The Earth as a Commons, or as
an Aggregation of Private Enclaves

Edward J. Dodson

[Reprinted from WorldWatch Magazine, September 2007]

Submitted by ejdodson@comcast.net on September 3, 2007 - 2:09pm. The history of human societal development is one of many stories with similar dynamics. Settlement of people in one location brought about a need to allocate territory and to create and enforce laws distinguishing between societal and individual property. Over time, power and privilege became the basis for these systems of law, enforced in almost all cases by brutality.

Our privilege-based systems of law have been softened and mitigated under institutions of social democracy -- but not eliminated. Control over nature is in most parts of the world still highly concentrated. Landless poor are forced to migrate to the cities, to live in massive urban slums without access to decent housing, clean water, schooling, or most basic amenities. More than half of the world's population remains at the mercy of governments closely aligned with monopolistic (often corporate) interests and/or an oligopolistic landed minority.

North America, Australia and a few other regions of the globe served as the safety valve for Old World societies where land monopoly resulted in suffering for every addition to the population. Jefferson thought it would take several hundred years for the land mass of the United States to be fully settled, creating a democracy of freeholders. Only decades after his death, the nation's elected representatives passed laws that conveyed much of the public domain over to a small number of corporations. By the end of the 19th century, the frontier was gone and conservationists rushed to preserve what was left from private control.

We were warned about these developments as long ago as the late 17th century, by John Locke. And, again, by Adam Smith and others of his generation of moral philosophers and political economists. Theirs was an agrarian-centric world, but the principles remain the same.

In a very real sense, each generation of people is engaged in a productivity challenge: to continually get more from less, largely because of socio-political arrangements that allow non-producers to claim (out of the common rent fund) a greater and greater share of what is produced by others.

Even in the United States, where its occupants of European heritage had the advantage of building communities from scratch, something less than 3% of the population controls around 95% of the nation's land value. While the consequences of this concentration are severe, public discussion of the issues is thwarted, understandably, by the absence of regular reporting and analysis of effective ownership of the earth and its natural resources.

This story is, I believe, the most important story that needs to be told to understand the State of the World.