Insights ism they continue to practice. It explains how the landowners’ walls divide the nation, not only physically but also socially and politically. It shows how the law was tilted away from the defence of people and towards the defence of things. It shows how trespass helps to breach the mental walls that keep us apart. Accompanying the book is a new campaign, calling for the right to roam in England to be extended to rivers, woodland, downland and uncultivated land in the greenbelt, and to include camping, kayaking, swimming and climbing. This is less comprehensive than the rights in Scotland, which has caused little friction and a massive improvement in public enjoyment. But it would greatly enhance the sense that the nation belongs to all of us rather than a select few.
A petition to parliament launched by Guy Shrubsole, author of another crucial book, Who Owns England, seeks to stop the criminalisation of trespass. Please sign it. We can expect these efforts to be aggressively opposed in the billionaire press. This is what happened when a group of us launched the Land for the Many report last year: it was greeted by furious attacks and outrageous falsehoods across the rightwing papers. Even the mildest attempts to rebalance our rights are treated as an existential threat by those whose privilege is ratified by law. But we cannot allow their fury to deter US It is time to decolonise the land. CT George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian, where this article first appeared. His website is www.monbiot.com.
John W. Whitehead
Attack of the tomato killers
B
ackyard gardeners, beware: tomato plants have become collateral damage in the US government’s war on drugs. In fact, merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies – incredibly enough –
could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts. After shopping for hydroponic tomatoes at their local gardening store, a Kansas family found themselves subjected to a SWAT team raid as part of a multi-state, annual campaign dubbed “Operation Constant Gardener”, in which police collected the license plates of hundreds of customers
10 ColdType | September 2020 | www.coldtype.net
at the gardening store and then investigated them for possible marijuana possession. By “investigated”, I mean that police searched through the family’s trash. Finding “wet glob vegetation” in the garbage, the cops managed to convince themselves – and a judge – that it was marijuana. In fact, it was looseleaf tea, but those details don’t usually bother the cops when they’re conducting field tests. Indeed, field tests routinely read positive for illegal drugs even when no drugs are present. According to investigative journalist Radley Balko, “A partial list of substances that the tests have mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiard’s chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins”. From there, these so-called “investigations” follow a script: judge issues a warrant for a SWAT raid based on botched data, cops raid the home and terrorise the family at gunpoint, cops find no drugs, family sues over a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, then the courts protect the cops and their raid on the basis of qualified immunity. As Balko reports, “Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It’s happened with all five.)”
