"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?" Those words are attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854 when the Suquamish Indians were faced with selling their lands to the white settlers or being driven off them by force. To our ears, conditioned as they are by notions of possession and the rights of ownership, they can sound quaint, even eccentric. We find no problem in the fact that every square inch of our national territory is owned by someone. And yet, the more one examines the concept of ownership, particularly as it applies to land, the more strange it does indeed become.
In simple terms there have been two basic modes of existence in human history. Hunter gath-erers moved around a more or less circumscribed territory, following the dictates of their ecosystem and living off the fruits of nature. To these groups the concept of "land" had sig-nificance in the sense that they were as much a part of it as it was of them. They were firmly rooted in its nature and were able to pick up subtle changes in its rhythms. Ancestors were all around them, having literally returned to the soil on which they walked, and contrib-uting to a sense of place and of belonging (rather than owning). Only if another tribe attempted to move into a portion of the country they habitually used did the question of "whose land is it?" arise – and here we are touching on the imperatives of survival rather than taking and holding onto land for the sake of it..

In other words, a given geographical area was needed to support a given population and, as-suming that population pressure didn’t upset this balance, who owned it was not an issue. If the pressure for resources increased, for whatever reason, either new land had to be found (which might bring the group into competition with a neighbouring tribe) or the weakest perished. Over time accommodations between tribes were reached and, as with many animal species, boundaries were recognised if not always respected.

With animal husbandry and the cultivation of crops a new element emerged. A definite, if still not defined, patch of land was required on which you and your group could operate. You could hardly take up your half grown wheat and replant it somewhere else. A piece of land would have to be available for at least the duration of the growing season. Ideally, you would want it throughout the year, and for years to come, to nurture the soil and build up its fertility. To achieve results requires time, effort, knowledge and experience. In contrast to the gatherer’s simple acceptance of the availability of food, you would be putting something into the trans-action and that investment would produce a sense of fulfilment and possession. It is one thing for someone to come along and take the berries or roots you would normally have eaten yourself (you might even accept that, coming directly from nature, you had no more right to them than anyone else), but if someone ate the corn you had grown from seed, or slaughtered the lamb you had reared, there would be no doubting that they were taking something from you.

By the same token, if you produced a surplus over that needed to feed your group you would feel that it was yours and therefore available to exchange for something you wanted. All trade depends on both parties accepting that you have a right to dispose of the good, in other words that you own it. On what basis then can we be said to own anything? A starting point is to recognise that, whatever other proprietary claims we might make, we at least "own" our selves and are ultimately responsible to ourselves, and no one else, for what happens to us (to consider ourselves as, in this sense, belonging to the family, the tribe, the company or the state is to accept that they have the right to dispose of us as they wish – and that is a sure route to tyranny and the abuse of self). From that starting point it is necessary to recognise that, because we are social beings, and for our own ultimate benefit, we inevitably enter a series of relationships with others. To honour the other’s ownership of their selves those relationships must be fun-damentally reciprocal because, if they aren’t, one party has gained power over the other – which is one dimension of ownership.

If knowledge and skills are needed to create something that didn’t exist before, and those at-tributes reside in an individual and are an integral part of their self, it can be argued that any-thing they produce by applying their talents belongs to them. Ultimately, however, human endeavour is merely transforming something into something else – a seed into a crop, a piece of wood into a chair, iron into girders for a bridge. Somewhere along the line is a raw product of nature, a renewable or non-renewable resource which cannot, under the definition we are using, belong to anyone because no one has created it. It is a given, like the roots and the berries of the hunter gatherer. Ultimately, land falls into that category; it is out there and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be appropriated by an individual or group to be theirs. Ownership of land is thus an entirely human construct, reflecting and defining social relations between people rather than being a fact of life.

If, in an abstract sense, we can’t own land, does possession in practice matter? Is it a lesser evil than, say, letting the strongest take the best of what is available, especially in a world where there is no spare land? In essence, a nation can be seen as a reflection of the existing property rights, having as its main function the protection of those rights from other individuals both within and outside the territory occupied by the state. The very existence of borders – often fiercely contested – shows that some individual or group has defined a piece of land as be-longing to them and that they are prepared to defend it with force if necessary. In that sense, the right of might has merely been removed from the individual to the state. The rickety condition of international law, supposedly designed to protect the weak from the strong, emphasises how ultimately insecure our world is when seen as a collection of claims on land.

Moreover, if we accept that land cannot be owned in any conclusive sense, all claims to ownership of territory become debatable. The on-going national and international trouble spots – Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Central Africa, the states that emerged from the shell of the USSR, etc., etc. – have their roots in disputed territory. Claims to these areas rest on doubtful history (i.e. who got there first) and the relative power of the combatants. Nowhere on earth is secure from such an explosive mixture as history has repeatedly shown.

The push for a "homeland" from many ethnic groupings within an established state (from the Basques to the Scots, the Kurds to the Timorese) shows how fragile such conglomerations of claims often are.

Looked at in this way it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ownership of land, through the medium of the nation state, is unlikely to provide the basis for a stable world order, unless it is to be achieved through some form of, ultimately repressive, world government accompanied by sporadic outbursts of violent reaction against the status quo. And while the bitterness as-sociated with the struggle for land persists it will take attention away from the truly pressing issues facing our planet, many of which are rooted in the way that land is owned and used in practice.
In a culture where ownership of land is a major source of wealth creation, not having any is a misfortune. The vast estates of Brazil can stand as an example of how the availability of land – as defined by who owns it – is linked to many of today’s ills. Firstly, the destruction of the Amazonian rain forests, and the murder and eviction of the indigenous populations, is directly attributable to the fact that they represent the only source of free land in a country where four fifths of the arable acreage is owned by the large landowners – many of whom are absentee.

Secondly, as the estates expanded so peasants, who formerly occupied the land but didn’t own it, were obliged to pay rent on their smallholdings which brought a new fragility to their sub-sistence economy, leading to debt and eviction (especially if the landowner could benefit from any improvements to the land the farmer might have made). Thirdly, when the rights to the land an individual works lie elsewhere, security can only be found in large families because, very quickly, a child can bring in more than it costs to feed. Unfortunately, as the children reach adulthood themselves there is no land for them and their families. And so, the drift to the big cities becomes an inevitability. Poverty, population growth and the expansion of cities can all be seen as an expression of land owning rights and are problems that can be found across the globe.

Ownership of land confers many benefits to its proprietors but it also produces a peculiar, one eyed perspective that, in global terms is proving disastrous. Once the idea of owning land is accepted it is but a short step to believing that an individual or nation has an absolute right to its given patch and can do what they like with it – including leaving it barren in a starving world. Conversely, one’s interest in other bits of land diminishes because they belong to someone else. It is a partial view of reality that encourages the pursuit of one’s own self interest while turning one’s back on what is happening in the next street, town or continent and provides one expla-nation as to why we are only just waking up to the fact that pollution is no respecter of boundaries. Land ownership is preventing the emergence of a holistic appreciation of the world as an integrated, interdependent ecosystem.

Indeed, land has ceased to be seen as a natural asset which can provide humankind with suf-ficient resources to realise their individual potentials. Instead, we view it as something to be exploited for the sole purpose of wealth creation. Either directly – through intensive farming methods or the building of office blocks – or indirectly – through the buying and selling of land or its intentional non-use to increase its value – we have turned it into an economic asset. Any long term environmental perspective has become a short term push for immediate gain. From an instinctive sense of belonging to the land we have taken the subtle, conceptual step of seeing the land as belonging to us. Until we can find new ways of accepting the responsibility for (as opposed to the ownership of) the land we occupy we will continue to remain detached from it and the ravaging will continue. We must accept ownership of what is rightfully ours – our selves – and learn that we are but a part of that which we cannot own. We must accept our place in the scheme of things. "The air is precious to us, for all things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the humans, we all share the same breath," Chief Seattle was right to doubt the integrity and understanding of "The Great White Chief in Washington". We have much to learn from the peoples we once despised – if only we will listen.

Tags: energy, environment

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