Prologue: Uncommon Ground

• Recent practice of offering a moment of silence, a short speech, etc. as a token of respect to Native Americans who first inhabited land that events are being held on → spread from Aus and NZ
  • Comes centuries too late, but at least serves to remind of us the complexity and questionable nature of the ownership of land
• What does it mean to own land?
  • Legally (in most western societies) → Bundle of Rights: of possession, control, exclusion, enjoyment, disposition
  • All relies on knowing where the land is, what it’s boundaries are

Part I: Borderlines

• Frontiers = grand, often vague boundaries between cultures, outlooks, ideologies — Iron Curtain, Israel vs Middle East, Pakistan vs India
• Over 2000 years ago, Greek scholar Eratosthenes → first computation of Earth’s circumference, with only protractor & other limited tools — only a few hundred moles off!
• 1830s, Struve (from modern-day Latvia) → measured a Great Circle (meridian) using triangulation
  • Over a huge distance, built wooden towers, drew triangle, knew one distance and two angles → could calc missing distance
• 1900s → International Map of the World project, to create standardized maps of whole world at millionth scale— didn’t quite cover everywhere (ex. Aus, Canada, NE Asia, Polynesia not mapped), but impressive nonetheless
  • Rise of commercial aviation → many other efforts in similar vein, so lost momentum and never completed
• Can be fun to choose a random international border and learn how it was established
  • First (mutually accepted) = Andorra
  • Most of world’s land borders drawn in late 19th, early 20th c
  • Drawing of border between India and Pakistan that led to so much violence = by some famous British lawyer (Cyril Radcliffe) who’d never been east of Paris; now lit so brightly it’s visible from space
  • By random historical circumstances, bizarre cases of enclaves & exclaves of land in Bangladesh belonging to India (sometimes up to four layers deep!), where people are trapped bc don’t have visas to get to the “mainland”

Part II: Annals of Acquisition

• “God made the world—but the Dutch made the Netherlands.”
  • Drained the swampy land using essentially one-way valves, then more sophisticated dam systems, to prevent encroachment from the sea
• Idea that “common land” is free for anyone to claim (Grotius) used as justification for settlers to “plunder as they wish” the land of natives in NA
  • Natives didn’t have same conception of ownership— saw land as “our mother,” belonging to all
  • Soon godly authority was added to the justification— it was Christian duty to own & improve the land
  • Third justification = authority of the king, his “divine grace,” royal charters
  • Reinforced by ancient legal provision, the Doctrine of Discovery: if a European nation discovers foreign land inhabited by non-Christian natives, it is their inalienable right to own and colonize it (and sometimes enslave the people)— how unlucky for the natives!
• Doctrine of Discovery informed Johnson v. M’Intosh SCOTUS case in 1823: only federal govt can buy land from natives— their claim somehow lesser than true land ownership
• Landed gentry own disproportionate amount of land in England
  • Roots of this go way back— that the oldest recorded words in English language include acre, bread, earl, half → importance of land, food, society, arithmetic to the early English

Part III: Stewardship

• 18th-19th c, England: enclosure → land once commonly used claimed for more “efficient” purposes by individuals
  • “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968) → people take more than their fair share from the commons, leading to disaster... enclosure is not a perfect solution (lots of injustices), but only alternative system
  • Other options = more destructive— ex. forced removal of Scottish Highlands of tenant farmers to make space for sheep grazing
• Owners of largest land areas mainly in Australia (lots of iron mining) and US (TX, Western states with cattle ranching)
  • Now “new money” also moving up there— Ted Turner, founder of CNN, bought up a ton of land in the Midwest, worked to restore bison
• US → very strong notion of trespassing on land, seen as violation of law/privacy
  • Elsewhere, in Eur and esp Nordic counties, right to “roam harmlessly across a landscape” is seen as inalienable part of human existence — governed more by common sense, with specific restrictions around harvesting certain foods, fishing, etc.
• Wilding — when land is left completely untouched by nature
  • Ex. DMZ in Korea, wildlife flourishes
  • Some more purposeful attempts— Netherlands, rich people in England, New England farmers (sometimes a gradual transition from being human-managed needed to prevent ecosystem collapse)
  • Maybe unethical... to purposefully allocate land to be unproductive, when we force farmers in poor countries to convert their land to monocultures to grow us, ex., quinoa
• Indigenous people often rich with foresight and wisdom about managing their land, but ignored or dismissed by imperialists
  • Ex. Aboriginal Australians extensively used fire to prevent massive wildfires that now plague the country
  • Andamanese Islanders predicted and prepared for 2004 tsunami → all survived

Part IV: Battlegrounds

• Israel/Palestine — such an old conflict that it is one of the few that transcends land
• Collectivization under Stalin → mass starvation, overlooked by the US for quite some time
  • Government took every last bit of grain & food grown by farmers, leaving nothing behind; executed anyone seen to scavenge even a grain
  • Cruelty of people starving on such rich, fertile grounds...
• Land of Japanese-Americans often confiscated after they were sent to internment camps during WWII

Part V: Annals of Restoration

• New Zealand
  • Last place on the planet to be settled by humans— mid 14th c by Polynesians, then 300 years later by Europeans
  • Place with most genuine democracy— participation of all residents, regardless of sex and ethnicity
  • Very British as recently as the 1970s, but since then have added Polynesian name to official title → Aotearoa NZ; include Maori in national anthem
  • Key historical event = 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi
    • NZ seen as unfit for prisoners (like Aus) or settlers, so basically ignored by English at first
    • Treaty intended to give British control while appeasing Maori; lots of conflict due to translating issues still relevant today
    • Violence over land (for Maori, no concept of “ownership”), British confiscating land just to be cruel
  • Since then, NZ has made much more progress than most others in addressing injustices to indigenous people (not perfect, but better)
• Matabale chief in Zimbabwe, when asked about the idea of buying land: You might as well buy the wind.
• Establishment of “untouched” national parks (ex. Yosemite) dependent on removal of native people who had lived there for centuries...

Epilogue

• Near universal belief underlying all this talk is that land is the only thing on Earth that lasts— except, not so, with climate change: sea level rise, melting glaciers