This was my weekly column inspired by Ben & Jerry's virtue signaling about "stolen indigenous land."
Musings on property
By Steve Browne
Well Ben & Jerry’s 4th of July announcement that America was built on stolen indigenous land and should give it back was well received in at least some quarters.
Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation in Vermont noted the corporate headquarters was located on Western Abenaki land and urged opening a dialog with Ben & Jerry’s to work together to uplift their people.
The company itself was sold to multinational corporate giant Unilever in 2000, but founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are still employed in non-managerial positions under an agreement whereby the ice cream company maintains its political and social activism.
I urge a look at the company’s history. Ben and Jerry are said to be socialists of some sort, but have succeeded very well as venture capitalists. They actually do try to put their money where their mouths are, whatever you think of any given stance they take. (They attempted to end sales in parts of Israel they consider occupied land for example.)
Frequently of course, economic reality catches up with them. After supporting defund the police and the July 4 tweet the parent company has lost an estimated $2.5 billion in market cap due to boycotts.
We shall see what happens, but in the meantime I was prompted to consider the nature of property and how we look at it.
So what is this thing we call “mine” as opposed to “thine”?
I think we probably have a broad general agreement that property consists of: the right to use it, the right to exclude others from using it, the right to the usufruct of it, and the right to sell it.
The devil of course, is in the details. Anyone who has sat in on a permit hearing for a proposed pig farm knows there are some pretty significant hoops one has to jump through to use your land in certain ways.
The whole concept of property in land is actually a late development in human history and the source of a lot of conflict between cultures. (“Late” as in the last 10,000 years or so, since the beginning of agriculture.)
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) came up with a rule of thumb of what defines property: what is found in a state of nature that man “mixes his labor with.”
Interestingly Locke used the example of “the Indian that hunteth the deer” and thereby mixes his labor with it. That is he changes the state the deer was found in, from alive to food. But he does not change the land the deer lives on.
The indigenous peoples of America were quite familiar with changing the nature of land. Half the world’s food crops originated in the Americas, greatly changed by generations of selective breeding from their natural state.
But the Americas are poor in large domestic animals and so agriculture was constrained by lack of a crucial bottleneck resource – manure. The great civilizations of Mexico and Peru could work around this, but in North America horticulturalists had to move their gardens frequently due to soil exhaustion.
When Europeans arrived they brought livestock that produced large quantities of… you get the idea.
And with their livestock and all their… stuff, they brought the idea of permanent land tenure which conflicted with indigenous notions of temporary stewardship. Not for the first time, high civilizations have been in conflict with nomads in the Americas, Asia, and Europe for millennia.
The different notions of what constitutes ownership in land created problems which persist to this day.
