His Majesty King Charles III
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
Your Majesty,
I write to you as your "astrological twin sister". Yes, we were both born on the fourteenth day of November 1948. And as the stars appear, within 10 minutes of each other. My mother sometimes laughingly said this about the day she and your mother gave birth to us: "That woman is doing the same thing as I am, why is she getting all the attention?"
I write to you as someone who also raised two children, who loves to garden and ride horses as you do (and both our mothers did), and as one who cares deeply about the state of our world, as you do.
As your astrological twin sister, I write this open letter to you in the hope that you might be moved to engage in a conversation with people from around the world. Together, as King and Commoners, I think that we can find clarity for a way forward, a way to end poverty, homelessness and hunger, and to build a world that works for everyone including the animals and plants, indeed for life itself. Through our sincere conversation I am certain right action will follow and we will create a world where justice will keep the peace and thus will we end the scourge and abomination of war once and for all. [1]
UK resident and Irish scholar Kevin Cahill wrote a magnificent book titled Who Owns the World [2] which is the first compilation of landowners and landownership structures in every single one of the world's 197 states and 66 territories. Who Owns the World covers the history of landownership as far as written history allows and shows the division of landownership in every region of the globe. Cahill identified the person who owns the largest proportion of the world's land and documents that person's landholdings. [3] That person was your mother. Now it is you, my dear astrological twin brother.
With the Crown comes your leadership role in the governments and thus the people of the British Commonwealth. You will bear an enormous responsibility in your vested legal ownership of over one-sixth of the planet's surface. You will reign in 32 countries and territories having a total land mass of 6,698 million acres which will bear your name as superior, or ultimate owner. In contrast, the United States as a country has 2,400 million acres while Russia has 4,200 million acres. As Cahill says, this is "a phenomenon never to be seen elsewhere on earth". The word "own" is used deliberately, being the word her Canadian Attorney General's office used to describe the legal status of all of Canada's vast territory."[4]
What we commoners know about what you as now King Charles III owns in personal property in the UK is this: "private, or near private, landed possessions in the home territory come to about 637,000 acres."[5] This makes my three-and-a-half acre family homestead quite minuscule indeed, yet we are so grateful to have it for our beautiful flower, vegetable and water gardens, pasture for animals and woodlot.
In Who Owns the World, Cahill describes in great detail the legal machinations of the Crown's ownership rights. He says that these are a "manifest continuation and legitimisation of feudalism in the modern world". Of the rights asserted in Magna Carta I he tells us that the barons "did not question the King's feudal superiority and his overall ownership of the land of the realm""[6]
You bear an enormous responsibility as you are technically and legally the ultimate owner and controller of by far the greatest proportion of the earth's territory compared to anyone else. Thus a stunning opportunity will be placed upon your shoulders as the crown is placed upon your head on May 6, your coronation day. You will have a highly visible capacity to ask one of the most important questions of our time, that of not just who owns the world, but of how SHOULD the earth be "owned"? And this question of earth ownership has been central to my own life's quest. I want to share with you some of what I have learned in this regard, as detailed in my award-winning book, The Earth Belongs to Everyone. [7]
During my time since we were born I have come to the realization that the ultimate claim of ownership of the earth's land and natural resources cannot be made on the basis of prior claim, discovery, purchase, military conquest, ability to maintain and secure possession, constitutional law, or length of residency.
Ultimately the only rational, supportable, moral, just and ethical basis upon which a claim of ownership can be made is by birthright to the gifts of nature and that cannot be an exclusive claim. The claim by birthright can only be legitimate if it is acknowledged that all other human beings have an equal claim to land and natural resources. The deepest ethical dimension of territorial rights recognizes that humanity is one and indivisible in its fundamental claim to the earth as the birthright of all. [8]
We people of the planet owe a great debt of gratitude as well as profound apologies for the manner in which we have treated indigenous people who have lived longer and closer to the precepts of natural law than most of the several billion of us. Colonization declared their lands "terra nullius" meaning void of human habitation as church and state considered native people to be savages and subhuman. [9] We can understand the Native American word wetiko[10] to mean those whose consciousness is that of being separate from the earth and from each other, whereas native people viewed the world as a whole and all human beings as related to all of nature. They said in their greetings and prayers Mita'kuye Oya's?i? meaning "all my relations."
John Mohawk,[11] a Native American leader and university academic, said this in his essay on The Problem of the Modern World: "When land became a "commodity" and lost its status as provider and sustainer of life, Western civilization began its history of subjugation and exploitation of the earth and earth-based cultures. For five centuries people have been coerced from their landholdings. The problem, in the English-speaking world, has its roots in the sixteenth century."[12]
Mohawk was speaking of the Enclosures Period,[13] when masses of common people in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere were forced off of their customary commons and other landholdings.
Enclosure could be accomplished by buying the ground rights and all common rights to accomplish exclusive rights of use, which increased the value of the land. The other method was by passing laws causing or forcing enclosure, such as parliamentary enclosures. The latter process was sometimes accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England. [14]
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