ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the active process of marginalisation and peripheralisation in the context of unequal social and natural rights. It seeks to address how we may develop a critically normative approach to nature and place given the Anthropocene. It suggests that there is a need to move beyond the treatment of the ‘environment’ as a compartmentalised and reductionist non-human space, or as a ‘surface’ or set of layers only to be protected or restored. This chapter explores the following interconnected themes: the contestations of communities as they try to protect their customary rights against the forces of enclosure and privatised appropriation; the process of privatised mass (con)urbanisation; examples of the regressive rentier privatisation of domestic and public space; engaged and empowering social practices, and how are they can be created and sustained in and by communities and places; how new and innovative community and place-based forms of practice and action can be extended; how a transformational environmental agenda can empower people to ‘take back’ their natures, and whether this implies a more distributed/hybrid eco-capitalism that seeks to redistribute and re-orientate property and bio-sphere rights.
