Thank you David Heilpern for your eloquent, brilliant and inspired article. Land sharing, in fact sharing, is a concept whose time has come.
I chose land sharing as my final project in 1974 at Louisiana State University and I see it as back to the future, the tribe and community sharing.
Forget compliance officers, the mentality of the Byron Shire Council planning and the strategic planning section throws up a hundred reasons not to allow the future development of land sharing in Byron Shire.
The main reason given is the infrastructure is not there to support the activity. One would have thought that is why we have a council. The north coast provides land sharing opportunities which are not seen in many places in Australia.
It’s true that sharing is not in our culture but it does allow people to live in the country when they can’t live in town. We inherited English planning law which says you live in town or you are a farmer.
I started a rural land sharing community in Main Arm at the turn of the century with the cooperation of Council and Jan Barham the then mayor of Byron Shire Council.
At a subsequent Blues Festival a lady asked, ‘Aren’t you lonely’. My response was, ‘The piece of land I live on has 100 native vegetation species and 100 bird and native fauna species to talk to’. Not everyone’s idea of paradise even though I have no mortgage and no water and power bills.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
