Across 2024, behind the scenes, I explored ecological justice through engaging with epistemologies of Land and elements beyond the contemporary western lens that dominates our environmental discourse. Traditional Ecological Knowledges, sometimes also referred to as Ancestral or Land-Kinned Knowledges, hold plurality, time and relationality beyond what UK climate, environment and health policy can conceive.

These knowledges are vast, entire worlds, yet what they have in common is that they are cultivated through continuous observation over time and generations, which is also to say they are inherently knowledges that are intimate with change. This form of knowledge is in action, in practice, relational and adaptive. Ultimately it is about living in kinship, the entangled web of relations that we find ourselves in, those we know, feel and nurture, and also those that are not yet known to us.

At Centric Lab, our framing of ecological health is informed by an understanding of this relationship too. Our bodies, our health, are in constant exchange and relation to our environments across time and generations. The symptoms we experience both individually and collectively tell a story of so much more than our genetics, they tell the history of our environments, the structural violences that are enacted in both the large and pronounced ways as well as the every day normalised ways, they tell the story of our migrations, our housing conditions, our work, as well as modern society’s (in)capacity for care. Our symptoms reflect the Air we breathe and the Land we live on.

So, as we piece together the myriad determinants of health, and the myriad relations that shape us, we also piece together the possible pathways to true health justice and healing. We find ourselves with a deeper need to Kin, for solidarity with each other and beyond us, into relations we have for so long been severed from in our individual and collective consciousnesses, despite the earth never having abandoned us.

No Right of Way, No Right of Play

As I was learning and connecting to this expansive area of work I saw a sign on a private piece of Land close to my home that read “no right of way, no right of play”. This sign was so explicit, almost comical, in the extent to which it conveyed how the acts of passing through and play are subversive, disruptive, and untoward on this area of Land. It might as well have said ‘no right of relationship, no right of imagination’. It captured UK Land relations so accurately, holding within it the unnamed threat of punishment and policing.

Play is defined as a behaviour, activity or process initiated (by children) whenever or wherever opportunities arise. Key characteristics of play are fun, uncertainty, challenge, flexibility and non productivity (source). Seemingly, these are the characteristics that threaten the property owner and their Land relation.

Through play children understand and construct their social position within the world. To do this they need ‘an environment’ (read: Land), ‘accessible space and time’ (read: Land), ‘space and opportunities to the outdoors’ (again, Land), and ‘in natural environments and the animal world’ (of course, Land). With so many of us so deeply alienated from our ancestral ecological knowledges, we forget that knowledges and observation are cultivated in deeply embodied and experiential ways, we locate ourselves in space, time, relationality and reciprocity through an accumulation of experimentation, observation and play. All of this is founded on a fuelled by certain imaginations.

Becoming aware of ourselves as ecological is not intellectual, it is experiential and confirmed in our bodies. It is an ongoing experience of being with Land, the home of our everyday. This experience is one that is manifest in our health, both individually and in our communities.

Land in the UK

Land in the UK is captured within the imagination, and implementation, of Land as commodity, as a profitable market for competition and wealth accumulation. In the UK, roughly 70% of Land is privately owned by a small percentage of the population, including individuals, corporations, and institutions. Half of England’s Land is owned by less than 1% of the population (source). This is a pattern that is only accelerating, two million hectares, 10% of Britain’s landmass, was privatised between 1979 and 2018 (source). We live on Land that is in large part exploited or abandoned. For most of us, the rights we have in the UK to build relation (to kin) with this Land is solely a ‘right of way’, which can also be withheld arbitrarily. We have this fragile right to be transient, to be in movement, across these Lands, where the right to stay in place is to ‘rest for a picnic’ or ‘take pictures’ (source). How then, during a picnic, do we practice ecological knowledge (a constant, generational observation of a set of relationships deeply rooted in locality)? Without ecological knowledge, how can we ecologically heal? Ecological knowledges, kinship and reciprocity are embodied processes that are dependent on Land, and the time to experience them in place.

Land relations in the UK, and the world over, are a key determinant of health. Land relations are overlooked, obscured and erased even though they are behind the scenes as a context of everything. There is no technology, energy, food, industry, or economy that is in a vacuum from the Land and relationships to it. How can we bring context and ‘background’ into view? And how can we unsettle and ultimately abolition this imagination around Land?

Hannah will continue to share notes on her journey as a director of Centric Lab weaving Ecological Justice throughout the Lab’s work. At the moment Hannah is currently working on the Introduction to Ecological Health and Community Health Impact Assessment learning programmes, steering the Polluters Playbook for Air is Kin, and working with Coffee Afrik CIC on a project on memory, archiving, and ecological justice for diasporic communities. You can reach Hannah via email: hannah at thecentriclab dot com

Ecological Being & Land Relations

No Right of Way, No Right of Play

Land in the UK

A Case for Health Reparations