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A collection of signs taken down from their positions defining ‘boundaries of separation’ of enclosed land, woodland and privatised places across the UK and Austria.

We are entirely used to our land, woodland, rivers and most places to be defined as public, or private. Ownership, whether of land, property or object is without question a completely normal and fundamental concept that underpins how we live. But it has not always been like this. The worldview of indigenous cultures across the world today, and indeed of our own indigenous ancestors here in the UK, have different understandings about the ‘ownership’ of land, about the human as a part of ‘nature’, and of how ‘inner’ mind is woven into ‘outer’ world.

I have been long interested in the British story of land ownership, the progression of enclosure that has gradually eroded the commons over a thousand years and all the immediate injustices that have come with it to the point today where only 8% of England is openly accessible to its citizens. But I am intrigued by how far this story of separation goes and how many layers there are to it. Enclosure of wild and common land into private ownership. A progressive separation of humans from nature. A separation of self from other, both human and non-human. But it runs deeper still, enmeshing itself into the reductionist assumptions of Rene Descartes’s separation of the thinking mind, or subject, from the material world of things, or objects. Reductionist assumptions that still dominate our thought systems today.

I have found these signs we see fixed up everywhere fascinating on so many levels. It is entirely normal and completely accepted that this is the way of things: Private Land = NO ENTRY. But these signs enforce more than simply the boundary of ‘private’ land, woods or ‘property’… they enforce a worldview - that says that humans are separate from nature, separate from ecosystems, separate from each other, and that our ‘inner’ thoughts and images are separate from the ‘outer’ phenomena of the world.

In a time of rapidly escalating climate crisis, we need to make significant changes, right now. As we learn more each year about the value of rewilding land to stabilise and enrich ecosystems to be at their most climate resilient, it is my feeling that we need to equally attend to the rewilding of the human. To embed ourselves once more in nature, with all the direct proven benefits to health of mind, body, family and community, and with the extension that once we feel nature connected, we understand better and are motivated for planetary care. And that with this comes a deeper rewilding of our understanding of who and what we are, of our perception. In taking action on the crisis in the climate it seems important to recognise that it has far reaching roots in the crisis in our perception.