1 - A Theory of the Forest

Summary

This book explores an other way of relating to land; a relationship to space and place that runs counter to property's (private) orthodoxy and its atomising, exclusionary ways. As set out in the Introduction, we use the metaphor of the lawful forest to describe this relationship. Like the forest, this relationship is ancient. Like the forest, this relational understanding of people, place and community seems peripheral to our modern, mostly urban lives, a wooded hideaway beyond our everyday experiences of concrete and steel. While the lawful forest is indeed extant, a literal place of trees, its presence also transcends the physical, evoking a figurative yearning for a spatial life lived better. Simultaneously physical and metaphysical, the forest emplaces us, creating contexts that weave together its remnant presents with a memory of forests past. We also describe this forest as lawful, drawing on critical property theorists and scholars of legal geography to derive its ground-up legitimacy from the many, not the few. Aspirations of common-wealth and spatial justice dwell in its shade, a space and place where the ‘wide-open synergies’ of the commons is a stark foil to the sequestering, controlling inclinations of private capital (and its private property alter ego). This chapter's ambitious task is to situate this vast, diverse (and mostly hidden) lawful forest in theory, and to explain why it remains so peripheral, and so overlooked.

What is remarkable about this lawful forest is its ubiquity. Equally remarkable is its near-invisibility. These observations are, of course, related. Making plain the latter renders obvious the former. It is a forest lost to plain sight, ancient woods that have seemingly disappeared amidst their (individual) trees. This chapter's task (and, indeed, the task of this book) is to reverse this skewed myopia, to identify why we see space in reverse, and to advance a theory of the lawful forest that marks its subtle outlines. Or, to imbue this task with a literary flourish, to reveal the forest's concealed glades and overlooked wood-pastures that subsist amongst us. In so doing, this task requires patience. It takes time to adjust one's vision from the harsh sunlight of the cleared private plains to the forest's dappled shadows. The rewards of patience lie in nuance and connectivity; subtle glimpses of the intricate relational practices and ancient propertied ways that this accustomed sight slowly reveals.