---
title: "“Emprius”, an article by Margalida Ramis in “Ara Balears”"
url: https://emprius.cat/en/article-ara-balears/
description: "Article by Margalida Ramis, environmental activist from Mallorca, published on 12 August in “Ara Balears”."
datePublished: 2025-08-30T10:08:28.000Z
dateModified: 2026-11-04T01:04:24.670Z
language: en
publisher: "Fundació Emprius"
categories: ["Awareness", "Communalism"]
---
# “Emprius”, an article by Margalida Ramis in “Ara Balears”

*Published: 2025-08-30 · Updated: 2026-11-04*

![](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYQCAWJ54SB82HPBBP7H80.png)

*Article by* [***Margalida Ramis***](https://www.instagram.com/margalidamariaramis/)*, environmental activist from Mallorca,* [***published on 12 August in “Ara Balears”***](https://www.arabalears.cat/opinio/emprius-margalida-ramis_129_5466681.html)*.*

In a time marked by chronic environmental emergencies, growing social inequality and barbarism, and fragile global systems and supply chains, reflection on land, resource management and collective sovereignty becomes urgent and essential. We need to trace paths toward fairer, more liveable and desirable futures — and that must be rooted, sown, relocated to the ground we walk on, the land that truly sustains us and can sustain us. In this context, the land, values and communal work demand special attention, a way of seeing that opens up possibilities and revisits collective imaginaries that have known how to work in another way.

As David Algarra explains in his article [**“Boscos comunals dels Països Catalans”**](https://reconstruirelcomunal.suportmutu.org/boscos-comunals/), published in the journal *Caramella*, for centuries our territories had a vast network of shared assets and a rooted communal culture: forests, meadows, pasture, springs, scrubland, paths and land, managed collectively by local communities. These weren’t meant for profit but to guarantee every family’s livelihood. Rights of shared use (the Catalan “empriu”) let people use firewood, pasture, wild fruits, water or farmland, all governed by conservation and use rules set collectively. In Mallorca, place names like the **Lloret commons**, the **Caimari commons** and the **Bunyola commons**, among others, are traces of that living, collective past.

Algarra also explains how this model faced systematic dismantling. As modern liberal states took hold, **communal land was parcelled, sold or seized by local elites**. Through processes like the 19th-century disentailments (desamortizaciones), privatising the commons became the norm. Collective ownership gave way to absolute private property — a property now treated as “sacred” by the ultra-neoliberal policies affecting our territories. This is how deep communal bonds snapped: the forms of mutual aid and life-support that had defined rural life for centuries, even here in Mallorca (hard to believe given our moment, and how fast and devastatingly it’s been erased from collective memory).

And it’s precisely now, when the land here in the Islands is about to suffer one of the most brutal speculative and destructive onslaughts in its history — as the consequences of the sweeping amnesty pushed through by the PP-Vox government and the strategic land-reserves law materialise. At a time when the ecosocial crisis demands we rethink the structures holding our lives together, reclaiming the commons becomes an almost pragmatic necessity. Reclaiming communal land, reconceiving ownership, the commons and collective stewardship of it, could be a key strategy against the forces that keep giving away public goods — now public land — for private profit and development. When did it become normal to think that handing over land to private interests for profit could solve the social and ecological crises facing the 99% locked out of wealth-hoarding that tends to commercialise and monetise disaster — call it injustice, structural violence, inequality or ecological collapse — all rooted in the very logic that drives this accumulation?

**Reclaiming the land**, asserting its rightful status as commons, recovering and reimagining forms of collective management and governance, reviving communal work as a form of political participation, belonging and mutual care — in this context, this becomes a radical rejection of how we now conceive, manage, exploit and weaponise territory. Gladys Tzul Tzul, a Guatemalan Maya Q’eqchi’ sociologist, defines **communal work** as “a form of government and resistance aimed at sustaining collective life”. That’s a radical alternative.

We need cracks in the walls of the irrationality we’ve made reason into, openings onto other worlds, territories and societies that are possible and desirable. Finding and widening those cracks is what **Fundació Emprius** does, with intention, resolve and persistence in building rural commons. And it’s what the second edition of the [**Emprius Prize**](https://emprius.cat/en/premi/) (Premi Emprius) promotes — they want to recognise initiatives of communal and collective ownership, use and management across Catalan-speaking territories. Initiatives rooted in **communal tradition** not as archaeology but as **seed** for other possible and desirable presents and futures. They promote critical thought and practice for a different relationship with land, work and life — one that frontally, radically opposes the extractive, exploitative, profit-driven uses of what belongs to all of us and of which we ourselves are part: the land and life itself.

This ecosocial, collective, rooted outlook is shared by many initiatives unfolding across our territories today: community-grounded farm co-operatives, land stewardship projects, land banks, communal agroecology, recovering rights of use over municipal forests… Projects that deserve recognition, protection and replication. These practices must move from the edges to the centre of future strategy. Not just for their social and ecological power, but because they recover essential values we must claim: shared responsibility and commitment to life.

Reclaiming the commons is an act of radical hope today. It’s trusting that together we can relearn, invent, care for what sustains us and build the alternatives we need.

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Source: https://emprius.cat/en/article-ara-balears/