Heathland farm as a new commons?

The Dutch heathlands have been redefined in the last century. They have gone from being largely commons under a pastoral regime developed and performed by cooperating local residents of varying backgrounds, to becoming protected nature areas run by eco-managerial professionals. At the same time, farming is becoming an increasingly industrialised agribusiness under equally professionalised farm managers. This has resulted in the landscape being divided between a high-tech agriculture and high-science ecology that seeks thereby to balance and compensate for the anthropocentric loss of nature in core agricultural areas by promoting an ‘anti-anthropic’ rewilding on the margins. Now, however, there is a growing reaction to this polarisation leading to new forms of contemporary ‘commons’ as a cultural natural landscape exemplified here by the introduction of the ‘Heathland Farm’ as a basis for alternative forms of agro-environmental use.