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How the Hunger for Land Shaped the Modern World?
From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.
Simon Winchester, 2021. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, HarperCollins.https://www.harpercollins.com/products/land-simon-winchester?variant=39325414555682https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/land-how-hungerhttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/human-history-and-the-hunger-for-land
The question of land—how we understand it, who controls it, how it's been distributed/claimed/seized historically, and how climate change will alter it—is a crucial one. Simon Winchester's new book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World attempts to answer these questions.
In this book, Winchester examines our duelling impulses for appropriation and exploitation, on the one hand, and stewardship and restoration, on the other, tracing our relationship to land from the dawn of agriculture to the current age. Moving across varied histories and geographies, he offers us one case study after another of how the once seemingly inexhaustible surface of the Earth has devolved into a commodity, the ultimate object of contestation and control.For example, he details the decades-long creation of Flevoland, a province in the Netherlands built entirely on land reclaimed from the North Sea, attributing Dutch communalism and consensus-driven policymaking to the fact that much of the country is below sea level. Winchester also details debates over indigenous land rights in America and Australia, and notes that Australian mining magnate Lang Hancock, whose daughter, Gina Rinehart, is now the world's largest private landowner with 29 million acres under her control, once suggested that unemployed aboriginal Australians should be sterilized.Winchester amasses a wealth of intriguing factoids and arcana. For instance, in 1816, the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve set out to calculate the length of the Earth's meridians, employing an arsenal of theodolites, telescopes, brass measuring chains, and other hulking surveying tools to triangulate points across great distances and impossibly varied topography. Four decades later, Struve's Geodetic Arc was completed, spanning ten countries and nearly two thousand miles, from the tip of Norway to the Black Sea coast of Ukraine. The line was a monumental achievement of engineering—it allowed Struve to determine the circumference of the Earth with astonishing accuracy, Winchester tells us, coming within sixteen hundred meters of the figure NASA settled upon more than a century later with the aid of satellite technology.It is the word land, a word formally denoting that exposed portion of the planet which is higher than and is fundamentally physically different from—and by happenstance is also somewhat less extensive than—that part which is today covered by water and which since the thirteenth century we have called the sea. Land is an originally Germanic word that has been current in English since the tenth century, denoting since then the solid surface of the planet that is found generally lying above sea level. What strikes many as ironic is that we have long called our planet the Earth, when—and this is of course especially noticeable when our blue and green spheroid is seen from outer space—it manifestly should more properly be called the Ocean. The Earth is more sea than land, and by a long chalk.Some may wonder why the word land came into common usage so much earlier the word sea. There is a reason, and it points to two fundamental differences, other than the obvious physical dissimilarity between earth and water, and which so markedly separates the two. One difference is that while the sea generally looks—and indeed is—much the same everywhere around the planet, varying only slightly in apparent color and warmth and salinity—the land varies hugely in aspect from place to place, and often does so in close proximity—there are mountains here, valleys there; there is desert or glacier, swamp or meadow, the surface is undulating or jagged, fertile or barren, wooded or grassy, its features hot and dry, or bitter cold and edged with ice. Variation of landscape is a basic feature of land, and is something to which inhabitants are sensitive, and of which they presumably always have been profoundly aware.By contrast—and this is the second fundamental difference—land and landscape are the near exclusive domain of air-breathing mammals—and most especially those that can speak, read, and write. And even before humankind first encountered the sea, humans would have been aware, and just because of its endless variety, of the landscape in which they were placed. They would have noticed, and noted—with the result that land and its vast spectrum of forms would have come into their vocabulary with more facility—its sheer variety made them more aware of it.Planners tend to think of land in concrete terms: as the medium for zoning, building, (sometimes) conservation, and so forth. But the concept of land as a commodity, thing of value, and object of control—by private, public, or corporate ownership—is generally an article of faith. In Land, Simon Wincheser explores the complex, and often disturbing, nature of land ownership around the world and throughout history.Land ownership entails the awkward grafting of money and paperwork to something tangible, unique, and, mostly, immutable. The result is an infinite array of interpretations, permutations, and conflicts over who owns, governs, and uses the world's 52 billion acres. The sum total of all of this, from ancient Britain, where two farmers hashed out a boundary line millennia ago, to the modern American West, where a discomfiting class of American oligarchs measure their holdings by the millions of acres, is that, for the most part, land ownership is a scheme that helps the rich and powerful become ever more rich and powerful.Please compare the two sets of numbers.The twenty biggest own well over half a million acres apiece, and together the top hundred own as much land as the entire state of Florida. And the rate of expansion of private ownership is phenomenal: since 2007 the amount of American land owned by these wealthy one hundred has increased by 50 percent and is showing no signs of slowing down. Many of them are ranchers, and invariably own tracts in Texas and in the cattle-friendly western states. A great number of their holdings go back to forefathers who ran cattle in the nineteenth century, and these landowners attach some reverence to their territories, seeing responsible ranching of the western emptiness as something of a public trust. Other large holdings have been acquired by those who believe that lumber—for home building or papermaking—is the more sustainable and perhaps easier way to make a fortune; their lands tend to be in the wetter, hillier territories, either in the Pacific northwest or the forested expanses of the northeast.The 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.How will climate change alter land?The near universally held belief about land: land is the only thing on this earth that lasts. Since 1965, we have come to know that continents are far more plastic than they look and that their land, once supposedly immobile, does indeed move, and that the plates to which this land is all bolted shift and jostle and plunge and collide one with the other in a ceaseless ballet of wandering rock.Land is decidedly not staying put. Land is in fact withering away. The seas that surround the land are rising, and they are rising fast. They are doing so because the world is getting warmer. The glacier ice and the Greenland ice and the Antarctic continental ice are all melting and pouring into the oceans, which are themselves becoming warmer, and their warming waters are swelling in volume. Tides are getting higher and storms are getting more frequent and surges are occurring in places where there never were surges before—and in sum, the land is under threat like never before in human existence.The land is drowning. It is slowly but steadily shrinking away, like a balloon with a leaky valve. Thus far, the loss of land has been all but imperceptible. Between 1996 and 2011, for example, the East Coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida, lost just 13,000 of its acres to the clawing waters of the Atlantic Ocean. One would suppose this to be a tiny amount, scarcely worthy of mention. A year later, however, came Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City square on and then lingered: suddenly, rising-water nightmares and flood scenarios that New Yorkers had never imagined became an urgent reality.The fate of the planetary land depends today on a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The steady melting of the once pure-white polar ice sheets has the simple effect of decreasing the planet’s reflectivity, its albedo. A nonreflective earth allows more solar heat to reach down and do its damage, melting more and making the now off-white world ever more gray. And the more gray, so still more heat is allowed to be absorbed and so still more gray all becomes, with the result that the circle deepens and widens and the melting accelerates—and the sea continues to rise up and up along the tide tables, and the storms become ever more numerous and dangerous, and land, more land, much more land, becomes swamp, becomes flood prone, slides underwater, then vanishes itself into the sea and is settled into becoming sea and finally being sea, forever.Oceanic expansion will be truly global in its consequences. This rising of the waters will wash away mudflats in Bangladesh and West Bengal and Thailand and Burma, as well as eroding the estuary of the Yangtze in Shanghai, deepening the waters in New Orleans, flooding the docks in Oakland, London, and Valparaiso, turning the Fens and sands of East Anglia into open water.For a while, and for most people, the land losses will still be imperceptible. It will be some long while before the 37 billion acres of the world are diminished by any serious fraction. It will be very many decades at least before as much as a single billion acres, for instance, could be thought of as being at immediate risk of loss. A billion acres is a combination of the areas of India and Pakistan together. It will be decades, centuries most probably, before land on that scale will be lost to the world. The coastal erosion experienced since 1996 along the Atlantic coast of North America amounts to a loss only of an acreage the size of San Marino, or of half of the island of Anguilla. Maybe by the end of the twenty-first century the world's land surface will have shrunk by an area equivalent to, say, Belgium. The coastal lands are indeed withering, and they will not last. CityReads ∣Notes On Cities"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
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