Barbuda’s Commons: Land, Resistance, and Resilience

Gaia

Welcome to the show everyone! I'm Gaia, here with Nemo. And Nemo, I want to start with a rental lease that sounds like a piece of historical folklore, but it set the entire legal destiny for an island. In 1685, King Charles II leased the Caribbean island of Barbuda to the Codrington family for the price of, quote, "yearly one fat sheep if demanded."

Nemo

One fat sheep. That's a cheap lease for sixty-two square miles of Caribbean coral limestone. But you see, the Codringtons quickly realized that Barbuda was too dry, too flat, too lacking in fresh surface water to cultivate massive fields of sugarcane. So instead of carving it into the typical high-yield, brutal plantation system like neighboring Antigua, they used it as a provision ground -- a place to raise livestock and grow local food staples.

Gaia

Exactly, which meant that when emancipation finally came in 1834, the Barbudans were left out of the formal Slavery Emancipation Act. They had to fight to free themselves. And when the Codringtons finally packed up and left in 1870, the British Crown showed up demanding rent from the newly freed Barbudans. But the people flatly refused. They said, "We have worked this ground for two centuries. We owe you nothing."

Nemo

That refusal is the seed of everything. It forced the British Crown to issue a colonial enactment in 1904, recognizing Barbudans as lawful tenants in communal possession. And that wasn't some primitive, informal arrangement. It was refined, codified, and legally locked down in the Barbuda Land Act of 2007. Under that law, every single Barbudan is legally entitled to three plots of land: one for housing, one for agriculture, and one for business. Crucially, that land could never, ever be bought or sold.

Gaia

Barbuda is the only island on the planet where all land is entirely held in common by its people. There are literally no fences. It's a system designed to keep the entire island completely out of the speculative global real estate market.

Nemo

No fences. You see, to a Western developer, like Mike Meldman of the Discovery Land company, partners in this land grab, a land without fences looks like "waste land" -- a blank canvas waiting for "improvement." But to the Barbudans, omitting those fences is a highly sophisticated, active defense of their communal sovereignty. It's the only thing that has kept their coastline wild and their lagoons protected.

Gaia

But then came September 2017. Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm, blasted across the island, damaging ninety-five percent of the buildings. The very next day, Prime Minister Gaston Browne flew over in a helicopter and declared the island "barely habitable." Within days, the military was deployed to force the evacuation of all fifteen hundred residents to shelters in Antigua.

Nemo

"Barely habitable." That is classic, textbook disaster capitalism. While the Barbudans were stuck in shelters on Antigua, desperately wanting to return to rebuild their homes, they were blocked for thirty days. The official media even claimed that the island was completely empty for the first time in modern history. But behind that narrative of "uninhabitability," the central government was busy. They began constructing a massive international airport without any environmental impact assessment, and they leased protected Ramsar wetlands at Palmetto Point to John Turbidy, financed by the billionaire and conscious capitalist John Paul DeJoria's "Peace, Love and Happiness" partnership.

Gaia

That PLH project is a two-billion- US dollar luxury enclave called the Barbuda Ocean Club, featuring four hundred and fifty exclusive villas and a massive golf course. "Create wetlands" on a Ramsar site! You can't make this up; outside the Ramsar wetland, Robert De Niro and James Packer push forward their "Paradise Found" resort -- a three-hundred-and-ninety-one-acre luxury complex leased for a mere sixty-two thousand dollars a year.

Nemo

. Developers use this language of "improving" the land, promising to "train and educate" the locals and "create wetlands" -- on a site that was already a pristine, internationally protected wetland. It's John Locke's old seventeenth-century property theory repackaged for the ultra-wealthy. If you don't mix your labor with the land to generate profit, it's considered "waste." So Gaston Browne amended the Barbuda Land Act in 2018 to allow Barbudans to buy the freehold title to their homes for one symbolic East Caribbean dollar, while selling the rest of their plots at market rates.

Gaia

And the community saw right through it. A resident named Kendra Beazer asked in a New York Times interview, "I already own something, and you're telling me I have to pay a dollar for it -- how insulting is that?" Another resident, Tyreen Gift, pointed out that they collectively own sixty-two square miles, but the government's plan would reduce their communal right to just two square miles.

Nemo

It is a deliberate "vulnerabilization" to force them into a private property model. But the Barbudans are fighting back in the courts, filing four separate lawsuits. Even though they lost a key challenge to the Paradise Found Act in the Privy Council in London in 2022, they aren't backing down. I keep coming back to what a local fisherman said: "I'm the richest man on earth! We own this whole island, together." Or as the marine biologist and community activist, now Head of the Barbuda Council, John Mussington put it so clearly: "Our land system is the reason we survive. As simple as that."