Atlantic City was a neighborhood before it was a highway.
The book started there — the crossing at Hampton and Brambleton, built on top of a community demolished to build it. The working-class neighborhood, racially integrated in a city that worked hard to prevent that, demolished in 1957 to build Norfolk General Hospital and the roads serving it. The community that was not relocated. The community that was erased.
What was taken, when Atlantic City was taken, was land.
Underneath the houses and the neighborhood and the social fabric: specific parcels in a specific city, held by the people who lived on them, organized by use and relationship and history. When the city took that land — through eminent domain, through the manufactured slum designation, through the simple fact that the people living there lacked the political power to resist — it took the foundation.
Walk the corridors around what is now the Eastern Virginia Medical School campus today. The neighborhood adjacent to the hospital — Ghent, the historic district along the Elizabeth River — is one of the most expensive zip codes in Hampton Roads. Art galleries. Wine bars. Renovated craftsman houses selling for $600,000. The value of this neighborhood was created, in significant part, by the institutional investment that displaced the community that had been there: the hospital, the medical school, the road infrastructure, the decades of public subsidy that built the anchor institutions whose presence made the surrounding land desirable. Atlantic City's residents were displaced to create the conditions that made their neighbors' land worth more. Their displacement is now invisible in the property values of the people who replaced them.
This is the enclosure running in real time.
Marx called the original version primitive accumulation — the foundational violence by which land held in common was separated from the people whose lives were organized around it, converted into private property, and made available for the extraction of value. The frontier this requires never disappears — it just moves. Atlantic City was that frontier in 1957. The Narmada valley was that frontier in 1999. The Weelaunee forest is that frontier now. It was not ancient history when Marx wrote about it. The English enclosures that drove peasants off common lands and into factory towns were living memory. The colonial land seizures dispossessing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, and Asia were ongoing. Marx named it primitive not because it was simple but because it was first: the precondition for everything that followed. You cannot extract rent from people who own the land they live on. You cannot compel wage labor from people who can feed themselves from their commons. Enclosure is not an accident of history. It is a political choice, made repeatedly, maintained by force.
In Burlington, Vermont, a couple who had been renting for seven years bought a Champlain Housing Trust home in the early 2000s — the trust Bernie Sanders had helped seed in 1984. They couldn't have bought at market rates in the neighborhood they loved; the trust made it possible. A decade later, when they needed to move, they sold back at a formula price: their investment returned, a share of appreciation, but not the full speculative gain the open market would have offered. The next family paid below-market. They chose this deliberately.
Brenda Torpy, who led the Champlain Housing Trust for two decades and spent years buying land in Burlington's gentrifying neighborhoods and taking it permanently off the market, described the trust's purpose plainly: not to make the market work better, but to refuse the market's premise that land is a commodity. The trust's resale covenant removes land from speculation permanently — structurally, through a legal structure that persists independent of whoever is in office, built into every deed. A pact across generations: the covenant binds the future to keep the land unenclosed.
Two hundred and sixty-three community land trusts operate in the United States today. The distinction that matters: affordable housing programs provide below-market units as long as funding lasts and political will holds. Community land trusts remove land from the commodity market through governance. Not subsidy that ends. Governance that persists.
What the economist and the land trust director and the policy analyst cannot quite say is this: the enclosure of land doesn't only take a resource. It severs a mode of consciousness.
E. Richard Sorenson spent decades in contact with preconquest peoples across New Guinea, Micronesia, the Andaman Sea, and South America, and documented something that defies easy summary in the language of Western social science. In communities that had not been enclosed — that still operated on open territory, without private property, without the cognitive apparatus of boundaries and ownership — sense of space itself was different. People navigated by affect, not by coordinates. A place had meaning through emotional relationship to it — the excitement of good hunting, the comfort of a particular clearing, the pleasure of a stream. Boundaries were hazy, overlapping, felt rather than drawn. Names for places were improvised, multiple, shared differently by different people. There was no single map. There was a living, distributed, relational intelligence woven between people and land over generations.
This is not romanticism. Sorenson was an anthropologist documenting a specific cognitive structure — one he watched collapse, in real time, on an island in the eastern Andaman Sea when tourism arrived. He described the collapse as a kind of cultural death: the subtle empathetic rapport that had organized consciousness simply went out, like a light, in the space of a week. What replaced it was the postconquest apparatus of property, formal identity, bounded space.
The people didn't go anywhere. The land didn't go anywhere. What was suppressed was the relationship between consciousness and place — the living intelligence that the land and the people had built together over generations. That intelligence is not recoverable from outside. It is only built from inside, through sustained relationship, over time, in specific places.
I know a little of what Sorenson is describing from the inside.
For a season I lived and worked with a community at the edge of wilderness in the Pacific Northwest. I was not a visitor. I was a teacher, and I taught not through information but through affect — the only way this transmission works, and only within a community, never one on one. I taught honoring and blessing and singing. I taught witnessing, listening, speaking to plants and trees. I taught the stalker's gait that the children dropped into when the deer walked into camp — not as a skill but as a doorway. Evocation, passed the only way it passes. I learned from people who carried these ways, and from ancient trees that were older than the tradition I was learning. I learned with my body and my soul as well as my mind. I remembered my ancestors.
I didn't watch people's relationship to land shift. I became the land inviting them into relationship. There's no other way to say it that's accurate. That's what the tradition asks of you, and what it gives back.
I've studied with students of the ecopsychologist Bill Plotkin, who has spent decades mapping the terrain between the soul and the living world — charting what he calls the descent to soul, the encounter with wildness that is not outside us but is us, the restoration of a relationship that postconquest civilization has been busy severing for five thousand years. Plotkin lays it out for both scientists and practitioners. I am a practitioner. A novice. I've learned a little from his students — wizards all — about shaping reality with a word, a glance, your absence at the right moment.
What I know is this: the capacity for this relationship is still in us. It has not been destroyed, only suppressed. It reasserts itself — in the stalker's gait, in the moment you stop and listen to what the forest is saying, in the grief that rises when a place you love is paved over. That grief is not sentiment. It is information. It is the consciousness Sorenson documented, still alive in us, recognizing a loss that the language of property and market price cannot name.
When Graeber observed in Debt that the idea of owing the earth repayment is absurd — that the earth gave everything, that framing our relationship to the living world in terms of debt and repayment just extends the enclosure logic into nature itself — he was touching this same truth from a different angle. The earth is not a creditor. It is not even a commons in the usual sense. It is the condition of possibility for everything the commons produces. The relationship that preconquest peoples maintained with land was not governance in our sense. It was kinship.
Indigenous and community-managed territories cover roughly 22 percent of Earth's land surface. They contain approximately 80 percent of the world's remaining biodiversity. This is not a coincidence. The communities that had the practice before anyone wrote the theory have been maintaining what the theory is still trying to describe.
The Kayapó people govern roughly 11 million hectares in the southern Amazon. During the Bolsonaro years, when federal environmental enforcement collapsed, deforestation inside Kayapó territory remained dramatically lower than in surrounding areas without active Indigenous governance. When illegal miners entered the territory, community members enforced the boundary directly, often without federal support. The forest is there because of the institution: defined territory, governing authority, locally adapted rules, multigenerational stakes, real enforcement — the design principles Ostrom documented from commons governance systems around the world, instantiated here across generations.
The adivasi communities in the Narmada valley — whose forest governance the dam project couldn't see — were running the same kind of institution. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 didn't create that governance. It recognized it, imperfectly, and immediately came under pressure to be undermined.
The threat to these territories is enclosure in its operational form. Global Witness documented over 200 killings of land and environmental defenders in 2020 — the majority in Latin America, over a third of them Indigenous. These deaths are not incidental to the ecological crisis. They are the ecological crisis at its operational level: the physical enforcement of enclosure against the governance holding ecosystems together.
The threat in its operational form kills the people who defend the land — but the defense also speaks. Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman born around 1956 near the Rio Toototobi, has spent decades campaigning to expel illegal gold miners and rubber tappers from Yanomami land; he co-founded the Hutukara Yanomami Association in 2004; following his international campaigning, Brazil recognized Yanomami land in 1992; and he has faced death threats for it. What sets his case apart is that it reaches us in his own words. The Falling Sky, told to and composed with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, defends the forest and the standing to speak for it at once. The miners take the land; the habit of studying from outside takes the account of it. He refuses both. The title is his: in Yanomami cosmology, the whites' extraction threatens to bring the sky down.
Carbon is released at scale when forests are cleared. Forests are cleared at scale when communities governing them lose territorial control. Housing becomes unaffordable when land becomes a speculation vehicle. The housing crisis and the extinction crisis share a cause: land governed for extraction rather than for the long-term benefit of the communities that depend on it.
At Standing Rock in 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and thousands of water protectors from Indigenous nations across the continent stood in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline to defend the Missouri River and treaty land. The state's response was water cannons in freezing temperatures, rubber bullets, mass arrest. I have friends who were there. They have scars. They can speak for themselves — I gesture to them in love and solidarity. Anyone reading should seek their words. They are the work embodied. What Standing Rock demonstrated, at a scale the world watched, is that the defense of land as a living relationship rather than a commodity is not historical. It is ongoing, right now, maintained at enormous personal cost by people who understand something about land that the pipeline's engineers and investors do not.
In the Weelaunee forest in Atlanta — the forest defenders call it Weelaunee, its Muscogee name, not the city's name for it — a community of people occupied old-growth forest to prevent a police training facility from being built there. They called it Stop Cop City. The state's response included the first use of domestic terrorism charges against forest defenders in American history. Tortuguita, a defender, was killed by police in January 2023. The forest defense continues. Here again: people placing their bodies between a living ecosystem and its destruction, understanding that the forest is not a resource to be managed but a community to be defended. That understanding is the preconquest consciousness Sorenson documented, still alive, reasserting itself in an old-growth stand outside Atlanta. Abjuration, cast for the commons — the body itself the boundary.
Hampton Boulevard is still there. The crossing is still dangerous. The neighborhood it was built on is still gone.
The institutions built on the displaced community are now the anchor institutions whose presence makes the surrounding land expensive. The displacement didn't just destroy a community. It created the conditions that made it impossible for a community like it to exist there again. The people who might have lived in Atlantic City now cannot afford to live in Ghent.
A woman who grew up in the neighborhood that replaced Atlantic City's residents said it plainly in Chapter 2: they're saying it's for us, but really they're just sprinkling us in there to make us feel welcome. She knew the structure before this chapter existed. She was describing the completion of a process she was living inside — the enclosure made visible to the people it enclosed, decades before any analyst named it.
The Champlain trust. The Kayapó territory. The Forest Rights Act. Standing Rock. Weelaunee. The season I spent becoming the land for a community learning to remember. These are the same foundational recognition in different conditions: that land is not a commodity, that the relationship between consciousness and place is not a luxury but a necessity, that the governance structures we build either honor that relationship or destroy it.
To some, land is an asset. A balance sheet entry. A speculation vehicle. To others, land is life itself. The ground under your feet is not raw material. It is the oldest commons, the one the whole of the rest of this book depends on, the one we have been enclosed from longest, the one we most need to find our way back to.
Land is the foundation. And the foundation is alive.
Keeping it alive is care. The next chapter is who does that work, and why the system needs the work to stay invisible.