We need a new story
I have been recently reading some articles from the past – 1980s to be specific. One of which was in a journal dedicated to “Just Economics” for humans and non-humans alike. Here is a quote I came across by Thomas Berry that really struck me as what is missing with our world’s approach to economics and land.
“There is a certain pathos in social reform movements and in efforts made to improve the living conditions of the impoverished within the context of such a dysfunctional and non-sustainable economy…If there is to be real and sustainable progress, it must be a continuing enhancement of life for the entire planetary community. It must be shared by all the living, from the plankton in the sea to the birds above the land. It must include the grasses, the trees, and the living creatures of the earth. True progress must sustain the purity and life-giving qualities of both the air and the water. The integrity of these life systems must be normative for any progress worthy of the name.”
Then I turned to Henry George’s writings in his book Social Problems1 first published in 1883. George wrote “What more preposterous than the treatment of land as individual property? Were land treated as the property of the whole people, the ground rent accruing to the community would suffice for public purposes, and all other taxation might be dispensed with.” George also pointed out “Speaking generally, the agriculture of the United States is an exhaustive agriculture. We do not return to the earth what we take from it; each crop that is harvested leaves the soil poorer. We are cutting down forests that we do not replant; we are shipping abroad, in wheat and cotton and tobacco and meat, or flushing into the sea through the sewers of our great cities, the elements of fertility that have been embedded in the soil by the slow progress of nature, acting for long ages. The day is near at hand when it will be no longer possible for our increasing population freely to expand over new land; when we shall need for our own millions the immense surplus of food-stuffs now exported; when we shall not only begin to feel that social pressure which comes when natural resources are all monopolized, but when increasing social pressure here will increase social pressure in Europe”…and so on. George was not anti-government. In Social Problems, George advocated a measure of government intervention. His solution at the time during America’s Gilded Age was a tax or capture of rent on the value of land and all-natural resources would in essence socialize the rent while preserving private ownership and use.
“The collection of land rent, by the public for supplying public needs, returns the advantage an individual receives from the exclusive use of a land site to the balance of the community, who along with nature, contributed to its value and allow its exclusive use.”2
What George and others did not envision was the immensity and dire impact of this industrial monopolization worsening social pressures and damaging the planet’s ecosystems. There is no planet B as they say, and the immediacy required of our attention to monoploy ownership of land and resources is greater than ever.
As Thomas Berry3 wrote— “It is all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story.”
We need a new story!
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Notes
The Nature of Land and Natural Resources