Decompiling Oppression #145
Sam McVeety
The Norwegian government's unofficial translation of the 1957 Outdoor Recreation Act begins with the following statement:
The purpose of this Act is to protect the natural basis for outdoor recreation and to safeguard the public right of access to and passage through the countryside and the right to spend time there, etc, so that opportunities for outdoor recreation as a leisure activity that is healthy, environmentally sound and gives a sense of well-being are maintained and promoted.
Variously called the "right to roam" or "freedom to roam" (literally allemannsrett, or "every [person's] right"), this practice allows for recreational use of land by the public at a vast scale. The structure is notable: land is divided into innmark (cultivated or developed land) and utmark (anything else), where the right applies to the latter, and crucially, land not explicitly designated as innmark defaults to utmark. For owners of utmark, it is in fact illegal to build barriers for the sole purpose of blocking public access. The right is also seasonally contingent; it extends to some categories of innmark that can be traversed when covered in snow without damaging the underlying land.
Returning from Norway, I was reflecting on this practice, and thinking about how it invites us to see entirely different ways of being. Here in the United States, with private property viewed as sacrosanct (with a handful of exceptions), I would expect something as far-reaching as allemannsrett to be met with strident opposition, not simply for supposed unworkability, but calling its very nature naive and unrealistic. I see so much of our political and policy imagination being constrained by very narrow conceptions of the possible, with transformative ideas being mired in a thicket of hypotheticals (for example, a social safety net without work requirements wrecking the labor market), as if the status quo didn't have its own host of downsides.
We also see this in retrospect: implementations that are not undeniable successes are declared failures (never to be revisited again), rather than examined as the complex systems that they are. Many, many divergences from the criminal legal system come to mind, whether that is new approaches to treating substance abuse disorder or other divergence programs.
Systems like the Outdoor Recreation Act flip our common assumptions (like an absolute right to private land) on their head, showing that different realities are possible. Of course, there are critiques and proposed changes; this isn't evidence that the policy is broken, but rather that it exists as part of a living system. These emergent complexities also invite us to see what other differences might buttress such realities. In Norway, one of those differences is the widespread cultural prominence of stewardship and respect for the outdoors. It's a reminder that, while we often imagine achieving change as requiring changing just one thing, the complex world that we inhabit is rife with interconnectedness; change can be an iterative process.
Were we to imagine allemannsrett in the United States, some of this complexity would come from our own history of Indigenous dispossession. Whereas Norway casts utmark (alternately described as "uncultivated") as corresponding to a positive right to access, the supposedly "undeveloped" nature of Indigenous land in the United States was used as pretense to seize it as part of settler colonialism. Public access in the United States would also need to contend with the resources promised in various treaty provisions.
Let's return to the core audacity of a widespread public good. Where else might we imagine these? While there are promising glimmers in programs like universal (or guaranteed) basic income programs, the empirical findings of those programs (they work!) are still threatened to be overwhelmed by culturally rooted skepticism (and political disinterest in an empowered working class). If we take a broader look, though, we can see that the world holds a myriad of other possibilities.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Where might the world we live in today be different?
Communal: How can we lay the cultural groundwork to realize these different possibilities?
Solidarity: Support Queer the Land and their work to address the root causes and power structures that displace communities and destabilize their organizing work.
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