Meet and Greet Clydebank

Audio (Sorry about quality) from SLC Meet and Greet Clydebank

Info: From event advert.

Join us at the Scottish Land Commission Meet & Greet taking place on:

Thursday 21 September 2017 from 7pm

Clydebank Town Hall, Clydebank

 This is your opportunity to find out more about the new Scottish Land Commission, who we are and what we do.

We would also like to hear from you and what you think the priorities for land reform should be.

For more information call 

0300 244 4452 

or email:

info@landcommission.gov.scot.

Website: landcommission.gov.scot

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Land 

Trouble with important issues like land reform, is that they are served up as dry conversations that only those either with invested interests, or obsessives like ourselves are interested. I mean if Gov. "Meet and Greet" is to mean anything and get to ordinary people it needs to create the kind of dynamic that will get folk to come along.

And for a start given the urgent climatic shift we are experiencing at present we shouldn't be obsessing about land, but about earth. We should be really talking about the potential we have in this country for the protection of the earth. As most of the damage is done to the planet through the idea of people believing they own parts of it, and that gives them the right to do what they want. Wether it be grouse shooting in the north of Scotland, or the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. We have proof that the ownership of the earth by converting it to land, is not the best stewardship for future generations. We need to try something else. We have to try something else. Look at this country (Scotland) it has just about got everything going for it in renewable energy. An endless supply of downward moving water, waves pounding every shoreline, wind round every corner. Our engineering once kept the world supplied with ships and steam engines and to drive the industrial revolution. Why can't the natural resources of our country be used to drive the next revolution. A revolution about giving things up, about sharing, about innovation for transforming life, not for producing endless junk nobody needs. And about finding enjoyment in thought, peace of mind and education. Another thing we were once well known for. 



Land ownership is an abstraction, dreamed up by the rentier society, that is those who make money while they sleep. ie for doing nothing. Reading up about these things you wonder why we were stupid enough to go along with it.

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses

All of this suedo ownership of Scotland didn't happen that long ago. In the intrim we could tell the so called owners of the land they can keep the land with their big house, but they are not allowed to make money off of it. 

Maybe we could spare some contemporary crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors on the human race if we started to look at the earth for what it is to everybody, not just lawyers, business, the state, land owners and the oil corporations.

We need to start our own conversation about land and our relationship to it. In an understandable language relating to human needs not the needs of landlords.