Taylor Sheridan is bringing the enclosure movement to the masses
Viewers are loving it, I am not.
I’ve watched a lot of Taylor Sheridan television in the past few years. When Yellowstone first aired in 2018 it was the show my dad — a career farmer who leans into the conservative side of politics — didn’t miss. It was the year I moved back to New Zealand, and so I watched too, trying to fit in. Those early episodes were entertaining, mostly for the fluffy insight into ranching culture in the United States. So I kept watching. I binged 1883, the Yellowstone prequel starring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, on two flights over to Sydney and back to New Zealand. This year I watched Wind River and the Sicario films trying to work out why Paramount spends $500million a year making Sheridan’s productions.
By the time 1923 aired I was essentially hate-watching. I’d concluded that the gratuitous violence and endless product placement for the Sheridan-owned Four Sixes ranch had turned Yellowstone into an R16 infomercial. (Remember all the quarter horse competitions and the episode about selling beef directly to customers?)
By 1923 I was in tune with Sheridan’s not-so-subtle view of history, and one scene in particular confirmed why he and I would not play well at a dinner party. He’s a big fan of enclosure and protecting what you own (or have taken). Those who glorify the colonial project tend to buy into Locke’s theory of property and Sheridan has created an entire story universe around it. I’m not into it.
Me versus Taylor
In the past few weeks I’ve been writing about the commons, and why I think a contemporary community can and should be rooted in the value system that underpins a commons. Commons advocate and author, David Bollier, explains a commons as this: “It occurs whenever a community of people decide they want to manage certain resources for themselves with an accent on fairness, meeting their needs, inclusive participation and in long term stewardship of the wealth.”
Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton and Jerome Flynn as Banner Creighton | CREDIT: EMERSON MILLER/PARAMOUNT+
So, to the aforementioned red-flag scene in 1923. Let me take you back. It’s episode one. The Montana landscape is stricken with drought; locusts have torn through the grass lands, it’s now barren and populated by skinny cattle and hungry “wandering” sheep. Jake, played by Harrison Ford, who is the feudal lord of the series, fronts an angry crowd of lease-hold sheep herders and cattle men.
“What grass we have in the mountains is all we have” says Jake to the crowd.
Banner Creighton, a Scottish sheep herder, speaks for the crowd, yelling at Jake: “You have everything, the land, the lease, a whole mountain range.”
Jake: “I have what my family fought for. You want to fight me for it too?”
Outside, after the meeting he cautions Banner to “play by the rules”. But whose rules?
Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton and James Badge Dale as John Dutton Sr. | CREDIT: EMERSON MILLER/PARAMOUNT+
Soon after, Jake and his cattle association mates set off for the high country pushing their cattle up above the fence lines and into the mountains where hopefully they will find enough fodder to get through the drought (or at least the summer).
The mountain tops have traditionally been common land where no one landowner has sole rights, and so the cattle men go en masse. But the sheep shepherds, led by Banner, have the same idea. Banner cuts through a boundary fence to push the sheep up into the same grazing territory. “That fucking Dutton,” Banner says to his fellow sheep herders, “fencing the world out of grass he can’t even reach”. Predictably, by episode two, they confront each other and men on horses are shot and then some are strung up. In a blaze of gunfire, Sheridan illustrates the Tragedy of the Commons.
Tragedy, alright
The Tragedy of the Commons is a concept that was made famous in a 1968 essay by biologist Garrett Hardin. In it he argued that when confronted with a common pasture into which every farmer can put their sheep or cattle, they’ll go all in. Soon the common land will be overstocked, overexploited and ruined. That’s the tragedy of the commons, it assumes men (with animals) are selfish, opportunistic, shortsighted and a bit shit.
According to David Bollier, the assumption that a commons is unworkable is empirically wrong. He pointed me to the work of Elinor Ostrom who spent much of her career documenting commons systems around the world. And she noted that a commons is actually a community with rules, governance, and punishment for those who violate the rules. It is a cultural system not a gunfight. Rights are not won by a strongman, they’re shared for the benefit of the whole system, people and the land.
A good example of how this ancient system works can be found in ‘The Shepherd’s Life’ by James Rebanks. Or in pretty much any literature that details Indigenous knowledge systems, but that’s an essay for a future newsletter.
Anyway, after speaking with Bollier, I went looking for contemporary examples and found a couple of imperfect commons managed by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. That’s hardly surprising. As historian Peter Linebaugh writes in his book Stop Thief!: “Commoning has always been local. It depends on customs, memory, and oral transmission for the maintenance of its norms rather than law, police, and media. Closely associated with this is the independence of the commons from government or the state authority”.
It’s not political, until it is
Last year, I met a couple living in northern New South Wales on a large co-owned block of land. Some 30 people resided on the block, their self-built homes nestled into the lush bush. The intent of the collective ownership model was two-fold: to protect that natural habitat, and to live in a way that didn’t require a mortgage. The couple referred to the web of homes, gardens, and families nestled in the bush as an intentional community; they joked it’s a fancy, modern word for commune that tries to dispel the vibe of ‘70s free-loving naked gardeners.
You can find out more about their community in the podcast First Eat.
They haven’t unplugged from society entirely – they run businesses and have professions – but they’re not wholly part of the wage economy. They dip in and out to meet their income requirements. This “home-based lifestyle” demands that they don't outsource all the small chores. They grow food, mend things, build dwellings, care for the land, often in conjunction with the others who live on the commune. The labour is shared, and the reward is not servicing a mortgage or chasing money to pay for things.
The reason I wanted to find examples was to provide Alex — our pickling guide who is adamant more community will cure her head aches — with some sort of template to follow. Initially I was wondering if we could common our way to good health. But living within an intentional community isn’t easy. The labour may be shared, but it’s still a labour-heavy lifestyle. As the couple said, some days it would be nice to live on a street with a cafe so they could enjoy a cup of coffee made by someone else. So I kept looking.
Not a commune, barely a commons
Back in 2020, I started following and writing about a New Zealand farmer-led protest group that were publicly calling to halt freshwater regulations and pump the brakes on climate-change mitigation. Among other things, they don’t want farm emissions to be rolled into an emissions trade scheme. They call it a tax on farmers. You can read more about their cause (and the reasons why I disagree with their position) in my book FARM, but what’s interesting about this group is the alternative environmental action the founders propose. They told me freshwater management was best done at a local level through Catchment Groups — a term to describe a consortium of landowning farmers who collectively agree that improvements need to be made to their region’s water systems (the commons). They are typically farmers who consider themselves “stewards” of the land, bound by traditions that circumvent government regulations. The rationale for working together is sometimes about public relations but often nostalgic, they can remember a time when they could swim in the rivers without fear of illness. And they want that again.
To be honest, they have a lot of work to do. New Zealand’s river systems cover 425,000 kilometres and weave through the country’s urban and rural landscapes. A 2020 freshwater summary indicates almost all contain pollutants that are in small and dramatic ways changing the ecosystem. The irony is that the degradation of waterways can be traced, in part, to nutrient and sediment loss from farming practices. But at least the work is being done, and some groups have been working together for close to a decade. They monitor water quality, fence off waterways, plant riparian areas, and manage pests. All good stuff.
The downside is many aren’t setting clear improvement objectives, nor pressuring farmers – their neighbours, friends, brothers – who don’t comply to do better. That’s the key to a successful commons, if you break the code or damage rather than nurture the commons you face reprimand. But where I live farmers don’t like to criticise each other, it’s not in their nature so many revert to the codes of behaviour Taylor Sheridan glorifies: retreat behind your own gate, protect what you own and what you can control.
Commoning isn’t perfect so is it the solution?
Neither Alex nor I are about to buy-into a commune in northern NSW nor join a Catchment Group, but we are both ready for something a bit different to what we have. David Bollier believes an ontological shift is necessary so that we all come to appreciate that we are individuals embedded in a collective; that being the ecosphere. “We need to deal with the holistic system as opposed to the libertarian fantasy that we're all isolated and have nothing to do with each other and have no obligations to each other,” he says.
Yes but how?
Despite Alex’s search for community, she has the most astute advice in response to my question. And it’s the lesson I take from both the commune and the catchment group: you’ve just got to start.
“This idea that everything has to be perfect, and that you have to do everything perfect isn’t right,” says Alex. “You can try and do what you can and through trying you empower yourself. And maybe that empowerment can also lend yourself to being a more involved community member and a member in your democracy in terms of holding people who actually can make those bigger decisions accountable.”
So now, I have in mind an imperfect commons. It exists in a city. A series of front yards that are to-date just decorative but in the future can be transformed into food gardens. The food produced is for the community that manages this commons. The gardening labour is shared and it provides for many. Each garden sits atop private property but is bound by a value system. Would it work? Legally? Will it sustain the community when drought or some other climate emergency hits, or will we revert to the worst tendencies of the Sheridan universe and erect yet more fences to keep each other out, hoarding the produce?
Next week, in First, We Eat…
I meet a group of Indigenous women who are reclaiming urban gardens for the benefit of many. They assume most of us are Sheridan fans, swift to close the gate, so they’re using the western legal system to create communal lands. As the saying goes, the pen is mightier than the sword. It just doesn’t make for top rating television.