Prefigurative Community Building (Part 16)
Stewardship Commons: Rewilding Land through Collective Care
Across the world, ecological degradation has paralleled the unraveling of social cohesion. Extractive land use, displacement, and enclosure have severed many people from any living relationship with land. As climate collapse accelerates, the need for restorative, community-rooted land stewardship has become urgent, not as a technocratic solution, but as a reconnection to mutual care. This is where the Stewardship Commons arises: not as a nostalgic return to "pristine nature," but as an invitation to regenerate living relationships between people and place.
The housing crisis, land dispossession, and ecological collapse are interwoven. Many communities, especially those historically excluded from land access, are rediscovering the principle of land as a commons, not owned, but stewarded. This pattern is not merely about protecting ecosystems. It’s about re-establishing community agency, healing fractured relationships, and cultivating Power With: coordination through mutual responsibility, distributed leadership, and reciprocal care.
Coordination Pattern: Stewardship Commons
A Stewardship Commons is a community-led land project in which land is held, restored, and cared for collectively, without centralized authority or private ownership. Rewilding becomes a participatory process: ecological regeneration is interlaced with social healing. No single person owns the land. Instead, care responsibilities are shared, negotiated, and adapted over time, shaped by the needs of the land and those in reciprocal relationship with it.
This pattern embodies Power With by emphasizing shared decision-making, distributed authority, and the interdependence of ecological and social regeneration. It resists Power Over models that dominate land through ownership, control, or technocratic gatekeeping.
Step-by-Step Guide
1. Identify a site for potential stewardship
Seek out degraded, abandoned, or underutilized land. This might be a vacant urban lot, a neglected rural edge, or a space threatened by development. Spend time with the site. Observe its ecologies. Learn its history, including who lived there before colonization or displacement.
2. Assemble a circle of care
Gather people who live nearby or are deeply connected to the area—local residents, youth, elders, gardeners, foragers, Indigenous knowledge holders. Avoid formal hierarchies. Begin with listening and collective dreaming.
3. Learn from the land and its past
Before proposing interventions, spend time learning: What grows here? What used to grow here? What animals visit? What has been extracted, polluted, or lost? Consult with ecological restoration practitioners, but also with local memories and ancestral stories.
4. Co-create principles of stewardship
Together, define how you want to relate to the land and to each other. These could include values like reciprocity, non-extraction, open participation, and long-term commitment. Use these shared principles to guide decisions rather than a rigid plan.
5. Develop a light-touch rewilding plan
Begin small. Remove invasive species, plant native ones, restore water flow, and support biodiversity. Let the land lead. Avoid grand interventions. Center slow, continuous observation and adaptation.
6. Structure participation through shared roles
Use rotating roles, seasonal workdays, and group reflections. Let people contribute in multiple ways: some may plant, others cook for work crews, others document and tell stories. Value all forms of labor equally.
7. Formalize collective land care (if needed)
If you need legal structure, consider a Community Land Trust (CLT), land cooperative, or conservation easement that prevents privatization while keeping control in community hands. Avoid centralization by designing structures with distributed accountability.
Avoiding Power Over
No ownership, only stewardship: Avoid private deeds or sole custodianship. Hold land through collective legal structures or informal pacts of care.
No experts in charge: Share knowledge horizontally. Validate lived experience, ancestral wisdom, and ecological observation equally.
No hierarchical leadership: Rotate facilitators. Use consensus or sociocratic methods. Design for adaptability, not authority.
No single vision: Let the land, the seasons, and the community co-shape the project. Be wary of control disguised as “good management.”
No savior logic: The land is not a problem to fix, it is a relationship to renew.
Two Real-World Examples
1. Earthseed Land Collective (North Carolina, USA)
A Black- and Brown-led community that collectively stewards land for ecological restoration, cooperative housing, food sovereignty, and cultural healing. Their governance is participatory, spiritual, and place-based, blending ancestral stewardship with ecological regeneration.
https://earthseedlandcollective.org
2. Sogorea Te' Land Trust (California, USA)
An Indigenous, women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous stewardship. Their approach honors rematriation, ceremony, and collective care, reweaving broken land relationships in the Bay Area.
https://sogoreate-landtrust.org
Resources to Support the Work
The Community Land Trust Network — For models of collective land governance
Regenerative Land Trusts via Agrarian Trust — For farmers, rewilders, and stewards
The Common Cause Handbook — On shared values in collective action
CELDF Legal Tools — Community-led defense of land and ecosystems
Native Land Map — Understand Indigenous land relationships and responsibilities
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — On Indigenous wisdom and reciprocity with land
Regeneration is Relationship
Stewardship commons are not a return to some imagined past, but a forward practice, a weaving of new relationships that reject enclosure and embrace care. Through small, collective acts of tending (planting, listening, repairing) people begin to re-enter the ecological story they were taught to forget.
This pattern is about more than restoring land. It’s about restoring the social fabric, not as uniform community but as living plurality. In this interdependence, Power With becomes generative: not control over land, but emergence with land. The flourishing of one becomes bound to the flourishing of all.
Let this be one thread in a new weave of care that is quiet, patient, and wild.