‘Right to roam’ movement fights to give the commons back to the public

Like most nations, England doesn’t have legally recognized rights for citizens to cross non-public lands. This means that the nearly 56 million people who live there are only legally allowed to access 8% of the country. One particularly picturesque example of this problem was recently noted by the BBC, which discussed a large piece of public land that’s actually inaccessible due to being surrounded by private land, forcing people to trespass in order to reach it.

Right to Roam campaigner Jon Moses speaks with Rachel Donald on the latest Mongabay Newscast about a growing movement in England that stages creative events like group walks on private land to point out the benefits of public access for repairing degraded landscapes and improving the lives of everyday citizens, which are outlined in a new book, Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, that he’s co-edited with Nick Hayes.

Listen here:

Freedom-to-roam laws aren’t widely recognized outside of Scandinavia and Europe, but Moses says these rights are fundamental to repairing the damage caused by centuries of private land ownership.

“I think that there needs to be a kind of rethinking really of [what] people’s place is in the landscape and how that intersects with a kind of new … vision of farming and a new relationship between people and nature as well.”

Among the reasons Moses says is given for the increase in private land ownership over the past few centuries is industrial agriculture, which he says isn’t benefiting the farmers all that much either. Moses says the reasons for decreases in the rights of “commoners,” as they’re referred to, to access and use common land in England were in part to suppress wage growth and quash locals’ autonomy.

“They’re really kind of explicit about this in the documentation, that we need to break common rights in order to create a kind of more dependent class of agricultural laborers that are reliant on a wage,” Moses says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.

Banner image: Thousands gather for a protest against the attempt to ban wild camping on Dartmoor. Campaigners gathered to raise ‘Old Crockern’ – a mythical spirit of the moor – on Stall Moor, owned by the landowner leading the ban. Image courtesy of Jon Moses.

Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.

Related Reading:

Public lands and parks are our common heritage: Bruce Babbitt