Ownership Of Land - A Deeply Flawed Concept?

[Sonoran Na'vi]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

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?

There could still be consequences to actions we are unaware of. Being unaware of such consequences puts us in danger of becoming victims of such consequences without realizing those consequences before hand. Another aspect of societal collapse is that some societies continue with an activity knowing the consequences. They aren't compelled to change until they are forced to. I think this is what you are referring to in regard to today's society.

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.

Property rights give economic incentive on the use of land and/or resources. By assigning property rights, the use of resources will be more efficient.

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.

Ownership of land and resources is not without its drawbacks, but I have already outlined the the problems of not assigning property rights.