Free Land!

The case for why land ownership doesn't really exist

“The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth.” -Chief Seattle

Although we technically own our little quarter acre off-grid property, we were not able to get title insurance on it. The same is true for most people in our neighborhood. Title insurance provides coverage for any future claims on your property. To get title insurance, a title insurance company examines the history of proof of ownership of your property to show that no one else can lay claim to it. For example, if after purchase you discover that the previous owner didn’t pay property taxes, the title company will cover that for you. However, the subdivision we live in only has proof of ownership going back to about 1960. Prior to that, all paperwork is lost. I think I heard somewhere that there was a fire in the county courthouse. This land used to be owned and subdivided by a sketchy company that was sued for holding a sweepstakes giving away free land that ended up being, well, at the time a desolate wasteland. They stopped paying taxes and the land went to the state. It is now mostly bought by private citizens at auction. Still, we cannot get title insurance.

Does this make it feel kind of precarious at times? Yes. Could someone arrive on a dark horse out of nowhere and lay claim to my land and all the surrounding land and potentially take it away from me? It’s possible.

This precarious situation has been a practice of non-attachment for me. I have had to release my attachment to the idea of ownership of my land and house. This is my home. I love and care for it while I am here. I am its steward. But when I die, bury my bones below it and let it go.

This land does not belong to me, though I belong to this land.

Wars great and small throughout time have been perpetrated because of land ownership. Somebody wants more land and so they start a war to take it over and lay claim to it. The other side must violently defend their land to keep it. If they lose, they lose their land and their home.

Even when land is given to people peacefully--such as by a United Nations Resolution after the partition of a British mandate as is the case with Israel or through further UN Resolutions and peace accords such as the attempt to establish self-ruled Palestinian states—wars continue to ensue to defend the land given peacefully.

This is an over-simplification, but it is still true.

Consider your own claim to your private land in the United States that you love and care for. By the law of Eminent Domain, the federal government has the right to seize your land and convert it to public use. They can do this either by outright taking it from you or restricting your use of it to such a degree that it constitutes a taking. Yes, they must economically compensate you for it, but does that make it any better? Because of eminent domain you can never actually own your land, you can only own the rights to it.

Consider mineral rights. Someone who has mineral rights to a piece of land has the right to explore or exploit solid or liquid minerals below the surface and sell their rights to do so to anyone else. However, mineral rights can be separated from surface level ownership. If you have a severed estate where you own the surface rights and not the mineral rights, the owner of the mineral rights can frack or mine on your land. Do you know who owns the mineral rights to your land?

Consider air space. Air rights include the space above the Earth’s surface and like mineral rights and water rights, can be owned separately from surface level ownership. With the emergence of airplanes, congress has declared the air space where airplanes soar to be a public highway, about 500 feet above your property in congested areas and 1000 feet otherwise. Air rights now only include the air space above the surface of your home that could reasonably be used in connection with the land. Whether or not someone could fly a drone into your airspace is still up for debate. In big cities like New York city, people sell their air rights to massive skyscrapers, sometimes making 50% more than what the land below is valued at.

So, yeah, make sure you know your easement rights before buying any land.

Do you actually own the land? I mean, isn’t it all a bit precarious? We can have all the insurance and economic compensation in the world but if another country invades and decides to take over and we lose the ensuing war, we don’t own the land anymore. Though we feel far from this possibility in the United States, this happens all over the globe and could even happen here.

There was a time when land was widely used for the common good. In many pre-feudal societies in Europe, land was commonly held and not privately owned. Families were able to use the common land for agriculture, grazing animals, or hunting. There were also nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes that had systems of communal grazing lands.

Around the 12^th century, following the introduction of the feudal system (which capitalism grew out of), common lands became appropriated and enclosed to increase the efficiency of agriculture and the value of land. These enclosures marginalized many poor people and especially affected elderly and unmarried women who became vehement protestors of the loss of common land rights. The Witch Trials not coincidentally soon followed with the added “benefit” of eliminating these protestors.

Pre-colonial Native Americans had many different systems of property ownership, but often land was commonly shared and regulated. Usually land was considered to belong to the entire tribe, though there were clear boundaries of where their tribal land ended and began. Starting in the 17^th century, European settlers arrived and pushed Native Americans off their land eventually resulting in a forced migration 200 years later onto reservations. The indigenous people of North American lost 99% of the land they historically occupied.

All this is to say, do you really own your land? First, if you have a mortgage, the bank still owns your land. But even if you are indigenous to the land that has been in your family since time immemorial and you are sitting pretty on your happy acreage owned in full, even if you have all the mineral and air rights one could possibly own, even if you have a full arsenal of weapons to fight off your government or any other governments that came to take your land, does it really belong to you?

Land ownership is a social construct. It is a societal agreement that only stands up if we all agree to it. And we don’t have a claim to the land, only the right to use it.

We can live under the false myth that we are able to control and dominate the Earth, but the truth is that we are completely dependent on the Earth to sustain us. The Earth has no need for us. We are the children of this planet and Mother Earth takes care of us and makes sure that we have everything we need to continue to survive. Like teenagers, we are mean to her, even though we need her more than ever; we abuse her and berate her even though we love her more than anything. It’s time to grow the fuck up.

The bombing of citizens is also the bombing of the land. If we love the land so much we’re willing to kill people for it, then why are we bombing the shit out of it and destroying it? Why are we threatening nuclear fallout? Why are we melting the glaciers, polluting the seas, tearing down forests? The time for rebellion and individuation from Mother Earth is over (still using the teenager analogy here). It is time to take responsibility for our actions. Stop fighting and waring and make peace with reality. We need to take care of each other, of ourselves, of our Mother. Otherwise, there will be no land left to fight for.