“We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall common upon the common.

We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor take profits of the same.

We pray that Rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and passage.

We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase lands freely, (i.e. that are freehold), and to let them out again by copy or court roll to their great advancement, and to the undoing of your poor subjects.”

The date is 6 July 1549. The peasants of Wymondham, a small town in Norfolk, England, have risen in rebellion. They are marching across the fields to cut down the hedges and fences of private farms and pastures, including the estate of Robert Kett, who surprisingly joins the protests, giving his name to the rebellion. As they march, they are joined by farm workers and craftspeople from many other towns and villages. On 12 July, 16,000 insurgents camp at Mousehold Heath, near Norwich, and draw up a list of demands addressed to the King, including those mentioned above. They will hold out until the end of August, when more than 3,500 insurgents will be massacred and their leaders tortured and beheaded. But what provoked this insurrection? And why was the repression so bloody?

Kett’s Rebellion was a reaction to the hardships inflicted by the extensive enclosures of common lands. These lands, which were of great economic and social importance, were managed according to rules and boundaries established by the communities themselves, guaranteeing a balance between their members. The plots were used for grazing, gathering wood and wild plants, haymaking, fishing, or simple passage, and even included shared farmland, where peasants each cultivated small portions of the collective land. The common land system thus contributed to the subsistence of the communities and, in particular, the most disadvantaged.

With enclosures, common land was reorganised to create large, unified fields, demarcated by hedges, walls, or enclosures, and reserved for the exclusive use of large landowners or their tenants. This gradual process of land appropriation was not exclusive to England but was a large-scale phenomenon that spread in various forms throughout Europe (and even more violently in its colonies) from the 15th century onwards. This is the phenomenon that Karl Marx describes in Das Capital as “primitive accumulation”: agricultural workers, deprived of their means of production (land), are forced to work for wages, possessing nothing other than their labour power. This was one of the factors that led to the emergence of capitalism, a process involving violence, expropriation, and the breaking of traditional social ties.

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

Another significant aspect of enclosures is their impact on the role of women. Until the Middle Ages, a subsistence economy prevailed in Europe, in which productive work (such as tilling the fields) and reproductive work (such as caring for the family) had equal value. With the transition to a market economy, only work that produced goods was considered worthy of remuneration, while the reproduction of labour power was deemed to have no economic value. What’s more, as we have shown, the loss of use rights over common land particularly affected already-discriminated groups such as women, who found in this land not only a means of subsistence, but also a space for relationships, knowledge sharing, and collective practices.

Feminist researcher Silvia Federici, in her celebrated book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, reflects on the link between the privatisation of land and the worsening of women’s condition: “For in pre-capitalist Europe, women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets (…). But in the new organisation of work every woman (…) became a communal good, for once women’s activities were defined as non-work, women’s labour began to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink (…). According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will.”

The consequences of this exacerbation of power relations between the sexes were manifold: women found themselves increasingly confined to the domestic sphere, economically and socially dependent on male authority, and controlled in the management of their bodies by demographic policies that were essential to a society dependent on the flow of labour power. Control of the female body, through the condemnation of contraception and the traditional knowledge associated with care, became central to the emerging capitalist society. The witch-hunts that struck down thousands of women in Europe and America were part of this repression and control.
In the European colonies, similar processes of expropriation and violence were justified by the rhetoric of domination over “savages”. This pattern, based on the extraction of resources and cheap labour, continues to this day: think of the appropriation of indigenous lands in the global South for the exploitation of natural resources. Capitalism and oppression are two sides of the same coin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality, wrote: “The first person who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’”

Rousseau’s thinking in this book is not without its problems, and, among other things, fuelled the dangerous myth of the “good savage”, which would in part justify colonialism. Yet these words represent a warning and a hope, inviting us to question the very foundations of society: structures, institutions, and economic systems are not immutable. Change is always possible, provided we have the courage to imagine it.

In everyday language, the term “landscape” encompasses a variety of notions: it can refer to an ecosystem, a beautiful view, or even an economic resource. However, the complexity of the term can be better understood and approached through the concept of “experience”.

Experience is something that brings us into contact with the outside, with otherness: in this context, the landscape is no longer seen as an object, but rather as a relationship between human society and the environment. An experience is also something that touches us emotionally, that moves and transforms us. Viewing a “landscape” as such helps us realise how much it gives meaning to our individual and collective lives, to the extent that its transformation or disappearance leads to the destruction of sensitive markers of existence in the lives of its inhabitants. Experience can also be seen as a form of practical knowledge or wisdom. It is the kind of knowledge that is acquired by living in a place, which makes the people who inhabit a landscape its experts. Finally, experience is also a form of experimentation: this is the active aspect of our relationship with the world, enabling us to discover and create new knowledge and to bring to life what is yet only potential.

We might take these reflections a step further and argue that human beings live off the landscape—a statement that may seem hyperbolic, but that makes sense if we pay close attention. Indeed, the landscape is the source of our food: we live in the landscape and the latter activates representations and emotions within us. Our relationship with the landscape is dynamic: by changing it, we also change ourselves. It is therefore impossible to avoid entering into a relationship with the landscape. The very choice of ignoring and not ‘experiencing’ a landscape can have practical and symbolic consequences.

It is on the basis of these observations that Jean-Marc Besse wrote La Nécessité du Paysage (the Necessity of the Landscape): an essay on ecology, architecture, and anthropology, as well as an invitation to question our modes of action. In it, the French philosopher warns us against any action on the landscape: an attitude that places us ‘outside’ the said landscape, which, as mentioned above, is simply not plausible. Acting on a landscape means fabricating it, in other words starting from a preconceived idea that ignores the fact that the landscape is a living system and not an inert object. “Acting on therefore involves a twofold dualism, separating subject and object on the one hand, and form and matter on the other.”

So how might we escape this productive yet falsifying paradigm? Besse suggests a change of perspective: moving from acting on to acting with, recognising “that matter is animated to a certain extent” and envisaging it “as a space of potential propositions and possible trajectories”. The aim, in this case, is to interact “adaptively and dynamically”, to practise transformation rather than production. Acting with means engaging in ongoing negotiation, remaining open to the indeterminacy of the process, and being in dialogue with the landscape: in a word, collaborating with it.

Georg Wilson, All Night Awake, 2023

Acting with the soil
The “abiotic” dimension of soil is addressed, among other disciplines, by topography, paedology, geology, and hydrography. However, from a philosophical point of view, soil is simply the material support on which we live. This is where we construct the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on, and it is the soil that makes agriculture possible, one of the oldest and most complex fundamental manifestations of human activity. This “banal” soil is therefore in reality the focus of a whole series of essential political, social, and economic issues, and as such it raises fundamental questions. What kind of soil, water, or air do we want? The environmental disasters linked to the climate crisis and soil erosion or the consequences of the loss of fertility of agricultural and forest land call for collective responses that draw on both scientific knowledge and technical skills, as well as many political and ethical aspects.

Acting with the living
The landscapes we inhabit, travel through, and transform (including the soil and subsoil) are in turn inhabited, travelled through, and transformed by other living beings, animals and plants. In his essay Sur la Piste Animale (On the Animal Trail), philosopher Baptiste Morizot invites us to live together “in the great ‘shared geopolitics’ of the landscape”, by trying to take the point of view of “wild animals, trees that communicate, living soil that works, plants that are allies in the permacultural kitchen garden, to see through our eyes and become sensitive to their habits and customs, to their immutable perspectives on the cosmos, to invent thousands of relationships with them”. To interpret a landscape correctly, it is necessary to take into account the “active power of living beings” with their spatiality and temporality, and to integrate our relationship with them.

Acting with other human beings
A landscape is a “collective situation” that also concerns inter-human relations in their various forms. A landscape is linked to desires, representations, norms, practices, stories, and expectations, and it draws on emotions and positions as diverse as people’s desires, experiences, and interests. Acting with other human beings means acting with a complex whole that includes individuals, communities, and institutions, and drawing on the practical and symbolic—in a continuous process of negotiation and mediation.

Acting with space
Considered through the tools of geometry, space is an objective entity: its dimensions, proportions, and boundaries can be satisfactorily described. However, the space of the landscape cannot be reduced to measurable criteria. In reality, it is an intrinsically heterogeneous space: “locations, directions, distances, morphologies, ways of practising them and of investing in them economically and emotionally are not equivalent either spatially or qualitatively”. Interpreting the space of the landscape correctly therefore means remembering that “numerical” and “geometric” measurements are necessarily false, and that the set of geographies (economic, social, cultural, or personal) that make it up are neither neutral, nor uniform, nor fixed in time.

Acting with time
When we think of the relationship between landscape and time, the first image that springs to mind is that of the earth’s crust and the geological layers that make it up, or that of archaeological ruins buried beneath the surface. In short, we imagine a sort of tidy “palimpsest” of a past time, with which all relations are closed. The time of the landscape, however, should be interpreted according to more complex logics: we need only think of the persistence of practices and experiences in its context, and the fact that landscape destruction is never total: rather, it is transformation. What’s more, the time of the landscape also includes non-human time scales, such as geology, climatology, and vegetation. They are temporalities to which we are nonetheless closely linked. Thus, in reality, the landscape remains in constant tension between past and present.

“Our era,” Jean-Marc Besse concludes, “is one of a crisis of attention. […] Landscape seems to be one of the ‘places’ where the prospect of a ‘correspondence’ with the world can be rediscovered […]. In other words, the landscape […] can be seen as a device for paying attention to reality, and thus as a fundamental condition for activating or reactivating a sensitive and meaningful relationship with the surrounding world”, in other words, the necessity of the landscape.