Like most nations, England doesn’t have legally recognized rights for citizens to cross non-public lands. This means that the nearly 56 million people who live there are only legally allowed to access 8% of the country. One particularly picturesque example of this problem was recently noted by the BBC, which discussed a large piece of public land that’s actually inaccessible due to being surrounded private land, forcing people to trespass in order to reach it. Right to Roam campaigner Jon Moses speaks with Rachel Donald on the latest Mongabay Newscast about a growing movement in England that stages creative events like group walks on private land to point out the benefits of public access for repairing degraded landscapes and improving the lives of everyday citizens, which are outlined in a new book, Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, that he’s co-edited with Nick Hayes. Listen here: Freedom-to-roam laws aren’t widely recognized outside of Scandinavia and Europe, but Moses says these rights are fundamental to repairing the damage caused by centuries of private land ownership. “I think that there needs to be a kind of rethinking really of [what] people’s place is in the landscape and how that intersects with a kind of new … vision of farming and a new relationship between people and nature as well.” Among the reasons Moses says is given for the increase in private land ownership over the past few centuries is industrial agriculture, which he says isn’t benefiting the farmers all that much either.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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