World Community
Land Trust Proposal
(1974)
Primary Purpose
1) The main purpose of the World Community Land Trust will be to obtain and hold lands suitable for ecological community development in trust until the time comes when those lands can be transferred to an agency of the United Nations or possibly a world government body for administrative trusteeship.
This purpose shows why we wish to call this land trust the World Community Land Trust and what distinguishes it from other existing land trusts. We wish to advance the land trust concept to the point where it can become not only a legally recognized instrument for taking lands off the economic market but eventually out of national political jurisdiction by becoming a legal means of holding lands for the future development of a decentralized World Community federation of cooperative communities.
Other Purposes
2) To create environmental survival and regeneration zones for human beings and other species. The W.C.L.T. will provide land that is to become "un-nationalized" and strictly off-limits to national or international destructive social or political policies, e.g., political wars, economic exploitation of the environment and communities, etc..
--To provide environmental sanctuaries for experimental, cooperative (non-exploitive, non-violent) communities of people developing and practicing ecological lifestyles. Our premise here is that interference hinders if not destroys the experiment and therefore a major purpose of the W.C.L.T. will be to provide experimental communities long term "proving grounds" free as much as possible from outside social system pressures and harassment. We want to provide social pioneers a freer experimental base from which to evolve new ecological and social lifestyles and techniques that will be needed by all societies facing the new environmental and social realities of a shrinking resource foundation, the Earth in the coming decades.
The value of having social experiments going on during these times of rapid changes is something we hope to impress upon all existing societies through the agency of the W.C.L.T. What experimental communities provide are contingency social system models that will be invaluable for indicating which new social paths are workable for full-scale social change. The W.C.L.T. will provide lands for communities experimenting with new forms of community and inter-community government, new forms of education, new forms of technology and energy use, new forms of agriculture, new forms of interpersonal relationships and new forms of community life in harmony with the ecological parameters of each particular environment and the eco-systems of the Earth.
--To provide environmental sanctuaries for traditional communities of peoples. These are communities and societies of usually indigenous peoples still living a pre-industrial lifestyle. Currently, most if not all of these communities are facing destruction by either direct genocidal means or total disruption of their environment, or by forced absorption into the surrounding dominant industrial social system. The W.C.L.T. will help oppressed traditional peoples obtain environmental sanctuary status for their lands. Like experimental communities, traditional pre-industrial communities have much to teach us all about living ecologically and in closer communion with Life. The W.C.L.T. can foster the kinship that exists even now between members of both types of communities facing common problems and arriving at similar solutions.
--To provide environmental sanctuaries for endangered species and endangered eco-systems. Here the W.C.L.T. will provide lands protected from harmful human social intervention so that endangered species of plants and animals, and vital eco-systems such as estuaries and wilderness areas will have a chance to recover and become once again regenerative repositories of ecological diversity and therefore ecological stability.
3) To provide community land for people from all over the world desiring to participate in world community. The W.C.L.T. will operate as a fully cooperative and decentralized federation organization. It will become a model of local and worldwide community self-management. Decision-making will occur at the levels closest to the situation requiring a solution. Councils will be formed and composed of representatives chosen by each individual member community in ways these communities deem appropriate. These councils will operate under fully cooperative democratic procedures with full representation given to all community viewpoints and with many systems of community feedback and checks on legislative authority. The communities of people involved will be participating in the world's first worldwide inter-community governing system which can serve as a prototype for what the United Nations could evolve into.
4) To provide land-based centers of operation for the maintenance of world eco-systems and for the reconstruction of damaged eco-systems. Each W.C.L.T. community site will have a Land Center which will serve as an ecological information gathering facility to help community members keep careful watches on the state of their shared environment. The W.C.L.T. can sponsor environmental reconstruction programs to help life and the Earth recover from the ravages of industrial society. The W.C.L.T. can also sponsor educational programs to help alert all peoples to the dangers of continued exploitation of the Earth's dwindling resources.
5) To provide a model for worldwide land reform. The Earth belongs to the Earth's peoples and control of the land belongs to humanity as a whole. for everyone's survival all persons must be entitled to their fair share of the Earth's resources. Land is a primary resource. The W.C.L.T. will act as a model for the equal distribution of arable and non-arable community land and will push for a worldwide land reform movement which seeks to take lands out of the hands of commercial exploiters and gives it back to whole communities. The W.C.L.T. can be instrumental in providing ecological land use information and ecological lifestyle demonstration to the world.
6) To provide help to the world's hungry. Part of the W.C.L.T. program for its member communities can be to provide a portion of foods they have raised that exceed their needs to help populations in hunger crisis situations. Probably the most valuable contribution W.C.L.T. communities can make in this area is in providing new ecological self-sufficiency agricultural technology information which involve using low energy systems and are readily adaptable to areas of the world's poor, e.g., the French Intensive/Biodynamic gardening methods.
7) To provide a means of worldwide demographic reform. The W.C.L.T. can help facilitate demographic reform by encouraging the formation of new communities in low density population areas suitable for community development, and discouraging the building of new communities in population-saturated areas. The W.C.L.T. can also help develop plans for the ecological revitalization of our over-developed urban and suburban communities.
8) To provide ecological community self-support technology information. Since the major emphasis in developing ecological community lifestyles will be in the area of developing community and inter-community self-sufficiency systems, the W.C.L.T. can serve as a clearinghouse for distributing this information to the world's peoples to help them break away from the eco-destructive economies and technologies of the industrialized societies.
9) To begin to build eutopia here and now. In order to survive as a species we must make a very large social evolutionary jump to be able to develop workable cooperative relationships between human beings and between humanity and the rest of Life. We must build eutopia which means building the best place we can imagine. If we fail to do so, there is a high likelihood that we may perish.
The W.C.L.T. can provide the foundation on which many eutopian community models can be built. So long as each traditional and experimental community can agree on fundamental ecological and cooperative lifestyle practices amongst themselves, then there is enough agreement to form an ecological cooperative community within the W.C.L.T. framework. How these communities may choose to structure their internal social policies would be left up to them. No one can formulate a single social vision for all people. It would be enough that communities could agree on basic cooperative practices. Diversity would bring both freedom and long-term stability.
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See how the World Community Land Trust proposal formed the basis for the Holy Land Trust proposal which in turn became the Canaan Peace Plan.