Ralph Borsodi

 

Lindy Davies: Land and Justice

We tend to have a very romantic conception of land, in this day and age. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has to do with how seldom modern people actually come into contact with the stuff of the earth itself. We deal with burgers... papers... toilets... Without thinking about the many layers of processing between hayfield and burger, between tree and paper, between flush and water table.

We think of dropping out of the modern plastic world to go "back to the land." "The land" is where we go on camping trips.

This romantic conception of land can lead to some dangerously fuzzy thinking. It leads us to think, for example, that perhaps land used to be absolutely vital to human life, back in some halcyon, underpopulated past — but modern technology has long since taken care of that.

Or has it?

Let's think about this question: what is our most valuable natural resource? Is it
— gold, diamonds, precious or strategic minerals? Nope, not even close.
— Oil? Well, it's highly important to industrial civilization, of course, a matter of great political import — but by no means the most valuable.
— Water? Now we're getting closer: necessary for life, to be sure, and thus a potential object of wars — but in terms of cost per cubic foot, not so terribly high, yet.

What is it? Our most valuable natural resource — by leaps and bounds, more valuable than all the others combined — is urban land. Our most valuable natural resource is land whose natural fertility is utterly depleted, it will yield no gems or minerals; its soil is full of toxins. There's nothing worthwhile about it, except for one vital attribute: where it is.

Technology has continually reduced the amount of land that each person needs to survive. But, of course, we do more, economically, than merely survive — and human society has continually demanded more land for all the stuff that people produce: all the gewgaws, gimcracks, thingamabobs and widgets...

It takes a whole bunch of land to produce — and transport, and merchandise — all that stuff. Nowadays we hear a lot about the concept of the ecological footprint: the overall area of land and resources needed to support a certain industry, say, or a certain region. The grossly huge ecological footprint of many communities (the United States, for example) leads to hand-wringing about overpopulation — goodness gracious, what if all the people in China and India start wanting to consume as much as we do!

We can analyze the ecological footprint in terms of its three distinct components:

  1. the subsistence footprint (what we must have to stay alive — which, as I said, tends to shrink with human progress)
  2. the wealth footprint (the resources needed to make the stuff we want, over and above what we actually need)
  3. the illth footprint ("illth" is a very useful term coined by ecologist and social philosopher Ralph Borsodi. It refers to the resources that are squandered on things we neither want nor need: pollution, waste, weapons, crime, preventable disease and malnutrition) ... read the whole speech

 

Jeff Smith: Share Rent, Transform Society

If someone buys a ticket to Super Bowl and decides not to go and sells it for more than its face value, he could face the wrath of the law. If he bought a super location and sold it for more than he paid for it, he could become a pillar of society. Temporary ownership for profiteering is illegal; but if permanent ownership, it is legal. If only we had a single standard, I think society would change for better. It doesn't matter who owns what. What matters is who gets the rent. We have millions of acres of forest we Americans own together, and we are losing rent on it. 

The word property cannot convey the distinction between rent and land. Ralph Borsodi came up with an alternative, a trust that would claim publicly and occupy privately and use sparingly and compensate neighborly. Share the rent with neighbors. A word for that is geonomics, earth-focused economics. It hones in on all this flow of rent that is so overlooked. Shift the focus to sharing; then owning of land loses importance and belonging to earth regains its importance. It is a different identity for human beings as parts of the economic system.  ... read the whole article