Help educate people to reduce human occupation and use of the land that rightly belongs to nonhuman animals.
What
RPA’s This Land Is Their Land campaign challenges our species’ self-entitlement to all of Earth’s land, the beings on it, and their natural homes and ecosystems. This Land Is Their Land urges authorities and citizens to devise land-use policies that reduce animal abuse, restore Earth, humanely, equitably, and justly reduce human overpopulation and over-occupation of Earth, and reduce civilization’s impacts on Earth and all of its animals, including human beings.
Why
Much of the abuse human beings inflict on other animals is due to our species’ overpopulating Earth, occupying far more land than their original, natural home on the African savanna, making nonhuman animals’ natural homes into artificial human homes, destroying forests, prairies, wetlands, deserts, oceans, lakes, and waterways, disrupting topsoil, and poisoning water, soil, and air.
Books like Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape by Francesca Russello Ammon, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins, Topsoil and Civilization by Vernon Gill and Tom Dale, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil by Daniel J. Hillel, and The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler make clear that, long before climate breakdown and the extreme pollution that precedes it, our species caused enormous suffering in nonhuman animals and human beings through practices taken for granted even when we deplore environmental destruction: destroying naturally occurring vegetation and soil to produce food; maintaining expanses of nonnative turf grass at homes, athletic fields, industrial complexes, golf courses, and elsewhere; paving over enormous amounts of soil, and more.
These unnatural human practices abuse and stress nonhuman animals incalculably and deny countless beings a chance at a fulfilling life. Animals not killed outright by our species’ reckless land use suffer from pain, fear, stress, anxiety, loss of family members, encounters with other members of their species as they flee to seek new homes and territories, and other factors. Human beings are secondary victims of the same abysmal land-use policies and practices.
Nonhuman animals generated nearly all life on Earth as humans have experienced it these past few million years. Nonhuman animals spread seeds and pollen. Their bodies become soil when they die and decompose. Tiny animals break down vegetation and animals when they die, converting them to topsoil, the source of the vegetation which human beings and other animals rely on for survival and wellbeing.
Only by reversing our species’ long, destructive rampage over Earth can we begin to improve our own plight and that of other animals, creating a brighter future for all.
How
RPA’s This Land Is Their Land campaign promotes rolling back our species’ destructive land use and returning as much of Earth’s surface as possible to other animals. This Land Is Their Land began with letters to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and some state chapters, urging those organizations to acknowledge harm done by our species’ treating all land as potential human property and to cooperate in reducing the human impact on Earth’s other animals. Approximately one in 200 adult Americans is a realtor.
This Land Is Their Land principles are incorporated in RPA’s free background paper “Governing for Life: How Officials Can End Animal-Abuse Policy, Annihilation of Nature, and Resulting Human Misery by Upholding the Constitution and Its Stated Values.”
Send “Governing for Life” to your legislators and other authorities. Ask them their long-term vision for the living world and whether they can reconcile it with the current human trajectory. Apply your knowledge of nature and animals. Help draft much-needed RPA literature for the organization’s This Land Is Their Land campaign. Discuss your ideas with RPA. The field is wide open! Despite massive conservation efforts, the living world continues to lose ground. Maybe it can help to establish in the human mind that nonhuman animals made Earth what it is and are morally entitled to it, while human beings have long undermined it and claimed it for themselves despite only being morally entitled to their original home on the African savanna.