Belonging isn’t the same as ownership – but it’s not the opposite, either
Lately I’ve been sitting with a tension that keeps resurfacing in our conversations about land, care, and the future.
It shows up whenever we talk about taking land “off the market.”
I understand the impulse. I share it. The market has proven itself to be a poor steward. Left to its own logic, it treats land as something to be flipped rather than tended, extracted rather than known.
And yet, I’m no longer convinced that removing land from the market automatically returns it to right relationship.
In some cases, it simply moves the problem to a kinder landlord.
There’s a story we like to tell ourselves — that if no one owns the land, everyone will care for it. That collective responsibility will naturally give rise to good stewardship.
But as the saying goes, when everyone is responsible, no one is. When responsibility is spread thin, two things happen. Some people step back, trusting “the collective” will hold things together. Others step forward, offering real care — but are asked to do so without expectation of return, in service to that same abstract “collective.”
Some do the work of the collective. Others reap the benefit. They aren’t always the same people.
As a result, care doesn’t recirculate. It’s offered — often generously, lovingly — but then absorbed into some nameless collective, never finding its way back to the caretakers in the form of security, continuity, or future capacity.
When the people doing the long, slow work of tending land are structurally unable to carry forward the value they’ve created — ecological, relational, cultural, material, and financial — separated, as it were, from the fruits of their labour, they become temporary occupants of something they can never fully belong to.
No matter how sacred the language, that’s still tenancy.
And tenancy, over long enough timelines, undermines rootedness. The body learns a dangerous lesson: I don’t belong here.
Over time, when long-term care is given but not returned, the system — often unintentionally — quietly eats its caregivers.
That doesn’t mean private ownership is the answer. Ownership, too, has been wounded — confused with exclusion, hoarding, and speculation. But I’m beginning to think the real question isn’t ownership versus “taking it off the market.”
It’s whether our structures allow care to accumulate over time as a legacy and reward for doing the hard work of caretaking.
In healthy land-based cultures, stewardship and livelihood were inseparable. The land fed the people, and the people’s care fed the land. Good stewardship was rewarded — not extravagantly, but enduringly. Poor stewardship carried consequences too — not as punishment, but as feedback.
That pairing mattered. It made care rational, not heroic. It allowed people to become rooted — not because they were idealistic, but because the system returned their care in tangible ways across time.
Today, we’re often trying to build ethical futures by denying the role of economics altogether, as if money itself were the contamination. But economics, at its root, was never about extraction. It was about proper care of the oikos — the wise tending of a shared home. What corrupted it wasn’t ownership, but disconnection. Disconnecting caretakers from ownership, then, only aggravates the problem.
So I find myself wondering:
Can we truly belong to the land if the land can never, in any meaningful way, belong to us?
Not as a thing to dominate or exclude others from — but as something we are allowed to carry responsibility for, and be carried by, in return. As something that can hold the memory of our care and return it, in its own time, as continuity, dignity, or care when we can no longer give as we once did.
What kinds of arrangements allow people to earn a stake through stewardship — a form of stewardship equity — where responsibility, risk, and reward remain bound together, and where care is not only given, but received?
I don’t have clean answers yet. But I’m increasingly certain that if our systems require people to give their care without ever allowing that care to return — as rootedness, legacy, or future possibility — we shouldn’t be surprised when exhaustion sets in, or when the land quietly begins to suffer alongside them.
Belonging, it turns out, is not the opposite of ownership.
It may be what ownership was meant to protect.