Ownership Of Land - A Deeply Flawed Concept?

[auroraglacialis]

Hehe - sonoran - no need to quote my whole post

Originally Posted by Sonoran Na'vi

Many times people do not know the consequences of their actions until it is too late. The advantage we have today is that we know of many of the failures of past societies, so that we may have the chance to learn from them.

Well - these days that is true. Civilization and its complexity made it also complex to foretell the consequences. It is not just complexity in society, technology, science that has arisen, it is also a complexity in problems and consequences. A hunter/fisherman can predict that overuse will deplete his resource. If game gets scarce, he knows there are less left and if all resources are getting scarce he or rather the women may decide that there would be not enough food in the future for too many children and act on it. In fact in a closed system (which is an approximation based on the lower mobility of non-industrial people and on the presence of other people around) there would not be another choice than to suffer hunger and starvation. It is self-regulating.
The failures in the past are there and we understand many of them. But I see not really that civilized humans have learned from them at all. Do you see any evidence that things are implied that are based on learning from them? And in fact - what would it be that we learn from them? One thing we can learn is that civilizations are not sustainable, that agriculture is not sustainable, that depleting or overusing resources leads to collapse. So what consequences would there be to learned?

The heart of the matter is that some sort of property rights need to be assigned to resources. Not assigning property rights will not work in large societies because people will maximize their use of the resource. Even many smaller, tribal, societies assigned use rights to land or a resource, giving the right to use the land or resource to an individual or a group for a particular amount of time.

In what way does property of land help in any way to ensure long term caring for the land? Property itself does not assure that - property means that it can be sold and traded, that one has a right to use the land or deny other people access to the land even if it is not used. So I guess the only situation property helps, is in case of a family owning a piece of land - and the incentive in that case is to keep the land in a state that allows the own children to live on that land - and in fact that does not really require ownership, just the prospect that people one cares for have a benefit from the land in the future. And that works well without assigning ownership - actually it works better without ownership. Land ownership fortifies sedentarism. It creates many more trouble than it alleviates. People can own huge amounts of land while others even have to pay for a place to sleep (that is called rent then). Companies can own land and they dont care about future land use. Individual people are fixed to a piece of land for good and bad years and dont share a common landbase to care for and for supply. In a mass society, I see the trouble of course. Probably both things are intertwined deeply and part of the catastrophe. A mass society is born out of overusing the landbase and out of land ownership (those who own more land can control the ones who own less and increase in population at the cost of the ones who own less). And of course a continuation of a mass society requires that system to continue. The fact that in a mass society land ownership and overuse of resources are required for continuation speaks for the instability and weakness of such a system, as it takes only a few abstract concepts to go for it to not work out any longer.

Good examples of working ways to deal with land use are provided by Pygmy:

Originally Posted by Pygmy-Na'vi

The indigenous peoples of the Xingu river basin [...] does not own land. [...] they own the crops that grow there. [...] The plants own the land, not they.
The nomads of Siberia (and until the 50's in northern Scandinavia) does not own land. They own the herds of horses and reindeers that graze there. They move with their herds, the herds own the land, not they.

And AFAIK the early settlers to the US "reverted" to that way of live and called it freedom. They owned herds and cowboys tended them. Later, land ownership with barbed wires came to pass and things went downhill from there...

But of course, since these people doesn't own the land they've lived in for thousands of years, they're evicted by corporations [...] - they own the land or rent it from the government, and the indigenous peoples doesn't...

Indeed - the government basically seized ownership. If you want to put it in terms of ownership, the natives "own" the whole country - but since they have no such concept, some government took it all and now seized the power to determine who gets what part of the bounty.

If some valuable mineral is found in quantity on your land for example, you HAVE to exploit it, mine it, or let others mine it, you're not allowed to simply leave it in the ground.

That is part of the laws in many countries and it is a major reason why companies can buid mines in the first place. Seriously - we had "mineral rights" in university and you have to allow a company to mine your land if there are resources under it. Even a company can only keep the option to mine these minerals for a few years until they have to start mining, so they are forced to mine them too (or loose the property). The only way around would be a nature preserve, but that is hard to get. So if someone should be allowed to own land, at least that person or community should have the right to keep these companies out if land ownership is in any way supposed to help protecting land.