To respect nature is to respect ourselves

Spider web at Torfolk Gård 2007

Nothing human beings do can compete with a piece of nature in complexity. A square metre of land contains so many organisms with so complicated and complex relationships that one can’t understand them. A gramme of forest soil may contain over a million bacteria colonies. It is estimated that several million individual animals and over a thousand different species may reside beneath a square metre of soil surface (Perry 1994); all of them are constituted by many, many cells and there is interaction between them, an exchange of energy and nutrients. Most likely, a square metre of nature is more complex and contains more information than the whole Internet.

Apart from the direct and indirect services obtained from nature, nature also has great aesthetical and cultural value. It gives another perspective, many reference points; it is an unprecedented piece of art. Natural environments have, for centuries, been known for their healing properties for people in spiritual need or mental stress. It is good to have respect for nature. The respect should be based on what it is; for its beauty and for its value, both apparent values and those not discovered. This respect should of course also include ourselves. A level of development has been reached where we are already managing most of the terrestrial ecosystems. This gives human beings unique powers among the creatures on the planet and unique responsibility too. We can’t pretend that we don’t have that power or that responsibility; both have to be exercised with due diligence, humbly realizing that there are so many things we don’t know.

Whose nature?
It should be kept in mind that exploitation of nature is also a question of whose nature. Different groups are affected by destruction of nature in different ways, and normally the nature of the weaker group is destroyed while the nature of the rich is preserved. This leads some to believe that the rich ‘care more’ for the environment or that only when there is a certain wealth that human beings ‘can afford’ to care about nature, but this mixes up cause and effect to a large extent. The rich can exploit the nature of the poor and even export their waste to the nature of the poor, whereas the poor has no other option than the exploitation of nature, be it in the form or natural resources or in the form of their own labour. To some extent, the whole trick of modern civilization is about exploitation of nature; exploitation of historical production, of which fossil fuel is the primary example; exploitation of the future nature, by dumping waste. But it is also the history of a few people exploiting many other people. At the centre, apart from nature and energy, are technology and society.

Society has four big challenges regarding the use of natural resources; well perhaps using the term ‘challenges’ is an understatement, ‘system errors’ is perhaps a more suitable term. First, humankind uses already too much of the planet’s resources; the capital is being consumed and it is not a question of whether society will go bankrupt[1] but when it will do so. Second, the distribution of these resources is extremely inequitable, between countries and within countries; rich countries and rich people use a totally disproportionate share of the resources (and rich people in rich countries are apparently the worst). Third, economic growth is continuing and seems to be hard-wired into society, which means that resource use will also continue to grow. Fourth, the world’s population is primed to grow for at least 40 more years, perhaps longer. We can’t negotiate with nature and no less can we expect that the poor will, or should, accept that common assets are wasted.

[1] The term is a bit unfortunate, the repercussions of an exhaustion of the natural capital is a lot more dramatic than a financial bankruptcy, which in essence only means a redistribution of money. The terms for bankruptcy with nature can’t be negotiated. There is no bailout.

The text is an extract from Garden Earth

Who gave you your property?

La propriété, c'est le vol! said French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book Qu'est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernment (What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government). This perception was not new. The famous Marquis de Sade (Yes, the same guy whose name formed sadism) said:

"Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

Those who are in favour of property rights to be almost unlimited and sacrosanct tend to be the same as those who wants to limit the extent of government. But they, conveniently, overlook a very fundamental fact. They have got their property from government and it is only government that can ensure their perpetuated right to the property. Before there was government, before there were laws and a state that could enforce them there was no property. And in most societies most things “belonged to” the community or the state. The root of private property is a privilege extracted from governments. This continues today where governments convert new things to goods and markets, for instance eco-system services. The market and control of such services is instituted by governments and through various processes allocated to private owners. 

Over years, different groups, with the support of the state (or being part of the state) came to take over larger and larger parts of property, such as the war lords, later becoming the respected nobles or the financiers of the state's war, the emerging capitalists of high finance. It is estimated that some 1.5 million valuable items were stolen from the Old Summer Palace in China, when ransacked by the French and the British 1860. Victor Hugo (1985) wrote:

One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace.[...] All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewellery. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away.

To stimulate the transcontinental railway building, the US federal government gave one fourth of Minnesota and Washington and a fifth of Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and Montana to the rail road companies; an area bigger than France (Lindblom 2001). It is interesting to note that a professor in the stronghold for "free market" economics acknowledge this. "Land, natural resources, and government contracts and licenses are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires, and all of these factors come from the government" says Ragharam Rajan, economist in Chicago (IHT 2011), referring to billionaires of India (read also NYT).

And no doubt, enormous wealth and therefore property is generated by the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How property in the collapsing Soviet Union was distributed was a crash course in how property is unequally distributed to those that are close to the power. 

It is an entirely subjective and political decision weather some should be given unique rights to land or other resources or they should be common. A government could as well declare a universal right to food as the private right to land. For those, like the author, that is raised in a fully developed capitalist market society it is almost hard to conceptualise how a world without private property could look like. Still, in many parts of the world, forests and farm land are often owned by the state or by the local community. The point is neither that private property by itself is good or bad, nor to claim that anyone with property is a thief (which would then include myself as well). It is to clarify that it is a privilege based on state sanction, and that the unique rights that property has been given has very little to do in a discussion about freedom, and even less that property rights should form a moral justification for limitation of other peoples' freedom. First when we have cleared the myth, can we discuss property in a rational way.



"Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can" sings John Lennon in Imagine. This is probably our greatest challenge. To think outside the box.