Home and land ownership in New Zealand is at its lowest rate since 1951 and is expected to fall further. There is evidence of a structural shift—younger people are less likely to achieve home ownership than ever before.
Advertisements by banks on TVNZ, are suggesting that “first home buyers are an endangered species.” Why?
One reason is that in New Zealand, land has increasingly become a commodity, traded on the open market to be bought and sold as an ‘investment’, and not just to New Zealand residents.
Land has been objectified.
However, land is a living, breathing ecosystem. It has soil and grows plants, from grass to trees, which form the foundation of life—without them, we die. Whether we are vegan or carnivore (animal food comes from plants), plants are doing the one thing we can’t: photosynthesise. Plants take sunlight and water and, through a process we have yet to replicate, turn it into an extraordinary diversity of life. At the end of its life cycle, what is not eaten or carried away returns to the soil to help the next plants thrive.
We have managed to reduce land, which hosts the fullness of this sun-fed cycle of life, to an object to be traded. But we are not separate from land; we come from land, we need land, and we return to land.
When we stop objectifying it and acknowledge it as a living being, we might well ask: what’s the difference between the power-over, extractive destruction of life on land, and slavery, or controlling and selling another’s body in the sex trade? We have become used to making land our slave, selling it, abusing it, poisoning it, digging it up, cutting everything down, and stripping it bare.
While much good growing land has been lost under concrete, asphalt, and buildings, land is not evaporating, and over the past few months of holding fireside chats on the topic of land share, we’ve met more people looking to share land than looking for land to be on.
This leads to the point of this article.
If you want access to land in order to be part of healing it and helping it increase the abundance of food it produces (not overnight but over time), then take the first step.
Come to one of the Land Share Communication Skills trainings. This map shows where we will be from now until January 20th 2025. If you are keen to attend an event, get in touch.
We’re offering to help you recognise why communications often break down (and cause collaborations to fail), and then help you develop feelings-informed communications skills. If you attend a one-day training, we will add your profile to the [coming soon] land share section of this website, where kaitiaki, guardians, and owners of land can learn about and connect with you to make offers.