Land of opportunity

Fiona Mackenzie delivered the annual Marston LaFrance Fellowship research lecture on Wednesday, March 10, 2010.

In her lecture, Islands of Possibility: land reform in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Mackenzie, professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, presented the culmination of the research she had conducted for the fellowship.

She spoke about the benefits that community ownership of the land brings to the people living in the Outer Hebrides. For generations, crofters had lived on and worked the land as tenants of huge estates that were owned by (frequently) individual absentee land owners.  Land reform, specifically community land ownership, by reversing practices of enclosure and privatization, provides them and other residents on the estates with opportunities to turn around economic, environmental, and social difficulties.
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With reference particularly to the North Harris Trust, a community land-owning body that now owns 62,500 acres on the Isle of Harris, she traced how the community was redefining itself as common rights to the land were re-established. She further explored how the community was taking responsibility for the conservation of areas of land with environmental designations of national, UK, and European provenance, and how generating renewable energy from small, community-owned, wind farms would provide much needed capital for supporting the land owning trusts’ objectives.

At the same time, Mackenzie was concerned to link what was going on in the Outer Hebrides with broader questions of property, nature and neoliberalisation.  She argued that, by re-working the meanings of property and nature, community land ownership opened up the political terrain of particular places to more socially just and sustainable futures.