We are not asking you to fight for someone else, far away. We are asking you to fight for your own survival, which depends on Indigenous and local community’s land rights, on their ability to take care of the land, and to teach everyone else how to do so. We are asking you to stop the harm that is created by this system that privileges most people in the Global North, that many of us are born in and inherited, and that therefore we have a responsibility to transform. Actively confronting our complicity, and the discomfort that comes with it, is the first step to cultivate responsibility and redeploy some of those privileges at the service of frontline communities. We are also asking you to fight for your own land in the Global North, that has been taken away from us so long ago that we do not even remember we ever lived in connection with it.

This story of elites separating communities from the land began even before colonialism, in Europe, with the enclosures, when the aristocracy and capitalist class violently removed communities from the land in order to profit from it: it was a forgotten social catastrophe. The great land grab started here and then moved to the Global South. In Africa as in Europe, as in most of the world, people’s land has been taken away by elites for profit, and as a result is being destroyed, threatening the survival of humanity. It is time to come together and reclaim our LAND BACK, so that we can regenerate it together.