Toward a Kinhip-Based Land Conservation Model

In 2020, LivingFuture began intra-organizational summits to reframe the meaning of land conservation to increasingly emphasize a synergistic human relationship with land, and to recalibrate value toward biological vibrancy, meeting human needs with ‘enoughness’, involving increased time spent in intimacy with land as a complex web of relationships that create, sustain, and renew us.

By implication, this extends conventional land valuation beyond commercial, market-driven measures to include the intrinsic value and sovereignty of all inhabitants, as well as the food-medicine sustenance created via human engagement.

LivingFuture began a multi-year plan in consultation with Indigenous principles and professionals established within a kin-centric worldview to craft a set of land stewardship guidelines that expand the benefits of land-tending (biodiversity, food system resilience, community-building) far beyond the modern conservation model, giving more rigor to LivingFuture’s ongoing ‘Conserve SHO Farm’ project on its 1296 mostly-forested acres.

We increasingly view the inseparability of land conservation and foodways soverignty as we renew a kinship worldview and our understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Multiple studies demonstrate that lands under Indigenous stewardship hold the most plant and animal biodiversity and, consequently, provide climate stability/resilience and carbon sequestration. Reflecting on our almost 20 years stewarding LivingFuture’s 1296 acres, we honor the enormous benefits to living in relationship with in a single place in deep time.

Different ways of deep-time/deep-place  knowing and knowledge-sharing emerge as a consequence, and can potentially form the core of smart conservation and resilient foodways work in the future, as they did for millenia prior to colonization. LivingFuture views rich opportunities for mobilizing philanthropic resources to this multi-benefit approach to land stewardship, and a more all-embracing form of land conservation combined with local food sovereignty.

Central to a kin-centric relationship with land—thus LivingFuture’s work—lies an intimate, reciprocal human engagement with the beings living in a single place over time, while meeting core needs for food, medicine, craft, shelter, spiritual connection, and community, which in turn leads to the durable wellbeing of ecosystems, habitats, biodiversity, human cultural needs, and climatic resiliency. 

A kin-centric approach to conservation de-commodifies land and all who grow and thrive within. LivingFuture’s increasing study of and focus upon kin-centric land relationship challenges modern versions of land conservation, which often treats land in isolation from daily, vital human engagement (often focussing more on recreation or escape from daily human activity) and stresses ‘saving’ land from destructive human impacts and exploitation.

By focussing on changing the human relationship with land, we hope, we can systemically and naturally redress the negative effects of extractive practices, replacing them with reciprocal and respectful, life-enhancing practices over time. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would ultimately render the need for conservation (as we currently frame it) obsolete. This change of worldview within human consciousness and the ensuing cultural practices has increasingly become  the focus of LivingFuture’s work.