Headline of the week, from the Chicago Tribune: "World's Unclaimed Land Running Out For Would-Be Kings." The article was about how there are 199 "official" nation-states in the world today, and how little "unclaimed" land there is left on Earth; if you want to start your own country, there's little left outside of coral attols. At first I simply found the article's premise amusing, as with the case of the Principality of Sealand. But then, I got to thinking... why does every single square inch of land have to belong to someone, in terms of totalitarian ownership?
Even if you've never seen the musical of same name, you've probably at least heard the song "Oklahoma." We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand, and when we saaaaaaaay, yeow! A-yip-ee-yow-ee-aaaaaaay... Hold up! Notice that the line says we belong to the land. Not the other way around.
Where does the concept of totalitarian land ownership come from, anyway? True, other animals have territories that they'll defend... from others of their own species. But do you know of a species other than Homo sapiens who believes that they actually own the land, and have the right to exploit anything, or any being (including plants and animals and rocks) that happen to be on his territory? That's what you get when you believe you own the land. "It's all mine, therefore I can do whatever I want with it." When you belong to the land, you allow yourself to live in harmony with everything else that belongs to the land, to the plants, the birds, the insects, the mammals, the trees, the grasses, even the rocks, rivers, and mountains. You may still defend your territory on occassion, but you don't jealously guard it as though only you have the right to be there and utilize the resources. When you think of yourself as belonging to the land, you treat it (and all that dwells there) with respect.
White settlers, when they came to the Americas, decided that the indigenous peoples were not "using" the land "efficiently," and therefore they had every right to kick them off. Personally, I'd like to kick a lot of corporations off their land because they're using the land too efficiently. ("Efficiently processing the living into the dead," in Derrick Jensen's terms... told you I've been reading too much of him lately.)
We've decided the whole damn planet belongs to us, when in reality it's the other way around. This exactly the kind of mentality that's causing industrial civilization to destroy the natural world.
