How The Occupy Movement May Be Off-Base, and How It Can Evolve

international | environment | other press Monday November 21, 2011 22:50 by T

Occupy The Land

This article by Jan Lundberg of CultureChange.org suggests we should be occupying the land as Jan has pointed out elsewhere that the Occupy movement hasn't really taken on the environmental crisis and sustainability into its core thinking and what will matter in the end is access to land for food when the whole system does eventually crash.

In this short article he develops the theme and points out where we are headed and points out the key factors that matter.

So in the opening paragraph he says:

The Occupy movement is by and large preoccupied with most wealth being hoarded "on Wall Street" in the hands of "the 1%". While it's true statistically that the money is there, what will ultimately prove to matter more to the "the 99%" is access to healthy land that can support life and human subsistence. When the total financial meltdown hits, it won't be the money in digital accounts that matters, but productive land that is held privately or in common.

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What folks in "poor" countries have always understood is that their power and survival lie in possessing their own land. Land reform in many parts of our increasingly crowded world is a burning issue. Many people live and die for the struggle for their right to live on their ancestral lands.  A movement in the U.S. for the masses to take back the land from the few is inevitable.
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Better late than never; many decades have passed during which the importance for consumers of being close to the land was greatly diminished.  Real wealth, the land, was given up for wages and cheap petroleum's technology explosion.  Population growth has happened so fast that a new generation didn't know it was inheriting a world less and less free and no longer abundant in life-giving resources ("ecological services").