Common Ground: Part One:  On Enclosure, the Commons, and Awe by Beth Bartlett

I spent the first half of my academic career studying and teaching the history of Western political philosophy – the works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to name a few.  It gave me the best possible grounding in understanding the foundations of patriarchy.  In more recent years, I have used these works to explain the Western paradigm of thought to my ecofeminism students so they could better understand how women, colonized others, and the earth have been defined and dominated based on these assumptions.

One of the key pieces of writing in developing such an awareness in my students is English philosopher John Locke’s understanding of the origins and “rightful” distribution of private property. “As much land that a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common” Locke wrote.[i]  In doing so, not only does “a man” come to own property, he is fulfilling God’s commandment “ . . . to subdue the earth – i.e., improve it for the benefit of life . . . .”[ii]

Locke’s writing provided justification for what would become the English enclosure movement. In 1773 the Parliamentary “Act of Inclosure” (sic) codified the enclosure by feudal lords of the “commons” – the land common to all, available for the growing of crops and the grazing of cattle. And so, with hedgerows, fences, and walls, later to be joined by barbed wire and no trespassing signs, the enclosure of the land and our separation from it began. Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Parliament approved roughly 5000 enclosures, displacing thousands of the peasant population.[iii]  These enclosures would multiply with the expansion of the British Empire, as well the imperialism of other European nations. Sanctioned and encouraged by their governments and various versions of the papal Doctrine of Discovery,[iv] Europeans, including those displaced by the enclosure movement, descended upon lands across the globe, assuming that by “improving” the land and planting a flag the land was theirs, ignoring the fact that vast numbers of people already lived there. “The rush to gather up the spoils — the land and its landscapes, soon to be deconsecrated and commodified – got ponderously under way,” wrote land historian Simon Winchester.[v]

Ecofeminist Vandana Shiva has written at length about the ways in which the English enclosure movement was imposed on the Indian population following the British conquest. Peasants were forced to grow indigo instead of food; sacred forests were enclosed and cut down. Eventually the Indian population lost their rights to food, fuel, and grazing lands, resulting in their impoverishment.  But this, she says, was just the beginning. Since then, water has been enclosed through dams and privatization; seeds and biodiversity through Intellectual Property Rights.  “While these first enclosures stole only land, today all aspects of life are being enclosed – knowledge, culture, water, biodiversity, and public services such as health and education.”[vi] Each enclosure is justified in the name of “improvement.” As ecofeminist Susan Griffin writes, “Every effort had the same theme, those whose lands were taken were being improved.”[vii]

According to the Act, the enclosures were designed “for the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the common Arable Fields, Waste, and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom.”[viii] The Crown of England had declared the commons “wastelands.”  However, as Shiva points out, the commons had provided life sustenance to the peasant population. “Despite the opinion of the landlords, the commons were not wasted land; they were a rich resource providing the community with a degree of self-reliance and self-governance.”[ix]  “The colonial concept of wastelands was not an assessment of the biological productivity of land but of its revenue-generating capacity,” Shiva continues.[x] As Griffin states, “in the Western habit of mind . . . a forest exists for lumber. Trees for oxygen. A field for grazing. Rocks for minerals. Water for irrigation.”[xi]  Thus did the Crown embrace Locke’s philosophy that “land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste.“[xii]

 Waste – from the Latin vastus – meaning “empty, desolate;” “immense, extensive, huge.”[xiii] Vast – also from the Latin vastus – meaning the same. How did “vast” become “waste”? How did the experience of vastness come to signify a wasteland? And with what consequences?

Hardly a waste, vast and vastness are at the very heart of the vital experience of awe. In their study of awe, psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleague Yang Bai  found that regardless of the source, the experience of awe followed a distinct pattern — “vastness, mystery, and the dissolving of boundaries between the self and other sentient beings.”[xiv] Vastness, Keltner writes, can be physical – such as looking out over the vast expanse of the ocean, standing beside tall trees, experiencing the star-lit sky, or a singer’s voice; or temporal – such a scent or a piece of music that transports you back in time; or about ideas – such as an epiphany that helps you make sense of the world.

“The content of what is vast varies dramatically across cultures and the contexts of our lives,” writes Keltner. “In some places it is high-altitude mountains, and in others flat never-ending plains with storms approaching. For infants it is the immense warmth provided by parents, and when we die, the enormous expanse of our lives. . . . The varieties of vastness are myriad, giving rise to shifts in the meaning of awe.”[xv]

In considering that which is vast to be waste, we deprive ourselves of the experience of awe, and thereby deprive ourselves of the means of our own betterment. People who experience awe are more open to new ideas, curious, thoughtful, generous, kind, willing to put aside self-interest in favor of others, less prone to political polarization, less likely to experience anxiety and depression, and more likely to experience joy.

I explore more consequences of considering what is vast to be waste in Part Two.

Sources

Chollet, Mona. 2022. In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial. Trans. Sophie R. Lewis. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Griffin, Susan. 1995. The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society.  New York: Anchor Books.

Keltner, Dacher. 2023. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” New York: Penguin.

Locke, John. 1690/ 1960. Second Treatise on Civil Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. In Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau.  With an Introduction by Sir Ernest Barker. London: Oxford U. Press. 1-143.

Shiva, Vandana. 2005. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.

Winchester, Simon. 2021. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins.

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[i] Locke, 20.
[ii][ii] Ibid., emphasis mine.
[iii] The enclosure of the commons was particularly hard on women, who depended disproportionately on the commons to graze cows and gather herbs. For many, it ended their independence, with the oldest often reduced to begging. See Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches.
[iv] The Doctrine of Discovery, which gave official Church sanction to conquest of lands and peoples, was granted by Pope Nicholas V in his 1454 papal bull giving dispensation to the Portuguese to seize any land and peoples in Africa south of Cape Bojador.
[v] Winchester, 132.
[vi] Shiva, 3.
[vii] Griffin, 100. Emphasis in original.
[viii] Quoted in Winchester, 177.
[ix] Shiva, 23, 20.
[x] Shiva, 25.
[xi] Griffin, 56.
[xii] Locke, 26.
[xiii] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “waste” has several meanings, among them:  1.“uninhabited or uncultivated country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, a wilderness; 2. “a piece of land not cultivated or used for any purpose, producing little . . . “; 4. “of speech, thought, or action: profitless.”  It is interesting to me that the “unprofitability” of the “wastelands” has become extended to speech, thought, and action.
[xiv] Keltner, 124-125. Psychologist Dacher Keltner and his collaborator, Yang Bai, asked 2600 people in 26 countries around the world: “What is an experience of awe that you have had, when you encountered avast mystery that transcends your understanding of the world?” (xix).   They were seeking an answer to the questions 1) what is awe, and 2) what leads people to feel awe. They discovered that universally “eight wonders of life” consistently evoke the experience of awe. First and foremost is what they termed “moral beauty” — “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming” (11). Second is “collective effervescence” – a sense of “we” experienced at weddings, graduations, sports, political rallies.  Third is nature; fourth – music; fifth – visual design; sixth – spiritual and religious awe; seventh – birth and death; and finally – epiphanies – “when we suddenly understand essential truths about life” (17).
[xv] Keltner, 8.