It is the source of our nourishment and the ground upon which we build our families, our communities, and our dreams. Yet we live in a culture that has turned land into a commodity—a thing to be bought and sold, used and abused, and traded for profit. Like other necessities, access to land is determined by money, and those without it are locked out.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
We can to imagine and create new ways of owning, sharing, and caring for the places which sustain us. We can make land accessible to those who have been excluded from it, and we can place more and more land into the hands of people and organizations who are dedicated to growing just and sustainable forms of life and livelihood in our communities.
This is the project of Land in Common.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community land trust founded in 2008, we are working to develop a durable, state-wide, democratically-run cooperative structure for the ownership, care, and equitable distribution of land in Maine. Building on years of experience working with members of the JED Collective homestead (now Wild Mountain Cooperative) and neighboring elder landowners to successfully protect more than 300 acres of agricultural and wild land in Greene, we are now launching a wider phase of work, seeking to bring new parcels of land across Maine into common ownership and to redistribute their long-term use and care to those who need them and will use them for good work.
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