Land Read online

  Dedication

  DEDICATED TO CHIEF STANDING BEAR

  In 1879 the U.S. government declared this

  Ponca chief to be a “person” under the law.

  But they still took away his lands.

  Epigraph

  The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

  —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,

  Discourse on Inequality (1755)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue: Uncommon Ground

  1: Transaction

  2: Foundation

  3: Population

  4: Exploitation

  5: Demarcation, Eviction, Possession

  6: Exploration

  Part I: Borderlines

  1: When the Worm Forgave the Plough

  2: The Size of All the Earth

  3: Just Where is Everything

  4: At the Edges of Worlds

  5: Drawing a Distinction

  Part II: Annals of Acquisition

  1: Up and Out and on the Level

  2: Islands of the Dammed

  3: Red Territory

  4: The Land and the Gentry

  Part III: Stewardship

  1: The Tragedies of Improvement

  2: The Accumulators of Space

  3: Going Nowhere and Everywhere

  4: The World Made Wild Again

  5: On Wisdom, Down Under

  6: Parks, Recreation, and Plutonium

  Part IV: Battlegrounds

  1: The Dreary Steeples

  2: The Unholy Land

  3: Death on the Rich Black Earth

  4: Concentration and Confiscation

  Part V: Annals of Restoration

  1: Māori in Arcady

  2: Strangers in the Hebrides

  3: Bringing Africa Home

  4: Aliens in Wonderland

  5: Trust is Everything

  Epilogue: Yet Now the Land is Drowning

  With Great Thanks

  A Glossary of Terms, Some Possibly Unfamiliar, Associated with Land and Its Ownership

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Simon Winchester

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  List of Illustrations

  UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ALL IMAGES ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR ARE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.

  Chief Standing Bear

  An early American land deed

  Map of Dutchess County, New York

  Crofter using a caschrom plough (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Strip lynchets (courtesy of Alamy)

  Beating the bounds (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Struve Geodetic arc

  Albrecht Penck (courtesy of Getty Images)

  IMW sheet (courtesy of Marcy Bidney)

  Sir Cyril Radcliffe (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Wagah border gate ceremony (courtesy of Getty Images)

  View of U.S.–Canada border, showing the vista (courtesy of the International Boundary Commission)

  Southern part of Raasay on Ordnance Survey map (courtesy of Ordnance Survey, 1947)

  Cornelis Lely (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Flevoland (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Railroad broadside for land (kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society)

  Unassigned lands in Oklahoma

  Land Run in full spate (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Guthrie buildings (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Domesday Book (courtesy of Getty Images)

  An Enclosure Act

  “The Mannie” (courtesy of Alamy)

  Dunrobin Castle (courtesy of Getty Images)

  A crofter’s home (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Gina Rinehart (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Ted Turner (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Shooting bison from a train (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Land owned by the Wilks brothers (courtesy of Max Whittaker)

  Patent 157124 for barbed wire

  Wildlife in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Burrell and Tree at Knepp (© Christopher Pledger/Telegraph Media Group Limited, 2018)

  Purloined aboriginal shield (courtesy of Alamy)

  Cool fires being set (courtesy of Alamy)

  The Maidan, Kolkata (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Map showing gap in Denver beltway (courtesy of AAA)

  Rocky Flats plant (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Palestine border wall (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Soviet propaganda poster for Ukraine

  Memorial to Ukrainian victims (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Strawberry Festival in Bellevue, Washington

  Minidoka, Idaho, concentration camp (courtesy of Alamy)

  Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (courtesy of Alamy)

  Whina Cooper on the Land March, New Zealand

  Queen Elizabeth signs apology (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Island of Ulva (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Isle of Eigg (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Sgurr of Eigg, Scotland

  Cecil Rhodes bestriding Africa (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Violent occupation of a colonial farm, Zimbabwe (courtesy of Alamy)

  John Muir (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Miwok Indians in Yosemite

  Vinoba Bhave (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Henry George (courtesy of Alamy)

  Land Value Tax wagon (courtesy of Alamy)

  Land being inundated (courtesy of David Freese)

  Chief Sealth (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Idealized vision of a yeoman farmer (courtesy of Alamy)

  Tolstoy and horse (courtesy of Getty Images)

  Prologue

  Uncommon Ground

  It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can’t fly away.

  —ANTHONY TROLLOPE,

  The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

  * * *

  A Caveat

  With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false. The belief in land’s limitless stability has informed humankind’s approach to the possession of the world’s surface for centuries past, as the following pages illustrate. But now a profound change is coming.

  The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.

  * * *

  1

  Transaction

  On a warm midsummer’s evening just before the end of the last century, in a book-lined lawyers’ office in the pretty town of Kent, Connecticut, I handed over a check for a moderate sum in dollars to a second-generation Sicilian American, a plumber named Cesare, who lived in the Bronx but who had driven up into the lush New England countryside especially for the brief formalities of this day. The all-too-complicated rituals of what in real estate parlance is called a closing were familiar to the lawyers, less so to me. In exchange for the check—a cashier’s check, certified by the bank to be as good as cash; the lawyers had insisted; and to me it indeed felt like cash, pa
infully disbursed, and representing some years of scrupulous saving on my part—I was handed by Cesare’s stone-faced attorney an engraved, embossed, and rather elegant piece of what looked like parchment, a document formally known as a deed.

  This credential indicated that, with the agreed funds having been offered and accepted, I was now the unambiguous, undisputed, and indisputable owner of a tract, formerly owned by Cesare, of 123¼ acres of forested and rocky mountainside, located in the hamlet of Wassaic, in the village of Amenia, the town of Dover, the county of Dutchess, in the state of New York. The deed gave me title to the tract. I was now legally entitled to possess it. I was its owner. I could now occupy it, exclusively.

  I had just purchased a piece of the United States of America. A morsel of the continent now belonged, exclusively, to me. Since the total land surface of the planet amounts to some 36,652,096,000 acres—let us say 37 billion acres—I could declare, on walking out into the sunshine on that July evening, that my 123 acres, a little over three-billionths of its extent, were now mine, and mine alone.

  It was the first time in my life that I had ever done such a thing, had ever come to own a piece of real property, anywhere. Personal property, yes: I had owned cars, computers, dishwashers, books, fountain pens. But real property, and its kissing-cousin real estate:* this was a first. A first for me, and more or less the first time for anyone in my family. Back home in England my parents, whose lives had been mostly spent in respectable impoverishment, had in their later years managed to buy a small cottage in the English Midland county of Rutland. Since their house came with a tiny postage stamp of a garden, with a lawn and some shrubs and a dribbling water feature, it can technically be said that, once they had discharged their mortgage, they did indeed own real estate, albeit only a vanishingly small parcel of it. It would be stretching things, straining credulity, to hazard a description of them as landowners.

  It was much the same for my grandparents, whose circumstances were similarly straitened. Both the paternal-side couple who had lived in England, as well as those members of my mother’s rather more complicated side and who came from Belgium, had had nothing of the sort. For them, as for many people, accommodation and shelter relied on the whim and commercial acumen of a series of landlords, who as the name suggested had themselves owned the acreage on which my various grandparents had settled. I was given to understand that all the generations of my ancestors before them were unburdened by ownership also, had never owned an acre or a hectare, a cordel, a fardel, or a virgate,* nor any fraction thereof. All of which made my receipt of that Dutchess County title, a document of such letterpressed and engraved magnificence that I would gaze at it enraptured for hours, both historic and precious.

  Even though my property was neither particularly costly nor likely ever to be valuable, nor in truth was even very useful, my ownership of it had a powerful personal symbolism. A decade or so after the transaction I traveled to Boston, to the afterdeck of an old sailing warship, where I swore an oath before a federal judge and became, in a brief but moving ceremony, an American citizen. For many years after that life-altering event I drew considerable comfort and satisfaction from knowing that I had become fully invested, and with the square footage of mountainside under my ownership quite literally so, in the future of my new country.

  I would walk the forest—my forest now!—as often as I could. I would puff and pant my way up the escarpment, following a vague and almost vanishingly overgrown track through the woods and which led up from an ancient loggers’ landing. After a quarter mile or so, I would turn off left into the deeper timberland, after which I would frequently get somewhat confused, disoriented, and even a little lost. I remembered from Boy Scouts days that moss tends to grow on the north side of the trees and from school physics days that streams tended to flow downhill, and reckoned therefore that I would always be able to find my way out and back to civilization. Moreover, it turned out that, slicing across this tract of mine in a perfect die-straight line of cleared underbrush, and with permission seemingly granted by me under grandfathering laws in which I played no apparent part, and with warning notices posted every few hundred yards in red and white, there was, in a buried, invisible, and supposedly atomic-attack-hardened cylinder of concrete, a secure and once secret communications cable that had connected the Eisenhower-era White House with a strategic nuclear bomber base somewhere up in Maine. If I stumbled across this, then I knew I would find my way out—at least to Washington, or to Maine.

  But otherwise, once deep in the woods all the world soon faded, the forest became almost primeval in its quiet and detachment. Somewhere perhaps, and not too far away, maybe, there would be a rain-softened and moss-covered split-rail fence of cedar, perhaps an old wall of tumbled stones, and by chance a cairn and a chiseled mark or two left on a rock by some long-ago survey team. But generally, deep in these dark woods’ darker middle, there was no other clear sign of human intervention or activity, few clues for the passing stranger that mankind was ever here at all. There were just trees and ferns and soil and birds and the leavings of deer and rabbits and raccoons and bears, and overhead, glimpsed blue and silent through the crowns of leaves, the presiding vastness of what the poet John Clare, two centuries before, had called the circling sky.

  On that first untutored glance the surface here appears today as it always was, wild, unchanged, the result of geology and weather and heat and pressure and time. Most of all, by near endless extents of time, which all around the world, and not just here, have rendered the once malleable and plastic planetary crust into something colder, harder, and workable, and on which in many places, such as this forest, life of all varieties has come slowly to exist.

  Speakers of the English language have long called this exposed and rendered surface by a word that has been part of our vocabulary for longer than almost any other. It is the word land, a word formally denoting that exposed portion of the planet which is higher than and is fundamentally physically different from—and by happenstance is also somewhat less extensive than—that part which is today covered by water and which since the thirteenth century we have called the sea. Land is an originally Germanic word that has been current in English since the tenth century, denoting since then the solid surface of the planet that is found generally lying above sea level.* What strikes many as ironic is that we have long called our planet the Earth, when—and this is of course especially noticeable when our blue and green spheroid is seen from outer space—it manifestly should more properly be called the Ocean. The Earth is more sea than land, and by a long chalk.

  Some may wonder why the word land came into common usage so much earlier the word sea.* There is a reason, and it points to two fundamental differences, other than the obvious physical dissimilarity between earth and water, and which so markedly separates the two. One difference is that while the sea generally looks—and indeed is—much the same everywhere around the planet, varying only slightly in apparent color and warmth and salinity—the land varies hugely in aspect from place to place, and often does so in close proximity—there are mountains here, valleys there; there is desert or glacier, swamp or meadow, the surface is undulating or jagged, fertile or barren, wooded or grassy, its features hot and dry, or bitter cold and edged with ice. Variation of landscape is a basic feature of land, and is something to which inhabitants are sensitive, and of which they presumably always have been profoundly aware.

  By contrast—and this is the second fundamental difference—land and landscape are the near exclusive domain of air-breathing mammals—and most especially those that can speak, read, and write. And even before humankind first encountered the sea, humans would have been aware, and just because of its endless variety, of the landscape in which they were placed. They would have noticed, and noted—with the result that land and its vast spectrum of forms would have come into their vocabulary with more facility—its sheer variety made them more aware of it. Had there been note-taking creatures living in the early sea, this w
atery medium in which they lived would have initially been invisible to them, and the vocabulary needed to describe it would necessarily have been rather limited in extent.

  2

  Foundation

  Like all land and all landscapes, everywhere, mine has a story to tell. It has not always been owned. Nor, for that matter, has it always been land.

  The exposed bedrock in this particular part of North America is extremely ancient. Those benches and ledges of hard and lichen-draped rock that I can see poking out from the thin skin of forest soil, from among the dead leaves and mosses on the floor—as well as the clues offered by the boulders piled in the surrounding walls—are considerably more ancient than in most of the rest of the country. They are very more varied, too. In these square miles of rural New York State more than one hundred different rock formations have been described by geologists who, for decades past, have tramped enthralled across these hills and along the river valleys, exploring with their hammers and magnifying glasses and bottles of acid, with their compasses and clinometers and their all-too-keen eyes.

  The story that these New England rocks tell is one of hundreds of millions of years of geological turmoil executed on a titanic scale. It is a tortured and spectacular history that begins with volcanic land formation, then is given over to eons of sudden fracturing, splitting, compressing, heating, pummeling, twisting, folding, and breaking, followed by millions more years of inundations by tropical seas, with the much altered first rocks now covered by thousands of feet of deposited new materials, after which and all in good time there were long periods of slow upward thrusting to the surface, further long drownings, and then immense and violent collisions with other bodies of rock that were either broadly similar to or else very different from the first formed fragments of the volcanic crust.

  All of this activity, and all of these processes, helped to forge and deposit what are today’s New England rocks—what is today’s New England land—and it forced these rocks together in the improbable mash-up of granites and limestones and shales and sandstones and basalts that now extend from the Hudson River valley to the Atlantic Ocean. This part of what in today’s world is located well inside the Northern Hemisphere lies essentially halfway between the North Pole and the equator. My three one-billionths possession of the total land-and-sea planetary surface stands at 41.8 degrees north latitude—halfway to the Pole would be 45 degrees, so it is a little to the south of the center point. It is a stark reminder of the topsy-turvy nature of the prior workings of the planet that all of the building that put my land where it is today actually took place in the early Southern Hemisphere, close to the old South Pole, thousands of miles away from where the land has ended up today. The beginnings of my tract of land were both long ago and far away.