What does it mean to "USE" land....?

 We know that Land Rights matter -- Secure land tenure helps create long-term stewardship and investment in Soil Care, and we know that ecological damage is caused or exacerbated by unjust land appropriation.

But what if... What if we stopped thinking about "using" land and started thinking of "enhancing land"? Would it really matter who "owned the land" and who "worked the land" if all land tenants focused on regenerative landscape techniques?

What are we "using" the land for, anyway?

Housing and food production are the two big "uses" and somehow we've blundered into the notion that we humans can't shelter or feed ourselves without "degrading" the landscape.

Is this necessarily true?

Of course not.  

In my lectures I introduce students to the Vertical Urban Farm concept of Colombia's Dickson Dispommier and add to it my own concepts of the "Lifted Lithosphere".  In this concept buildings can be conceived simply as a "raised landscape".  The "footprint" of the building doesn't have to be a damaging ecological footprint -- in fact it can have a POSITIVE ecological footprint, a raising of biodiverse or bioproductive landscape into the Z axis direction.  If we had the political will... if we had the cultural acceptance, there would be no nocive "land USE" per se, and I would argue that human habitation could radically INCREASE the amount of biodiversity, the ecosystem services and ecological functions along with the housing function. 

This would be true of the food production function too. 

Would it then matter whether most of us had our own "land rights" if the land itself had certain rights -- the right to be biodiverse and productive regardless of who "owned" the land or "lived on" the land?

Of couse we want "ACCESS" rights - but for most of us it isn't access to the "land" per se that counts, but access to the fruits of the land.  Few of us really want to "work the land" do we?  Permacultural relationship with landscape can be a joy, but agriculture is conbsidered to be rather miserable (or so says the Bible, where "working the land" is part of the curse humanity supposedly inherited when we got "kicked out of the garden".)

So maybe the way to approach land policy is to focus on the rights of land itself rather than human "rights" TO the land.

The conceit would be that once we give "personhood" to the land (the way that New Zealand is beginning to do for some water bodies), we could give everyone certain "access" to that "person" in such a way that they never violate her/his/its rights (meaning the humans lose access as soon as they violate any rights of the land to be biodiverse and productive and in ecological balance).