Forest Charter

Renewing the Forest Charter, series of 10 x 8" photocollages mounted on wood panels [80 x 8"] ~ 2025

↑This work is a response to having read The Charter of the Forest of 1217, which granted rights to land and resources to “free men,” land that had been enclosed by Kings. The charter thus created lawful rights to what one needs for subsistence or survival, and gradually it defined a “commons.” The charter accompanied the Magna Carta and at the time was the more immediately significant document. No, it did not give rights to serfs, much less to women, who were considered property. But it did set the stage for more “abstract” rights later on, leading up to Human Rights and now environmental rights and laws. It also set the stage for conflicts over property rights, pitting individuals against each other and challenging the idea of a commons. Arguably, to remember, to renew, to rethink this charter now is to reconsider what counts as a “commons” in the Anthropocene, an age of planetary disruption and climate change. How do we, as what Bruno Latour has called “Earthbounds”—tethered to place and entangled in interdependent networks—manage our relationship to and with what we must now realize is truly a commons, i.e., the Earth on which our and other species depend for our collective survival? The first two images depict the earth consumed by fire and flood. The remaining images urge restoration and regeneration against the backdrop of an image of the original charter document. The final image incorporates most of the text above.