The Gandhian disciple Vinoba Bhave walked across India in the 1950s, urging landowners each to donate a sixth of their holdings to the local people as part of what he called the Bhoodan movement. It fizzled.

  Tall, thin, bearded, and at the time a good sixty years old, he wore only a homespun lungi from a khadi shop. His walks were eventually followed by thousands, such that a vast snakelike procession of land reformists swept across the land, its leader bent on persuading all owners he encountered or alongside whose lands he walked to give up some of their territory—a sixth of it, Bhave usually suggested—and to do so voluntarily and out of a sense of simple decency. And in their hundreds, they did, and for a while India became a repository of a considerable acreage of what was to be called Bhoodan Land—Gifted Land—on which hitherto landless peasants could live, and which they could till and seed and raise crops and on which they could feed a water buffalo or two, and thereby secure an entry-level position in a path to eventual prosperity.

  Sadly, and being India, the Bhoodan movement eventually fizzled. Bhave is generally regarded today as a saintly figure, a prophet more or less without honor in his own country, and he has appeared on an Indian postage stamp. But very few of the pieces of land he once so persuasively pried from the hands of various zamindars and nawabs belong to landless Dalits anymore. Most have somehow become subsumed into other estates or, where they once stood close to cities, have become unrecognizable components of Indian suburban sprawl, the details of their ownership mysteriously now passed into the hands of members of the fast-growing Indian middle class.

  Yet some of Bhave’s ideas—that landowners should behave charitably and give away parcels of land for the specific purpose of helping to alleviate poverty—have long survived him. Moreover, they spread very much more successfully outside India, and nowadays the notion of city land being gifted for the purpose of helping impoverished urban dwellers has advanced somewhat. Many hundreds of community land trusts have sprung up in recent years, particularly in Britain and the United States. The parcels of land involved—generally, they are reasonably small; this is a movement less interested in landscape than in building plots—are acquired in much the same way Bhave sought to acquire his land—as gifts freely offered up by right-minded people. Some governments—regional governments, in the case of modern Scotland, state governments in one or two progressive-minded administrations elsewhere—help pay for buyouts. There are many different models. But once the land parcels are transferred, local land trusts administer them, generally in perpetuity, and see that inexpensive, attainable housing is built on them, either for sale or for rent. The land beneath always remains the property of the trust; the improvement upon the land owned or rented is otherwise the responsibility of the occupier.

  The rural American south saw in the 1970s the first extensive roll-out of an idea that had much in common with the kibbutz scheme in Israel, as well as with the philosophical approach of the Jewish National Fund, which accumulated land in Palestine and offered ultralong leases to worthy landless applicants. A somewhat similarly established community trust was first established in the American south in the seventies—“A non-profit organization to hold land in perpetual trust for the permanent use of rural communities,” according to its brochures. It raised sufficient funds to buy a 5000-acre farm in southwestern Georgia, and farmers developed it for twenty years. This experiment ultimately failed, but it set the movement in motion, generating enthusiasm among those in the community who followed such land-economy philosophers as Henry George,* the celebrated inventor of the radical idea of the land value tax.

  The Georgia model spread, slowly at first. It took root next in Cincinnati, then most significantly in three counties in Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain—where the local Champlain Housing Trust managed to acquire a sufficient acreage on which to build 2,300 apartments, more than four hundred single-family houses, and fifteen commercial buildings—giving work and shelter to some six thousand people, who otherwise would have struggled to find places to sleep. Of the 250 community land trusts in the United States, that in Vermont is by far the largest, the flagship.

  In Britain the popularity of the movement is growing at similar speed—at the time of this writing there were slightly more trusts than in the United States: 255 of them in England, Wales, and Scotland. In Scotland trusts have permanent ownership of half a million acres, a figure that includes the aforementioned islands of Eigg and Ulva, in which the transfer of ownership from private to community involved some direction from government, rather than free-enterprise goodness, which appears to the hallmark of the movement across in America.

  The journalist and tax reform advocate Henry George was a hugely popular figure in late-nineteenth-century America with his 1879 book Progress and Poverty assuming magisterial authority. He proposed and advertised the consolidation of all revenue-raising efforts into a single Land Value Tax.

  It is one thing to take a progressive idea like the community land trust and employ it in a progressively minded state like Vermont, quite another to try it out in one of the more broken cities of America’s Rust Belt. But since 2008 a group of local activists has been experimenting with a raft of such radical ideas in the once spectacularly forlorn city of Cleveland, on the Ohio shores of Lake Erie.

  Until lately, no better example of urban failure could be found than Cleveland—a two-hundred-year-old port that once stood at a nexus of roadways and rail lines, a city built on steel mills and heavy industry—which during the Second World War particularly was one of the busiest industrial cities in the country. But after the war the demography altered: there was white flight to the suburbs, migrations of unemployed men from the Deep South, redlining by mortgage companies, closures of factories. And the pollution was infamous: the Cuyahoga River was so laden with oil and flammable chemicals that quite regularly it burst into flames, and one such river fire in 1969 was so bad it damaged and nearly destroyed two iron railroad bridges. Race riots broke out with dismal frequency. Cleveland in the 1970s was a city in serious decline, with an aspect of hopelessness about it that seemed irreversible and incurable.

  After thirty years of decay and desuetude, a group of seers with progressive ideas arrived on the scene, with plans for maybe curing the city ills. In 2008, an experiment known as the Evergreen Cooperative was launched, with the intention of making sweeping reforms to the employment and housing situation, to the use of local land, and to improving the urban environment—and it was established with the enthusiastic cooperation of a weary and relieved Cleveland city government and the local hospitals and health-care companies that had lately built offices there. By all accounts the initiatives seem to be having some positive effects. The chronic population decline has flattened. New building has increased. There are new parks, bright new schools, and—at least until the 2020 pandemic struck—an increasing tax base.

  And the Cuyahoga River has become clean enough today to support some fish, if not necessarily pure enough to drink. Where once its waters oozed dankly between rotting wharves and ruined warehouses, now it sparkles in the sunshine, and families push children in strollers along pathways beside its banks. Cleveland is by no means out of trouble, but the kind of land reform ideas that were born in Georgia in the 1970s seem to be a key component of a raft of changes now being effected in one of America’s most grimly injured cities. The old place at long last is showing signs of beginning to heal.

  Sharing and distributing land more liberally, as it appears to be being shared here and in Cincinnati and in rural Vermont and Georgia, can do unanticipated good. If properly and fairly apportioned, land can be the key to so many possibilities, all of them for the general benefit of those of us who live and work and have our being upon it.

  Epilogue

  Yet Now the Land is Drowning

  The near universally held belief that underpins almost all of the dealings with land that I have described in this book can be summed up thus: land is the only thing on this earth that lasts. Some in the recent past have waxed lyrical on the theme: land is the only thing truly worth working for, worth living for, even worth dying for—and that is because its enduring nature is absolutely undeniable, is unchallengeable. The lasting nature of the solid surface of the world is axiomatic; it should be taken for granted, is as guaranteed as the setting and rising of the sun.

  And yet, as we now know, this is not so. In relatively recent times much new land-related knowledge has been gained, and as a result much has changed in our beliefs. Since 1965, for instance, we have come to know that continents are far more plastic than they look and that their land, once supposedly immobile, does indeed move, and that the plates to which this land is all bolted shift and jostle and plunge and collide one with the other in a ceaseless ballet of wandering rock. No one of intelligence alive today can doubt that continents are anything but fixed. We scoff at the naïveté and mulish ignorance of our forefathers who ever supposed otherwise. Eppur, as was famously remarked four centuries ago about the world entire, si muove.

  Similarly with the gospel that spoke then of the immutability of the land itself. Maybe, yes, some grudges would now say, it can be permitted to move somewhat—to deny what science has now shown to be true would be foolhardy indeed. But the quartermaster’s accounts still hold true, surely? The simple existential fact of the presence of 37 billion acres of the planet’s exposed surface is as sound a basis for surety as is the existence of gravity, or of mathematics. Two plus two is four. g runs at thirty-two feet per second per second. These are constants. Pi is a constant. Boyle’s law speaks of constancy. And similarly, land. Land endures. Land stays put. Land lasts. Its shape may change. It may now move a little, yes. But its totality remains the same, aeon by aeon forevermore.

  Except that since 2005, and a thicket of alarming news from those who study the strangeness of the climate, we have lately come to accept the truth of the very opposite.

  Land is decidedly not staying put. Land is in fact withering away. The seas that surround the land are rising, and they are rising fast. They are doing so because the world is getting warmer. The glacier ice and the Greenland ice and the Antarctic continental ice are all melting and pouring into the oceans, which are themselves becoming warmer, and their warming waters are swelling in volume. Tides are getting higher and storms are getting more frequent and surges are occurring in places where there never were surges before—and in sum, the land is under threat like never before in human existence.

  The land is drowning. It is slowly but steadily shrinking away, like a balloon with a leaky valve. And sensible humanity is being urged all around the planet to move away from the seas’ shorelines, and in due course shift to safer and higher ground.

  Thus far, the loss of land has been all but imperceptible. Between 1996 and 2011, for example, the East Coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida, lost just 13,000 of its acres to the clawing waters of the Atlantic Ocean. One would suppose this to be a tiny amount, scarcely worthy of mention. A year later, however, came Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City square on and then lingered: suddenly, rising-water nightmares and flood scenarios that New Yorkers had never imagined became an urgent reality. The previously imperceptible became the immediately catastrophic. Enormous areas of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island streetscapes were swept underwater, torrents of salt water poured into the always open gates of the subway system, road tunnels became truck-drowning floodways. Rising ocean levels became overnight a New York certainty, and as a result new sea walls, flood barriers, diversion canals, and pumping stations are being completed or built as the scientists warn and the politicians allow. The trivial-seeming inundations of the recent past are recognized for what they were truly were: auguries of a certain kind of global doom.

  The East Coast of the United States is particular vulnerable to rising sea levels, and many acres are already in 2020 being chewed away by oceanic storm surges and tidal erosion.

  The fate of the planetary land depends today on a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The steady melting of the once pure-white polar ice sheets has the simple effect of decreasing the planet’s reflectivity, its albedo. A nonreflective earth allows more solar heat to reach down and do its damage, melting more and making the now off-white world ever more gray. And the more gray, so still more heat is allowed to be absorbed and so still more gray all becomes, with the result that the circle deepens and widens and the melting accelerates—and the sea continues to rise up and up along the tide tables, and the storms become ever more numerous and dangerous, and land, more land, much more land, becomes swamp, becomes flood prone, slides underwater, then vanishes itself into the sea and is settled into becoming sea and finally being sea, forever.

  The figures now suggest that this kind of flooding will accelerate, in and around New York and elsewhere, and more urgently in those poorer, lower-lying countries that cannot afford to build barriers to help save themselves. This is a problem manifestly more urgent for those countries that will lose land that is thickly peopled, and by people who do not have the funds or the choices that might enable them to withstand, mitigate, or ameliorate the unstoppable forces of nature.

  Whole island groups will go. Out in the mid-Pacific, the Marshall Islands, which include Bikini and Eniwetok, where the first atom bombs were tested, will soon become green with shallow water and in later years blue when the water inundates them wholly. The vast-spread pattern of islands that make up today’s Republic of Kiribati, which being positioned both astride the International Date Line and the equator manages, uniquely, to exist in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and to experience today and yesterday, summer and winter, all at the same time, will go under too. In French Polynesia, Claude Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropique will become reality, Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore similarly, as rising waters erode old island landscapes and change islanders’ lives forever.

  Oceanic expansion will be truly global in its consequences. This rising of the waters will wash away mudflats in Bangladesh and West Bengal and Thailand and Burma, as well as eroding the estuary of the Yangtze in Shanghai, deepening the waters in New Orleans, flooding the docks in Oakland, London, and Valparaiso, turning the Fens and sands of East Anglia into open water.

  For a while, and for most people, the land losses will still be imperceptible, will be thought of as little more than omens, worries for the long term and faraway. Populations will adjust. Coastlines will be nibbled away, not gnawed at greedily. Big cities farther inland—Kolkata, Dhaka, Nanjing, Rangoon, Lima—will, if reluctantly, receive most of the nearby displaced. New Zealand is alive to the local problem and has said formally that it will accept some Pacific Islanders as climate-change refugees. Other countries may follow suit.

  It will be some long while before the 37 billion acres of the world are diminished by any serious fraction. It will be very many decades at least before as much as a single billion acres, for instance, could be thought of as being at immediate risk of loss. A billion acres is a combination of the areas of India and Pakistan together, is almost twice the combined areas of Alaska and Texas. It will be decades, centuries most probably, before land on that scale will be lost to the world. The coastal erosion experienced since 1996 along the Atlantic coast of North America amounts to a loss only of an acreage the size of San Marino, or of half of the island of Anguilla. Maybe by the end of the twenty-first century the world’s land surface will have shrunk by an area equivalent to, say, Belgium. The coastal lands are indeed withering, and they will not last. But they are withering slowly enough for many—if not necessarily most—to avoid the contemplation of making any specific plans to leave.

  Notably, however, the world’s major private landowners do not own or dominate coastlines to any significant degree. They may have their seaside mansions in New York’s Hamptons or in Britain’s Sandbanks or in Cap Ferrat or on the Queensland coast—which the flood-prediction maps all show as inevitable victims of the coming sea. But they have covered their bets—most probably unintentionally—in almost all cases by acquiring their long-term landholdings far away from the sea and at very much higher, flood-proof altitudes. The John Malones and the Gina Rineharts and the Ted Turners and the countless Scottish dukes own most of their acres back up in the hills and the heather, among the Rockies and the iron-rich Sierra interiors and the appositely named Scottish Highlands, with few of their holdings vulnerable to any elements of shrinkage.

  Although maybe, just maybe, the simple spreading knowledge of the vulnerability of land generally may prompt some of them to indulge in moments of sober reflection. It might give pause to some of the less greedy landowners—and maybe even the greedier ones too—to wonder just why the need to own so much when, in philosophical terms, the ownership of such an unownable entity as land means so little. Of course, the purely economic argument still lies in favor of ownership increases—in strictly monetary terms, a shrinking asset becomes ever more valuable, commands an ever higher premium as it becomes more rare. And yet: might the very fact of land’s newly realized impermanence not suggest to some that this could be the time to consider what has for so very long been well beyond consideration—the notion of sharing land, rather than merely owning it, outright?

  This would be an easier matter to contemplate if the vulnerable asset were something more readily tangible—if it were corn, oxygen, water, or fish—if the commodity in question, which had hitherto been available in limitless amounts, was suddenly seen to be depleting, and at a time when the world’s people had urgent need of it. In such a case even the most heartless would surely agree: rather than hoard it for himself, why not share it out, offer it for the betterment of the needy? And though the depletion rate of the world’s land is by no means an urgent business, the fact that it is depleting at all may give some the opportunity to wonder: What if I might share it out, and allow those who truly need it to have use or possession before it all passes beneath the rising waters?