Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

A sweeping, brilliant read by a writer who is worth every penny in prose, dictation, and compassion for his subjects. Winchester is a very, very accomplished writer — so much so that in 2006 he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen — although he currently resides in Massachusetts on a large parcel of his own recently purchased land, which he describes in detail in the early chapters of this book. In Land he tries to tackle an inextricable part of human history, one that is the cause of — and perhaps the solution to — so many of our worldly problems: who owns the land, and why? How did this come about? Would we be better off if more people owned more land, or does private ownership of large plots of land make us all better off in the long run? Why are Americans so private about anyone encroaching upon their land while Scotland, for example, is wholly interested in sharing community land with one another? These are very tricky, difficult, and nuanced subjects, and Winchester doesn’t take the reader on this journey in a linear way working from past to present. Instead, he weaves in and out of the tales of different countries, peoples, continents, histories, conflicts, and compromises, ultimately concluding with a short chapter on how we are, quite literally, losing our Earthly land because of climate change, and this is going to have massive, rapid implications on our immediate futures as human peoples. Some of the stories he shares in this 400-pager are truly difficult to read, most notably for this American the tales of the destruction, terror, and mayhem inflicted upon the land of Native Americans when the colonial settlers arrived, and stories of Japanese Americans being forced from their land and subsequently having it dispossessed by neighbors during the early years of World War II. Once again a graceful, elegant writer with a staunchly British wit and wicked sarcasm, Winchester makes these 400 pages well worth the very important read.

• the term real property signifies in addition the so called Bundle of Rights that can come with simple ownership: the rights, for example, to occupy, to sell, to mine, to clear away timber, to prevent trespass, to exclude others
• land is originally a Germanic word denoting solid surface of the planet that is found generally lying above sea level
• racist contempt was a characteristic of all too many of the colonists, with Native American chagrin and disappointment its twin
• title deed became an essential for demonstrating that one was actually the rightful owner of a piece of real estate
• until 1776, tenancy was welcome, but the notion that any individual could own, could have title to the land, was both impertinent and absurd
• when we reach back so far in time, questions about the precise nature of the ownership of land become necessarily ever more vague and the answers less fathomable than they are today
• mapmaking was keenly adopted in infant America
• as a lawyer puts it, ownership means that you have the right to call the police to throw anyone else off what the title documents say belongs to you
• it is not so much that you own it, it is just you own the right to tell everyone else to keep off
• possession or control, exclusion = right of enjoyment, disposition
• you must know where your land begins and ends, where its boundaries are
• by around 4K years ago, the concept of animal husbandry was being born, the concept of settled agriculture was begun — so came the demarcation of the land
• importance of knowing how one man’s land is made identifiably separate from that of another
• land has to be defined, whereabouts have to be known, boundaries and borders
• by the simple act of each farmer creating furrows of his own peculiar alignment, land, for the first time, had been informally demarcated
• Eratosthenes famously computed the circumference of our planet, some 2200 years ago
• Struve Geodetic Arc measured the meridian to determine the exact size of Earth
• Albrecht Penck very nearly succeeded in mapping the entire planet as the scale of one to one million
• wanted to establish an International Map of the World, the IMW, a common map for a common humanity
• Great War, reorganization of so much of the world dictated by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 required maps and atlases to help the world understand where exactly its citizens were now living their postwar lives
• after WWII, commercial aviation blossomed
• International Civil Aviation Organization, brand new aviation charts of this kind, similar to but different from the IMW, from the demands of airlines requested them at a faster pace — World Aeronautical Charts extended across all land surfaces
• Japanese Nippon Foundation is now under way to produce a general bathymetric chart of the world ocean
• 317 international land borders around the world — 154K miles
• great majority of the world’s land borders were fashioned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• Louis Mountbatten, final viceroy of India, broke India apart heartlessly
• appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a Lawyer, to draw boundaries of partitioned India, partitioned the country
• created a Muslim dominated West Pakistan and a similarly Muslim Majority East Pakistan
• 1947, Muslims fled to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs went to India
• defines only the randomly and hurriedly decided pair of eastern and western borders of today’s India
• one of the most dangerous borders in the world
• Netherlands has spent much of its recent existence manufacturing new territory for itself and the Dutch republic
• a quarter of the country lies below sea level
• land thus rescued and reclaimed was given a generic name that has since spread worldwide: the polder
• Netherlands is the only nation on earth with is guiding principles based on the theory and practice of the making of land
• very existence will be ever more tested as the world’s sea level rises and the weather becomes more extreme, year upon year upon year
• spirit of cooperation and compromise and a determined lack of evident privilege and separateness, and a concomitant belief that all of the population could and should share in such rewards as state-directed projects might ultimately generate
• pancake flat and perpetually windy, the twelfth province of the Netherlands, Flevoland, was raised from the sea and dried out in 1986, now supporting towns, and cities, farms, railways, highways, and a population of 400K
• North American continent had long been abundantly populated a vast array of aboriginal native peoples
• two to 20M with a profoundly deep attachment to the land
• June 1579, Francis Drake wanted to lay claim to untaken parts, NoCal
• his claim was to have profound implications for the future of Britain’s relationship with North American for centuries to come
• an indication that the whole country had been taken by England and so the entire nation, even that unexplored, was a colony
• Indians were rivals, competitors for possession of land
• Jon Winthrop, Bay Colony’s second Governor, argued that the colonial settlers now had both a natural God given right to own the land, but a civil right too
• for the English, the matter of the King, and the divine grace by which he reigned and ruled — take land as they pleased in the King’s name
• Doctrine of Discovery — notion first adduced by the 15th century Portuguese who sought and won a papal bull, known as Romanus Pontifex, which permitted them to seize as much as west Africa as they cared to take
• William Petty wrote that land must be acquired by colonists coming to America if they were to profit and prosper and lead the colonies into the sunlit uplands of economic success
• a lust for land was from now on part of a quintessential allure of America
• Native Americans looked after their land
• sophisticated and civilized people
• 500 tribes remaining and officially recognized today, with as many languages spoken
• Native Americans are, genetically, a Pacific people, in essence, an Asian people
• King George III issues a proclamation from London, declared that no English settlers could henceforth seize, buy, or settle any land that lay west of the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains
• one of the many factors that influenced the settlers in revolution
• new Americans unleashed themselves on the territory with improvident glee — Manifest Destiny
• U.S. Constitution, Section 8: Congress shall have Power … to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations and among the several states, and with the Indians Tribes
• had that not appeared in the constitution, it would have been up to the states to deal with resident Tribes
• from 1790 onward to today, a matter for the federal government alone
• 66M acres set aside for Native Americans — 2 percent of the entire U.S. landmass
• Native Americans were still not citizens of their own country at that time
• not until 1924, Snyder Act, 300K Native Americans then living in the U.S. could become, automatically and without application, full citizens
• Supreme Court ruling of 1823, Johnson v. M’Intosh — only the federal government can purchase land from Native Americans
• Homestead Act, 1862, freed slaves could apply for ownership; Indians could not
• all too few tribes today live on lands they originally settled
• Trail of Tears: many such trails, much less known, all bent on separating native peoples from their traditional lands, all indelible blots on the American escutcheon
• Oklahoma, land of the Red People
• in the early 19th century, it was in effect the federal government’s Indian dumping ground
• 1889, town of Guthrie, OK went from 0 population to thousands in hours on one day — fed government giving away land, no other city in America would ever grow so fast
• notion that the U.S. could ever have had the effrontery to all these acres “unassigned” when in truth the republic never possessed the moral authority either to assign or unassign them, here or anywhere else, is mostly forgotten today
• where a plough team completed a line and turned back, left behind was an eruption of piled earth — became a crude fence, the demarcation, a line in the ground that divided one pattern of ploughing from another
• how ownership began, probably 1400 BC
• ploughed field furrows became eventually substantial stone walls and Roman villa building
• when people began building fences around it, enclosing public land for private purpose, matters started to go awry
• enclosure of land, enforced removal of a portion of the surface of the Earth from the common ownership of many to that of one or more private individuals, represented a revolution in the social order, a cataclysmic change like few others before or since
• 15th and 16th centuries, a number of educated and aware men and women started to have arguments over the perceived inequities of the common land system
• beginning of Enlightenment, Agricultural Revolution, hints of Industrial Revolution, swept English society
• 18th and 19th centuries, millions of acres of once commonly used land came to be runged by wattle and wire, and fields, meadows, and woodlands were swept into private lands
• political left deplores enclosure of the land, believing it to have led to the dispossession of the rural poor, unfair distribution of wealth
• political right believes enclosure to have led to immensely more efficient farming, to ever greater food production
• cities began to expand, explosively
• Scotland = the clearances
• between 1807 and 1821, agents working for the Countess of Sutherland and Lord Stafford, forcibly and cruelly removed thousands of crofters from their pitiful smallholdings and settled them, mulish and unwilling, scores of miles away from home
• ineradicable aspect of history that has driven a wedge between Scots and English for two centuries and many more
• by most accounts, the world’s very largest private landowners are all Australian
• Gina Rinehart, heir to one of the country’s largest iron ore mining fortunes, 29M acres under her various companies ownership and control
• contributes significant sums to organizations that promote climate science skepticism
• in the U.S. the twenty biggest own well over half a million acres apiece, and together the top 100 own as much land as the entire state of Florida
• rate of expansion of private ownership since 2007 has increased by 50 percent
• in the 1800’s, huntsmen were soon thronging the prairies of the U.S., would hunt Bison by train
• 50M bison slaughtered by such fish in a barrel methods during the mid 19th century
• hunters never bothered to collect their kill, only wanted the kill itself
• Ted Turner remains appalled by that, has made efforts to breathe life into the Bison and it’s no longer on the verge of vanishing
• with so many wealthy people acquiring private quasi common countryside, locals see a closing off of a cherished part of rural life
• barriers, guard dogs, guards, unfriendly signs, jets, hotels = extreme wealth
• central to the concept of owning land is the right to tell others to get off it
• trespass = passage across the boundary of the law
• barbed wire = the devil’s rope
• 1874 helped in no small measure to bring about a signal change to the american diet, almost overnight, as it kept Animals in, not to keep people out
• beef became all of a sudden both cheap and available, would replace pork as the preferred national dinnertime dish
• razor wire became the world’s default barrier to unwanted movement
• Scotland there is today essentially no such thing as a trespass
• little harm and achieved a great deal of public good
• Scandinavia, ancient right of land wandering — allemansratten — “everyman’s right”
• all of these non American places it is so strongly felt that access to land is every bit as much a right as the right to air or water
• as long as you respect the interests of others, you take good care of the environment, and you take responsibility for your own actions — all Scotland, since 2003, is yours
• demilitarized zone, North Korea and South Korea
• amazing fragile rebirth of natural life, since it is one of the few places on the planet guaranteed to be untroubled by the presence of man
• wilding means no man made interventions, no shelter provided, no feed, no medical help
• seen as a good thing, beating back the tide of ecological disaster that presages, according to the “Sixth Extinction”
• wilding is seen as a practice likely to help prevent the death of the planet
• in MA, a property left a century ago by the farming family who built it produces wilding by its own volition, as a consequence of its own abandonment, and not by engineering at all
• should land be stewarded or left to run as it pleases?
• James Cook’s travels for England disregarded the aboriginal population, its people reduced in circumstance and stripped of all their dignity
• burning of underbrush — means of ensuring that larger fires, whether caused by dry lightening or by carelessness, had less of a chance of spreading, or getting out of hand
• stick burning, cold fires, to set small patches of fires
• idea that the fire will be cool enough to preserve any sensitive plants, yet hot enough to burn off the dead and unnecessary foliage
• indigenous Australians have long practiced the technique of setting regular and well controlled cool fires to clear underbrush and minimize the likelihood of major conflagrations
• sort of like lawn mowing in the suburbs
• centuries of experience with fires, generally are all too often generously armed with foresight and wisdom about the management of their lands
• cities are where land comes to die
• what we do to ourselves as humans we tend to do most egregiously in our cities
• sheer presence of landscape inhibits our baser instincts to pollute, to make ugly, to ruin
• landscape is all part of an ever changing world, and it forgives or forgets almost all of the assaults that mankind willfully or neglectfully imposes on it
• except with radioactivity — soils of the front ranges in part of CO are now speckled with traces of plutonium
• remains in place for thousands of years, a near permanent stain on the planet, a reminder of how cruelly man kind deals with his lands and his landscape
• all too often enmity subsides with distance and is replaced by the greater notion that all inhabitants of the land surface are simply humans, with more reason to be united than divided
• Balfour pledged in the hope that influential American Jewry might then support Britain in her prosecution of the war against Germany, also to help protect the Suez Canal in nearby Egypt
• act of policy finely calculated for the playing of a diplomatic war game
• Jews, or proxies, began to buy up land
• territory is only 200M north to south
• fighting and revolt, insurgency and ugliness
• many purchases made by wealthy outsiders, sympathizers and supporters, and by enormous new funds that had been set up specifically to buy land and encourage immigration and settled settlement
• creation of a sizable class of landless Arabs workers
• created a situation that was militarily and politically untenable and unsustainable
• fundamental argument now is the ownership of that land
• jubilee comes from the Hebrew word jubil, trumpet, a joyous celebration of the land and all that it offered to the people who lived upon it, cared for it, and drew their sustenance from it
• Arabs see it as catastrophe, Jews as jubilee
• Ukrainians left behind after Stalin enacted the law of five ears of wheat were terrified, those who survived, and who live today, remain suffused with anger and bitterness toward the Russians
• Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine’s landscape are near eternal, and are rooted in history, language, religion, and emotional connection, all of which are as powerfully magnetic as they are difficult either to define or quantify
• evils that Stalin perpetuated against the Ukrainian people will never be forgotten
• Ukrainians retain an anger and a bitterness that no emollient words from Moscow will ever manage to soothe
• one of the 20th centuries most appalling genocides
• 1920 there were 3.5M people living in CA, 71K ethnically Japanese, 2 percent of the population
• they managed to produce fully 12 percent of CA’s total farm products, crops values at 67M
• by 1941, on the even of war, their share of the truck farming crop of the western states had risen to an astounding 42 percent
• October 1941, FBI categorized Japanese into three levels depending on their perceived risk to the severity of the U.S.
• Roosevelt, 1942, executive order 9066 — Japanese men, women, children surrendered themselves into army custody, to be sent first to a number of hastily created and temporary assembly centers
• this is barely taught in schools today, and most people in the U.S. names of camps and what occurred there are almost wholly unknown
• white neighbors bought Japanese Americans’ possessions at low prices, ransacked their homes, looked to move into their soon to be abandoned homes, taking full advantage of their abruptly humiliating circumstances
• houses they had left behind had often been vandalized and their possessions stolen, in many a case the title to the land a Japanese family had once possessed had somehow vanished
• New Zealand was the last country on the planet to be discovered and settled by human population
• first country on the planet to install as its chosen political system the most genuine kind of democracy
• first settler state in the world to give the vote to its indigenous population
• one of the many failings of the British empire was the often bovine inability of Britons to even try to understand the subtleties and nuances of another and unfamiliar people
• to a Maori the concept of individual land possession simply did not compute
• Treaty of Waitangi concerned the disposition of the country’s 66M acres of hitherto communally owned land
• raft of problems that they are dealign with in New Zealand to this day
• Maori a minority in their own country
• reforms enacted in New Zealand over the years since the Land March in the 1970’s have been considerably more substantial than in those other settler states, in particular, the U.S., Canada and Australia, where an indigenous population has been well nigh obliterated by an immigrant horde
• Queen in 1995 issued a formal written apology for the land grab
• all told, some 600M in compensation has been paid out to various Maori clans
• Ulva in Scotland, a community buyout
• 1997, Scottish Parliament started to encourage communal ownership of land, a move that had the effect of starting the dilution of some private holdings and establishing, especially on some of the larger islands, a more dispersed system of ownership
• Land Reform Act of 2016, compelled people to sell (if they wanted to sell) to only such forward thinking communities
• more than a half a million acres, 2 percent of Scotland’s land surface, is now owned communally
• whether the new and supposedly more equitably disposed Scotland prospers as a socially healthy and economically vibrant entity, with its land widely dispersed throughout its community, has still not been fully tested and is still not fully known
• periods in history that are marked by exploration and survey, by botanical and biological and anthropological inquiry, seem so often to be the precursors of conquest, of cruelty, and of mercantile greed
• for sixty frantic years beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, Africa was casually and ruthlessly partitioned
• there had never been an entity called Nigeria until Sir Frederick Lugard had designed it
• the very concept of land ownership is to some cultures both puzzling and alien
• 500M acres of African land currently remains uncultivated, and yet 600M African people, almost half of the continent’s population, exist below the poverty line
• John Muir, founder of the Sierra club, was a white supremacist and had disdain for Native Americans
• but was central to America’s nineteenth century conservation movement
• core belief that land was sacred and God given, and that man was by contrast sinful, unclean, and unworthy
• America has long been keen to restrict and control all human activity within those areas deemed most beautiful
• if not empty, the areas must be emptied
• miners and prospectors, 49ers, were wholly disdainful of the Indians, regarding them as primitive, unclean, savage
• in Yosemite, the sedate village life of these harmless and congenial Miwok was now essentially over, reservation life beckoned, and the Yosemite Valley was forever destined to be pristine, preserved inviolate, and all but free of sinful humanity
• 1864, Lincoln signed the Land Grant Act, preservation and public enjoyment of the land
• Rocky Narrows, 274 acres in MA, oldest surviving possession of the oldest privately run and not for profit land conservation trust in the U.S.
• make land communally owned
• Trustees of the Reservations in MA
• community landownership is an arrangement that appears to work well, offering to the local public the undisputed benefits of health and exercise and peace and quiet and serenity
• owned by all, used by all, for the good of all
• notion of city land being gifted for the purpose of helping impoverished urban dwellers has advanced somewhat
• 2008, Evergreen Corporation launched in Cleveland, with the intention of making sweeping reforms to the employment and housing situation, to the use of local land, and to improving the urban environment
• positive effects of initiatives
• sharing and distributing land more liberally can do unanticipated good
• land is decidedly not staying put, it is withering away
• seas that surround the land are rising, and they are rising fast
• steady melting of the once pure white polar sheets has the simple effects of decreasing the planet’s reflectivity, its albedo
• time to consider what has for so very long ben well beyond consideration — the notion of sharing land, rather than merely owning it, outright?
• average Black household holding assets of no more than 8 percent of those owned by the median white household, land being a central component of those assets, is an enduring legacy that contributes to the country’s racial disharmony