I own a computer. I can do whatever I like with the computer, within some limits: for example, I should not burn it because it will pollute the atmosphere. But if I wanted to take a hammer to my computer and destroy it there would be no wrong in that. If I decide to ruin 'my' land by over-cropping it year after year, and allowing the soil to wash or blow away, I have committed a crime. If many land owners did that then how would future generations survive?
Surely I have a responsibility to look after 'my' land; to leave it in no worse a condition than when I took responsibility for it?
It seems that we do not own land in the same sense as we owns computers, cars, chairs and tables. The 'land owner' should more properly think of himself as the steward of 'his' land. He is holding it in trust for the future benefit of the biosphere.
My understanding is that primitive peoples generally believed that they belonged to the land, rather than the other way around. Better, don't you think?
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'Our' gardens
Our relationship with our gardens can tell us something about ourselves. First, there seems to be a 'natural' affinity between people, especially perhaps older people, and gardens; I suspect that this is instinctive and has held an evolutionary advantage since our ancestors changed from hunter-gathering to farming many thousands of years ago. My observation tells me that aboriginal Australians don't have this affinity; their ancestors didn't go through a farming period. (My experience has been with aborigines of the dry parts of Australia, in some other, better watered, areas some primitive and very limited form of farming might have been done.)|
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The need to 'own' our gardens The couple of years after I met my wife we each had a house. We normally stayed in her house during the week (although I was often away in the bush, usually two weeks at a time) and went to my house on weekends. I found it difficult raising enthusiasm gardening in my wife's garden, because it didn't feel like 'my garden'. It didn't matter if I told myself that this was irrational and silly, the enthusiasm that I had when working in my own garden was not there when I worked in my wife's garden.
On and off for the past ten or so years I have planted and tended trees and shrubs on the sides of public roads near our home (we sold the other two houses) at Crystal Brook in the Mid North of South Australia. We have our own garden around the house, and we have some land eighty kilometres away which is like a big garden too, so it's not that I lack land for gardening. I have come to feel some sort of ownership for 'my' lines of trees and shrubs on roadsides; I would be upset if someone removed any of them without first consulting me, I feel personally hurt when a vandal damages one of 'my' trees or shrubs. Yet, if someone kills native trees growing wild along a roadside I feel annoyed, but not nearly to the same degree as if they were 'mine'. Why the feeling of ownership?
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Elsewhere I see exquisitely manicured gardens, while on public land a short distance down the street, or perhaps even across the road, there is neglected land. The owners of the carefully tended gardens would not tolerate a stick out of place in their own garden, but are not bothered by tens of square metres of weeds within fifty metres of their front door. Why the need for ownership before caring for land and vegetation? If we could all develop a feeling of ownership of the whole Earth, then perhaps we would care more for it? Perhaps, if we didn't have near absolute ownership over 'our own' land, then we would care more for the land that we all belong to?
Perhaps my own feeling of ownership for 'my' plants on public roads is connected to a feeling of personal responsibility for the biosphere that I have developed over the past several decades? Is the lack of such a feeling in the apathetic majority a large part of the source of their apathy? Then should we be trying to instil a feeling of ownership for the Earth in our children? (I think it's too late for most of our politicians.)
I worry about the trend toward higher density of living in cities...
