Does the Planet Belong to Us, or Do We Belong to the Planet?

“One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”
–attributed to Thasuka Witko, A.K.A. “Crazy Horse“

John Locke, who was a theist, believed that since God created humans, we are his property. I do not believe in God, but I do still find value in much of Locke’s philosophy. Just because he begins from a theistic starting point doesn’t mean I have to dismiss everything he said, so long as I limit myself to those parts that do not depend on God, or I replace God with some other causal agent that fits reasonably well: evolution, for example. Of course, when I do that, I may be forced to tweak the philosophy a bit in order to make sense of it without God…

According to Locke, the creator owns his creation, which for humans means that we own that which we create or make useful by our labor. However, unlike God, we are bound by the restriction of sufficiency: it would be unjust to accumulate so much property that we deprive others of the ability to fulfill their needs. If I hoard all the berries, I’ve not only taken more than I can eat before they spoil, but I’ve taken that which I could have left for you. When it comes to land, this philosophy dictates that I am only justified in owning that which I am capable of working and turning to utility. (Presumably our right to own land at all comes from the belief that God has gifted the planet to us.)

But what happens when we replace God with evolution as our “creator”? It should be obvious: the relationship between humans and the planet gets flipped, and we become the “property,” or, more appropriately, the children, of “Mother Earth.” The natural process of evolution arose from the conditions of the planet, so its offspring is the planet’s offspring. If the planet is our creator, then how can we own pieces of it? The created cannot own the creator. The very concept of land ownership requires a supernatural creator, because the supernatural cannot be ensnared by this neat little trap.

In short: supernatural origins allow for land ownership; natural origins preclude it.

It was not long ago that I would have bristled at a post like this, yet here I am writing it. My position then was that I should not be allowed to use land unfairly — for example, to buy up all the land surrounding an important resource and prevent you from gaining access to it — but the concept of land ownership was perfectly acceptable to me (although I’ve never owned any). Yet, once again, reason has forced me to reconsider my position in order to remain consistent.

This poses a potential problem for me, regarding my position on “One World” government, since it becomes difficult to justify our borders if we cannot justify our claims to the land. But that reality doesn’t erase the one I described in the other post, and that one represents a more serious and immediate concern, in my judgment. The issue of political empowerment, and the fear of losing it under a global authority, is very real, whereas this topic is largely philosophical (although it does have real-world repercussions).

At any rate, it would seem that if Locke was right about ownership, then Crazy Horse was right about the land.

Who Would Al Gore Kill?

I am sick and tired of disingenuous environmentalists. I’m not talking about your typical run-of-the-mill fair-weather greenies; most of them are harmless, albeit hypocritical (e.g., the soccer-moms loading their SUVs with cloth grocery bags). I’m talking about the hardcore set, the ones who preach population reduction without having the integrity to put the real questions on the table.

Let’s accept that population reduction is desirable, for the sake of argument. If we simply limit every couple to one child we are not going to accomplish anything. People are living longer than ever, and increased longevity is being actively pursued by science as a Good Thing. But something has to give: either we stop having babies or we start killing people. In order to reduce the numbers, we would have to kill enough people that the total death rate, natural and induced, exceed the birth rate — this is simple arithmetic.

The question then becomes: who do we kill? Surely not the elderly, not after all our efforts to keep them alive. That would fly in the face of pretty much the entirety of modern medicine. Babies? I doubt that would go over well… but wait! We could sterilize enough women so that even if all the rest had an unusually large number of children — let’s say a baker’s dozen, just to be safe — the birth rate would still be lower than the death rate, even with people living to, say, 150 (for starters). OK, this seems at least plausible; let’s examine this option further…

The question now becomes: whom do we sterilize? The obvious answer is: whomever is having the most babies. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, those tend to be poor brown people (birth rate/fertility rate). Well, isn’t that just lovely? No, I think we better move along before we start entertaining ideas that would reverse several hundred years of hard-won progress…

OK then, if euthanizing the people we all hope to become (old people) is no good, and if sterilizing (and thus exterminating) the most downtrodden people on Earth is no good, then what are we left with? It might be argued that since the most affluent nations are the biggest polluters, then eliminating the upper and middle classes of Europe and North America would be “as good” as sterilizing Africa — but that will not reduce the number of mouths that need feeding. The real problem from the environmental standpoint is that hungry people are too worried about their next meal to care about cloth grocery bags and compact fluorescent light bulbs. No, I’m afraid the question simply cannot be ducked. If the population must be reduced, then we must choose who is to be cut: old people or brown people.

But surely it can’t be so simple; isn’t there some other alternative? Well, one does come to mind, but it’s pretty far out there: we accept that the best we can hope for is to slow population growth, and that we are unlikely ever to reduce it without becoming something less than human. If we accept that, then the question becomes: how do we slow it? One proven method is to increase affluence — but that’s crazy talk, right?