew their own food.


They could catch, you know, fish from the river.


And for the most part, they grew things to eat for themselves.


And then they would just sell off the rest at the market, anything that was excess.


Or if there were, like, people in the community that just, like, needed some food, had a rough year on their farm, maybe, they would just give away some of their food.


So it's a very big part of their culture, and they wanted to be able to farm.


So when they first started arriving, the community just wanted to, you know, it's Maine.


They could see there's just green farmland in all directions that they looked.


They're based out of Lewiston.


But, you know, they were saying, oh, we didn't know how to do it.


We didn't know, like, who to contact.


We didn't have any money.


They managed to get some land to rent through people that they knew.


And so these, like, farm plots, they basically made them into community farms.


You know, like, subdivided these plots into smaller plots for individual families to have their own little garden or farm plot.


And they also had these farm cooperatives of just, like, about two or four farmers who sort of ran a farm cooperative together, and then they would, like, sell what they grew at a marketplace or to local businesses or whatever.


And so those are the people that were using their farms.


The problem is that they found themselves, they had a few rented plots, and they kept having to leave them and find new plots.


So I think since in the last, like, 10 years, they had to move, like, six times or something.


That meant that, like, they have to, every single time, they have to, like, move, you know, any irrigation systems, any, like, storage systems that they have.


They have to, they just move the whole operation and start again from new every single time.


And this is a struggle, I guess, for land security that small farmers, table farmers around the U.S. share.


It's not just them.


So this was the problem that they faced.


So tell us about, yeah, the Equity Trust.


What is it?


Tell us about the Equity Trust that came in and how they organized themselves on this model.


Yeah.


So it started about 10 years ago.


It was basically some, like, farm non-profits and the Schumacher Center for New Economics.


And, you know, they gathered, and Green Horns, which is, like, a non-profit that supports young farmers, they gathered, like, a group of farmers and farm advocates.


And their big question that they were trying to solve was, like, how do we, what's a solution, a proactive solution to this farm, farmland crisis?


How do we protect farmland while also distributing ownership more broadly?


And so the solution that they kind of turned to is known as the Community Land Trust.


So this is basically a model of land ownership that was pioneered in the U.S., like, in the U.S. it was pioneered by Black farmers in Southwest Georgia in the civil rights era.


Now it's mostly known as an affordable housing model.


But basically how it works is that the land is, the land itself is owned by a community, by a non-profit that, in turn, is, like, controlled by, entirely by community members.


So individual residents or, you know, maybe businesses, like a farm co-op or whatever, that uses the land.


It's, you know, some of the people that control it might also be a local non-profit or organization.


Sometimes it's just local community leaders.


So it's community controlled and owned land.


But on top of that, whatever gets built on top of it, so that can be houses, or it could be a farm business, it could be a community center, it could be whatever it is, those things can be privately owned.


So it's a model that, you know, spreads the benefits and burdens or responsibilities of land ownership between a community, but then allows for private ownership of something, a business, a house, an asset that allows individual owners or businesses to build wealth.


So this group of farm advocates, they decided to do this, to go back to this model that was initially pioneered for farmland ownership, at least in the States, and they launched this organization called the Agrarian Trust, which is, like, a non-profit.


And so what the Agrarian Trust has done is that they've created these agrarian commons.


I'm not sure exactly how many, the number is expanding, but they might have about, like, a dozen different agrarian commons around the country now.


There's one in Minnesota, you know, where the White Earth Land Recovery Project is located, and that one is, you know, still being developed, but you have a bunch of different organizations and different farmers from, you know, Indigenous farmers, Black farmers, Latinx farmers who are coming together and figuring out, can we have this land that's owned by the commons, which we as community members, we will control, we sit on the board and we'll control the land, but then we can have our own non-profit or private farm businesses on top.


So in Lewiston, Maine, the Agrarian Trust, they started talking to LIBA and the members of, like, farmers with the Somali Bantu community, and one of the agrarian commons is the Little Jabba Maine Agrarian Commons, I think is what it's called.


In this case, the Somali Bantu, they have a community association.


They're kind of the sole business beneficiary of the land that's owned by this community, so of course the community members sit on the board for this CLT, this Agrarian Commons.


The non-profit organization, the Agrarian Trust, also sits on the board of this organization, so they can together sort of steward the land, decide on how much rent, you know, to charge any of the people who use the land, so that can be the community farmers or whatever, but then whatever gets built on top of the land, that can be owned by, you know, the Somali Bantu Community Association.


And so now they have this plot of land that has been placed forever, basically, in this trust, the Agrarian Commons, and it's controlled by the community.


And so they've sort of achieved this balance of, well, allowing people to start private businesses or, you know, or non-profit, non-profit organization, have a community farm on this plot of land, but it's controlled by the community and like protected from the pressures of the market.


Now, Audrey Lim, you mentioned before, you talked about gentrification.


There's another model in your book, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.


This isn't community land trust, but it's, there's a community planning organizing.


Talk about the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and what problem it solves.


It actually is a community land trust.


Yes, it started as a planning initiative.


So basically, what happened in, I think it was also in the mid-80s, this is in Boston in the Roxbury community that's mainly sort of African-American, Cape Verdean immigrants, Latinx, and white.


And basically the city, the city of Boston came up with this plan for urban development for this area called the Dudley Triangle within their neighborhood.


And the residents had already been organizing a lot around these, like, illegal waste transfer sites in their neighborhood.


And so they had been successful and they, I think, had a real sense of their own power as an organizing force.


And so when the city of Boston approached them, or they didn't even approach them, I think a plan, their urban development plan leaked.


The residents of this community were like, oh, no, this is not what we want.


We don't want fancy new office developments that are going to end up displacing us.


So what they did instead was they drafted their own plan with the support of this charity that had already started helping them out during the process of fighting these waste transfer sites.


And they not only, through organizing, they not only drafted their own plan, but they convinced the city to adopt it, convinced the city to give them, it was like over a hundred million dollars to roll out the plan.


They gave the organization, the community, DSNI, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, all of the vacant city lands within this 60 acre area known as the Dudley Triangle.


And they even delegated their powers of eminent domain to the organization to like buy up the unused vacant private lands within the triangle from like absentee owners.


And what they did was they put these lands in a community land trust.


They started to act as a developer.


They built a ton of affordable housing.


So some of these are like single family homes.


There's like fourplexes, duplexes.


And these were much less expensive than houses that are going for market price because the land is placed in community control and placed in this community land trust called Dudley Neighbors Initiative.


So, you know, it was significantly cheaper.


And if one of those homeowners ended up wanting to sell it, it could go to somebody else who is, you know, within the neighborhood or somebody who just like didn't make enough money to be able to buy something market rate.


But on top of that, because the community controls so much land, like basically half the land within this triangle, they have been able to develop all sorts of other things in the neighborhood that make it a really, really nice neighborhood.


There's a ton of green space.


There's really well-maintained parks and urban farms and community gardens all around the neighborhood that are really nice, you know, and that people use to just chill and, you know, hang out, but also to grow food and whatever.


They just acquired a very large commercial building that's going to be like an art and cultural space that's going to be part of this like new arts and culture district that the community also helped to envision.


And, you know, it's like, in large part, this model was the CLT, Community Land Trust model, gave them a way, was an instrument for them to control the land and actually bring this vision to fruition.


And they won the government support, the financial support from government as well as charities to bring, yeah, bring this plan to fruition.


They did that through community organizing.


And yeah, it's incredibly powerful, their story.


And it gave me a lot of hope just visiting it and learning about it.


Yes, exactly.


I mean, with so much that can inspire despair around us that we hear every day, it is really wonderful to read not just of things that people can do, but of the kinds of things that people, neighbors, communities have done to work within a system that has been so implacable in dispossessing them and take back sovereignty.


Your book is Free the Land, How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos.


There are many, many more examples.


You go to Puerto Rico, you explore some of the contradictions of, say, the conservation movement, land conservation movement.


There are many more things that we didn't have the time to cover.


I highly recommend this book to my listeners.


Thank you so much for talking with us.


Thank you for having me.