We had an amazing local speaker to one of our North Devon Green Party autumn lectures a few years ago, Myc Riggulsford, on the Charter of the Forest, and potential modern adaptation of it. It was the first I had heard about the document, and I've been fascinated ever since. Myc suggested a Universal Basic Income would have a similar ideological basis, as well as ideas like reversing standing charges on energy bills ( so your first 100 units are free, then a steadily increasing rate per unit).
There are useful lessons we can take from the ideas of inherent and fair rights to access the means to survival we can assume exists long before this document.
I wasn't aware of Robinson's paper, and I like the thought that it was a precursor to environmental legislation, although most environments would now oppose many of the ancient rights, such as cutting turf!
Thanks for your explanations, saved everyone a lot of work. This is history to which I had paid no attention and it is good to dip a toe. The Forest Charter is clearly about the use of natural resources, so I see why some view it as an early environmental statute. But I find my attention directed to the power relations it reflects. My question is not so much about the content as about the perversity (as I see it) of having a monarch whose power over others was so extraordinary that it had to be reigned in for even the most privileged people of the time to make reasonable use of resources that none of them created. The Forest Charter dimly reflects notions of reciprocity that had apparently been wiped 200 years before it was drafted. How/Why did we lose the economy of reciprocity in the first place?
We had an amazing local speaker to one of our North Devon Green Party autumn lectures a few years ago, Myc Riggulsford, on the Charter of the Forest, and potential modern adaptation of it. It was the first I had heard about the document, and I've been fascinated ever since. Myc suggested a Universal Basic Income would have a similar ideological basis, as well as ideas like reversing standing charges on energy bills ( so your first 100 units are free, then a steadily increasing rate per unit).
There are useful lessons we can take from the ideas of inherent and fair rights to access the means to survival we can assume exists long before this document.
I wasn't aware of Robinson's paper, and I like the thought that it was a precursor to environmental legislation, although most environments would now oppose many of the ancient rights, such as cutting turf!
Thanks for your explanations, saved everyone a lot of work. This is history to which I had paid no attention and it is good to dip a toe. The Forest Charter is clearly about the use of natural resources, so I see why some view it as an early environmental statute. But I find my attention directed to the power relations it reflects. My question is not so much about the content as about the perversity (as I see it) of having a monarch whose power over others was so extraordinary that it had to be reigned in for even the most privileged people of the time to make reasonable use of resources that none of them created. The Forest Charter dimly reflects notions of reciprocity that had apparently been wiped 200 years before it was drafted. How/Why did we lose the economy of reciprocity in the first place?