E. Converse, Who Owns Nature?
Property Rights, Biodiversity, and the Land Ethic
- Main idea: Should not view landownership as lordship but rather as trusteeship
- Lordship = absolute sovereignty
- Trusteeship = right to use, but also duties to preserve
- Given severity of env. problems and our recent understanding of significant
ecological interconnections-both within nature and between humans and nature
- Need a new understanding of ownership (particularly land ownership) that is
environmentally sustainable and just
- Leopold: "To change ideas about what the land is for is to change ideas about
what everything is for"
- Property institutions fundamentally shape a society
- What can and can't be owned, what rights, duties, and restrictions go along with
what types of ownership
- Important in determining how people relate to each other and to nature
- Two historical sources of out-dated, harmful view of landownership as lordship
- One: Judeo-Christian creation story that gives humans "dominion," interpreted as
supreme authority over the earth and absolute ownership of its creatures
- Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". . . So God
created man in his own image . . . and God blessed them, and God said to them,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over
the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that
moves upon the earth."
- Humans-and only humans-as divine like beings with souls
- This is not the only interpretation of Christianity's environmental ethic, but it is
one that has had great influence
- John Locke's view that the nature is for human use and left unappropriated, it is
worthless and of no use and that human labor creates virtually all of nature's value
- "The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to Men for the Support and Comfort of
their being"
- Human labor creates 99% of the value of land
- Like Locke, modern society is blind to the values undisturbed nature provides for us
- Undisturbed lands needs to be "developed" for its "best and highest use"
- Ignores services nature provides: pollination, pollution filtering, climate stability,
beauty, wonder
- One study argued that yearly economic value of nature's ecological services
exceeded the total GNP of all nations combined
- Need a notion of land and land ownership that understands incredible fertility of
the earth apart from human labor/appropriation
- In stark contrast to this Lockean, "Christian" Domination model of land is the
Native American view of the earth as kin, giver of life, and home
- Sitting Bull: Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the
embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed is
awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we
too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal
neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet, hear me, people,
we have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first
met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to
till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have
made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take tithes
from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of
ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with
their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns
its banks and destroys all who are in its path.
- The earth does not belong to humans; humans belong to the earth
- Owning the earth is like owning your mother-the source and origin from which
one came
- Owning earth's biodiversity is to own one's kin
- Examples of how lordship view of land leads to pernicious policies
- Rancher who put up 28 mile long fence threatening starvation of a 1600 member
herd of pronghorn antelope
- Cutting trees that might be future homes of red-cockaded woodpeckers
- Shooting restored wolves in Yellowstone
- No notion of sharing land with its nonhuman inhabitants that have been on the
land for eons
- Most troubling contemporary idea: Regulator Takings--Idea that community
restrictions on landownership is a government taking of property that requires
compensation
- 5th amendment eminent domain clause: "may not take private land for public use
without just compensation"
- Regulatory "taking" as distinct from taking resulting from public appropriation of
land under eminent domain
- Examples: Land restrictions to protect endangered species and wetlands-an attack
on zoning more generally
- Compensation clearly not required if regulation preventing a "nuisance" (harm); is
compensation required if regulation aims to secure a public benefit?
- An alternative conception of landownership: trusteeship, not lordship
- Leopold's alternative conception of landownership as community trustee
- Leopold: We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it
with love and respect. . . In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens
from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It
implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as
such
- Humans as plain members and citizens of the land community who should respect
other members and the community itself
- Ownership is no one thing: Our children, bodies, pets, toasters, ideas, homes,
spouses, countries, and parents belong to us; we say they are "mine" or "yours."
- No reason to think ownership of land should be like ownership of toasters
- Property rights are social constructions, not natural givens, and we ought to
construct them to heal our damaged relationship with the land
- Ownership is a bundle of separable rights and responsibilities
- Typically involves
- The right to possess, use and manage one's belongings
- Prohibitions on harmful or destructive use
- Responsibilities of care
- Duties to others
- Property rights not absolute; they do not involve unfettered control and personal
fiat over the thing owned in total independence of others (human and nonhuman)
- Property ownership is not all rights and no responsibilities
- Ownership in land must require that the owner not harm the common good the
land helps to create
- E.g., owner who fills a wetland, neighbors watch flood waters rise and gees
population fall
- Regulations preventing filling wetlands don't take property rights away
but interpret ownership to require respect for land, neighbors and the
common good
- Regulations on land use can be viewed as takings only if accept lordship model of
ownership
- Fundamental difference between owning human artifacts (whose existence,
meaning, and value is for human use) and owning natural givens toward which we
owe respect
- Owning land includes no right to destroy, but a duty to preserve
- Can destroy one's toaster
- May not destroy land humans inherit
- Owning land is more like owning children, than owning a toaster
- Landowner is a trustee of the land's biodiversity and its ecological services
- Who owns nature? Nature/Land is a common heritage of all life.
- Application: National sovereignty or common heritage treatment of
genetic/biological resources in the South (and the North)?