Our Mission

One-planet possibilities

We’ve lived on the land in community, and tasted the many joys of a life rich in connection to nature and tribe. We’ve experienced the sense of meaning and purpose that comes with enacting a direct, creative and holistic response to the multiple crises of our times.

We know that genuinely affordable, healthy and beautiful low-impact homes can easily be built; that low-cost, high-quality, nature-based lifestyles can easily be created; that regenerative ways of growing food are easily applied; and that a host of other one-planet solutions exist which can comfortably meet human needs while respecting ecological limits. And we believe that everyone who wants to embrace these possibilities should have the opportunity to do so.

Sadly, despite clear demand for land-based community living here in the UK, remarkably few thriving communities exist, and the obstacles to their creation—financial, bureaucratic, and social—remain formidable. Most would-be pioneers can't find a path out of the matrix of modernity, and many feel their dreams of one-planet living forever out of reach—while they remain trapped in unaffordable housing, their mental health plummets, and their cost of living soars.

The Land-Based Living Collective seeks to change this. Our mission is to forge a broad, accessible pathway back onto the land and into land-based community, and to provide robust support for all those ready to walk that path.

Land-based futures

We’re working to become an enabling organisation dedicated to building a vibrant network of land-based settlements all across these green isles, empowering individuals and groups on the journey back—and forward—home to the land. We aim to shape a near-term future in which low-impact land-based living is recognised as a legitimate and valuable contribution to our cultural tapestry—where hundreds of thriving communities across the UK demonstrate that humans can live harmoniously together in ways that contribute positively to the healing of natural ecosystems while also providing a low-cost, high-quality way of life.

This isn’t a utopian retreat from society, but an active reimagining of what sustainable human settlement can look like in the 21st century—a “thrutopian” vision that acknowledges the many challenges we face while charting elegant, holistic, research-informed pathways through them.

We know that the return to the land won’t appeal to everyone—at least not while the current system still provides a semblance of stability and security. But a growing number of us here in the UK recognise that low-impact, nature-based community living offers a great many benefits for both people and planet, and many thousands would be ready to embrace it today—if given the chance. We also believe that millions more would love to see our countryside re-populated by gentle folk working intimately with the land in ways that not only restore ecological flourishing but which nourish the roots of a renewed culture of connection, natural abundance and joy.

In these ways, we exist to serve all those who hold a vision for bright future in which we humans enjoy a more harmonious relationship with each other and with the wider community of life we are part of.

A renaissance of land-based culture

For 99% of our human existence we lived close to the land, immersed in natural living systems, deeply connected to the enlivening rhythms of the earth. Our food, shelter, clothes, stories, identity, culture all emerged from intimate relationship with place, giving us a pervasive sense of belonging to land, tribe, and the wider web of life—as well as a deeply felt duty of care towards it.

Fast forward to the present and we find that in the UK today 84% of us live in cities, while even in the countryside most villages are largely extensions of suburbia—only tenuously connected to the land around them. Almost all of us are cut off from direct engagement with and participation in the life of the land, estranged from our evolutionary milieu and severed from the shared ground of our embodied existence.

Consequently, the open countryside lies mostly empty of people—and, increasingly, of wildlife too—given over to industrial farming, corporate estates, and a conservation program that too often seeks to maintain landscapes in an artificially depleted state—in terms of both human and ecological richness.

This estrangement from the rich web of connections that is our evolutionary environment is, we believe, the source of so many of the crises we face in our world today. Fortunately, we can start to reverse this situation. We can—and indeed we must—begin to re-root our culture in a healthy relationship with the living earth on which our lives depend.

The great turning

For too long now has meaningful access to land been denied to all but the few. For too long has the narrative of separation—and the socio-political systems it has spawned— divided us from the living earth, from each other, and from our own authentic possibilities for wellbeing, natural abundance and joy.

For too long have the many complex strands connecting us to the web of life, community and meaning been systematically broken—only to be replaced by synthetic and often toxic substitutes which we have then been forced to pay for. For too long has our basic right to subsist been stripped from us, and the means for creating lives of quiet dignity and wholesome sufficiency taken out of our hands.

But enough is enough.

It’s time now to loosen the chains that have for too long bound us to an economic and political system that no longer serves life in any meaningful way. It’s time to forge a path back home to the living earth and to each other, to re-member the life-nourishing ways of being our indigenous souls still carry like precious seeds ready to be planted in the fertile soil.

The Land-Based Living Collective has come together to contribute to this great turning—the deep project of our times. For we believe that only from within a deeply restored relationship with our own earth-rooted selves, with each other, and with the wider web of life, can we as a species find a renewed sense of natural reverence for this miracle of life we are part of and begin to heal the wounds of our ravaged world.

Islands of coherence

Given the scale and severity of the multiple crises we face globally, it's hard to believe that it's even possible now to transition into anything like the kind of society that would ensure a liveable planet for our children's children to inherit from us. However, our collective is choosing to believe that such a transition is still just possible and, alongside many others who who are making the same choice, we're doing what we can to help bring it about.

Of course, individual one-planet communities—or even a thousand of them spread across the UK—aren't going make much difference to net global emissions or the healing of the earth's vast biosphere. But our hope is that they can become beautiful 'islands of coherence in the sea of chaos', proving that one-planet living is not only achievable but in almost every significant way superior to anything industrial modernity has to offer.

We think that such islands of coherence could be powerful catalysts for much broader system change in 'developed' countries, feeding our cultural imagination and sense of possibility with the belief that it is in fact in our power at both micro and macro levels to make the radical transition towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.