We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“LAND – How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World” by Simon Winchester (William Collins; Harper-Collins, $NZ39:99); “WHAT IF WE STOPPED PRETENDING?” by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate; Harper-Collins, $NZ14:99)
In Land, Simon Winchester sets out to explore what exactly the concept of land ownership is, how human beings have divided up the Earth, and what the consequences of this are. Although this 400-plus-pages-long book is subtitled “How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World”, the British-born American–resident journalist and essayist does not consider only the modern world. Much history enters into his account. The personal anecdotes and tales from the past come thick and fast.
Winchester begins in relatively jocular fashion. His “Prologue” explains how he came to own a large parcel of land in the rural north-west of New York state. But this at once leads him to consider all the people who would have owned this same land before him – including indigenous Americans who were driven off as Europeans invaded and took over the continent. Nor does Winchester exempt himself from his subtitle’s “Hunger for Ownership”. Much later in Land (the footnote on Page 207) , Winchester admits that he himself has engaged in land speculation for profit. So in matters of land ownership, this is a book written by a participant, not an onlooker.
The five long sections that make up Land deal with separate concepts of land ownership.
After consideration of the geological and meteorological forces that create land, Part 1 turns to the millennia-old story of how human beings, ceasing to be hunter-gatherers, began to mark land out as exclusive property when agriculture and cultivation became the norm. From this gradually emerged the desire to know how much land was available for cultivation. Hence there was the gradual quest, over thousands of years, to measure the size of the whole Earth. This leads Winchester to discuss cartography, the art of triangulation and the use of “trigs”. In the 19th century came the discovery that the Earth is not a perfect sphere but is an oblate spheroid. More and more precise measurements were made, including the endeavour, taking over a century, to produce the International Map of the World, which was eventually superseded by aeronautical surveys. We now know that the Earth consists of 37 billion acres of dry land, and 90 billion acres under the sea.
It is only in the 4th chapter of Part 1 that Winchester discusses how borders between nations were devised. Once upon a time, a range of mountains or a desert or a wide river or sea would separate one people or tribe from another. But in the age of imperialism, lines drawn on maps, designating political borders, were often completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with topographical features. Winchester dwells upon the border between the United States and Canada, an almost straight line unconnected to any salient feature (apart from when it reaches the Great Lakes). In passing he notes that this is not an “undefended” border as is so often claimed, but is riddled along its whole length with monitoring gadgets to check for anyone crossing the border illegally. In a more tragic vein, he tells the story of the creation of the border between India and the new state of Pakistan, when the British withdrew from India in 1947. The border was drawn hurriedly by a British bureaucrat in London, who had never travelled east of Paris and who was guided only by maps. The result was – and is – a much contested border whose very existence has led to much bloodshed and many thousands of deaths in the last 70 years.
Having established the topic of land and its boundaries, in Part 2 Winchester turns to the matter of how land is either created or acquired. There are, of course, submarine volcanic eruptions that still create new islands. Spectacular examples are given of new islands bursting up off the coast of Icaland within the last 50 years. Still uninhabitable by human beings, these new islands are already being colonised naturally by birds and plants. More intriguing for Winchester, however, is the artificial creation of new land by human beings. He considers how much of what is now Hong Kong was dredged up and barricaded to extend the busy sea-port’s holdings and accommodate its expanding population. Even more detail is given on the Netherlands and the long project, starting in the 1920s, of damming up and finally obliterating most of the Zuider Zee to create a whole new province. Winchester does not spare us the engineering details involved. Nearly 20% of the Netherlands now consists of land that has been won from the sea by human effort.
But if land is created, without human conflict, there is the more troublesome and millennia-long problem of land being expropriated from one people by another. One of Land’s longest chapters is Chapter 3 of Part 2, titled “Red Territory”, in which Winchester examines how Europeans justified taking land from indigenes as they built their empires. There was, for example, the idea of “Terra Nullius” – meaning land that was owned by nobody and hence able to be claimed by imperial powers. Ignoring the long and ancient occupation by Aborigines, British colonists claimed Australia was “Terra Nullius” and took the continent over as of right. There was also the doctrine that only those who “improved” land – meaning basically only those who farmed land in the European way – should be able to own land. This doctrine was favoured particularly in North America as the United States of America expanded westwards, overwhelming tribes who occupied desired territories, making treaties which had so many conditions attached to them that they were easily broken, stimulated by populists like Andrew Jackson who sped up the process of expropriating land from native Americans, and culminating in such tragedies as the “trail of tears” and the obscenity of the 1889 Oklahoma land grab. In the process of this, many tribes were completely exterminated while others were confined to “reservations” which were often far from their ancestral territories. In the matter of social class as a factor in land ownership, Winchester devotes Chapter 4 of Part Two to the large hereditary holdings of aristocrats in the United Kingdom, a review which recalls the essential feudalism of this system.
But how well do the owners of large estates treat the land they own, and treat the people who live on their land? This matter Winchester tackles in Part 3, which he calls “Stewardship”. He begins with the grim history of the enclosure of common land by ambitious gentry and aristocrats as the Middle Ages ended, then moves on to the equally grim tale of the Highland clearances, where lairds like the Duke of Sutherland decided that grazing sheep was more profitable than having poor tenant farmers. The crofters were bundled off their land and driven into exile with no compensation for their loss. But then, taking a jump into the present age, Winchester looks at the extremely wealthy owners of huge tracts of land in Australia – so-called “stations” – who nowadays are most concerned to earn huge profits by the extraction of coal and other minerals, to the detriment of the world’s climate. There are similarly obscenely wealthy billionaires (like Ted Turner) in the United States, who sometimes cloak their overlordship in a professed concern for the environment. In Chapter 3 of Part 3, Winchester hits on what I thought was going to be the crux of this book – the difference in concepts of land ownership. On the one hand, you have the strict “no trespassing” mentality, enforced by barbed wire and electrified fences, which says that walkers and ramblers may under no circumstances cross land which has a particular owner. On the other hand, you have the concept of “community ownership”, which has been embraced in Scandinavian countries and in post-devolution Scotland. Of course farmers’ growing crops and cultivated fields are not to be walked over, but there is free roaming over open fields and untilled land regardless of who owns them.
Yet, as any well-informed person must be, Winchester is not wholly starry-eyed about the current movement known as “wilding”. This is the conservation movement which says that land would flourish best, and contribute most to a better climate, if it were left untouched by human beings. Let fields grow with wild flowers and weeds as they will, without human intervention, and let birds and animals do what they will. Eden will be recreated. Winchester cites the unintentional “wilding” that has taken place in the wide DMZ (De-Militarised Zone) between South and North Korea, upon which hardly any human feet have walked in over 60 years. It is now filled with wild flowers and birds that are endangered in areas of human habitation. A similar thing has happened on many abandoned farms in the United States and (bizarrely) around the abandoned ex-Soviet city of Chernobyl. Yet some attempts at “wilding” initiated by human beings are compromised. Winchester examines in detail the estate of a wealthy and modish couple in England. They are “wilding” many acres of their estate, to the applause of Green tourists who come to admire their project. But as sceptics have pointed out, their paradise of uncurated British flowers and birds is really artificial. After all, in their “wilding” fields, there are none of the original alpha predators, like wolves, that once roamed the British Isles before human beings hunted them to extinction. Attempts to “wild” land are never natural – they are products of human choice.
Winchester concludes his section on “Stewardship” with historical lessons on how land should and should not be used. Lesson One – an example of good land management ignored. Australian Aborigines for eons knew the art of “stick-fire” or “cold-fire” to limit the growth of dry combustible trees. European settlers dismissed this art as primitive superstition and let combustible trees grow where they will. Result? Australia’s chronic, huge and barely controlled bush fires. Lesson Two – an example of appalling use of land. There are now no easy access roads to some outskirts of the US city of Denver, Colorado. This is because land is still infected with highly toxic plutonium, after years in which a poorly-monitored manufactory of nuclear weapons was functioning there.
In his second-to-last section, Part 4, titled “Battlegrounds”, Winchester turns to examples of land whose ownership is constantly being disputed. I will not dwell on these, as the examples given in detailed chapters are such well-known ones. First the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine, fired in the early 20th century by the expropriation of much Arab land. Less often publicised, the deliberate expropriation of fertile Ukrainian land by Stalin’s Soviet state, including collectivisation and deliberately engineered famines, causing many millions of deaths – a record of genocide rivalling Hitler’s. Finally, the case of Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in the USA during the Second World War, only to discover, upon their release in 1945, that many of their farms had been stolen by unscrupulous non-Japanese farmers who would not return them. In each of these three case-studies, the issue was land occupied by one group and coveted by another.
The final section of Land, Part 5, has an apparently optimistic title, “Restoration”. Winchester deals with attempts that colonists and settlers have made in some parts of the world to restore land to members of the original occupying people. Winchester leads off with a 20-page chapter called “Maori in Arcady” about New Zealand. As a New Zealander, I find it hard to read this without seeing it as a once-over-lightly, but Winchester deals fairly enough with the taking of Maori land in the 19th century and then the long path to the Treaty of Waitangi being written into law and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal to return some disputed land to Maori ownership. Following this is a chapter on the very mixed results of “community ownership” on Scotland’s Hebrides Islands (apparently on some islands, it has led to an influx of people who believe living on a remote island entails the privilege of never having to work.) There is, I regret to say, a very superficial chapter called “Bringing Africa Home” which deals first with the, often brutal, colonisation of Africa by imperial European powers; then with post-independence attempts by African countries to redistribute land. Winchester does discuss the disaster of the unhinged Robert Mugabe who turned functioning farms over to cronies unskilled in farming – causing Zimbabwe to become the basket-case of Africa as opposed to the bread-basket of Africa that it once was. But his survey of Africa is too glib to be informative. Running a little bit off topic, Winchester notes how “restoration” of land can sometimes means an attempt to “restore” land to an apparently pristine state, as in such places as national parks. Visitors therein are allowed to believe they are seeing a part of the Earth still as it was before human occupation. Unfortunately, many such attempts at “restoration” involve expropriation. Winchester notes that the US’s Yosemite Park was created by forcing out the native American tribe that had lived there for centuries. Twisting the knife, he also notes that many of the great conservationists of the 19th and early 20th century were also white supremacits – like the founder of the Sierra club – who thought that other inferior races were incapable of appreciating the sublimity of wild landscape.
On a very chastening note, Winchester ends with a warning on the climate crisis, rising sea levels, and the probability that diminishing acres of land will lead to even more tension over who should own what land and why. He concludes by quoting Leo Tolstoy’s famous parable “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, which rebukes a lust for land by suggesting that in the end, all we need is the plot we are buried in.
Now that I have given you my typical summary of contents in lieu of a real review, what are my conclusions about Simon Winchester’s Land?
Chapter by chapter it is a fascinating book. There is much geology, much history, much vivid description, many engaging anecdotes, much protest. Some of the examples Winchester gives will already be familiar to many readers, but others are both less well-known and more enlightening. Winchester’s anger over expropriation – from the Highland Clearances to the Soviet rape of the Ukraine; from the theft of Native American land to the botched attempts at redistribution of land in modern Africa – are fully justified. There is much to learn from this book.
BUT (Oh! the inevitable word!) what I missed most in this informative and engaging book was an overall thesis. What exactly was the argument that Winchester was making? What exactly does Winchester himself think about land ownership? Certainly he has pungent things to say about how land has been acquired, how it has been misused, and how it has been smothered by cities, but does he have some idea on how land ownership in general could become more equitable? Does he have a better system in mind? On top of this, Winchester’s survey is largely focused on the rural. The overwhelming majority of human beings now live in huge cities and large towns. What does he have to say about leaseholders, freeholders and renters in these conditions? Or does the concept of “land” ownership not exist in cities?
I hope the preceding review makes it clear that Land is a book well worth reading. But, lacking a central line of attack, much of it does come across as faits divers.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In What if We Stopped Pretending? American novelist, author of non-fiction and controversialist Jonathan Franzen presents a brief polemic on the matter of climate change. What if We Stopped Pretending? is 70 small pages of large print, with many blank pages between its chapters. It can be read comfortably in about half-an-hour.
A couple of years back, in the New Yorker and a few other publications, Franzen contributed essays arguing that global warming was now unstoppable and that the best thing human beings could do would be to prepare for the new conditions in which we will attempt to survive. He repeats this argument in What if We Stopped Pretending?, saying “my own hopes lie not in averting climate catastrophe but in our capacity to deal with it reasonably and humanely” (p.14).
For expressing these opinions, Franzen was much criticised as a pessiminst and as somebody who merely impeded attempts to avert a possible existential disaster. But here Franzen defends his corner. Of course he sees climate-change-deniers as being delusional and excoriates the Right. But he sees the Left as being equally delusional by holding out false hope. This is the “pretence” referred to in his title. Franzen points out that weasel words infect many manifestoes and statements made by those who think restriction of carbon emissions will avert climate change. Franzen notes that such statements usually hedge their bets by saying that restriction of carbon emissions may only “theoretically” halt climate change. But this ignores human nature – the fact that the overwhelming majority of people want to persist with their current lifestyles, fuelled by whatever power sources are available. Every “saving” in an adoption of “green energy” is offset by the demand for energy on the wider world stage. In Africa, a new coal-fuelled power station opens each week, China is not giving up on traditional carbon-emitting fuels, and the catastrophe draws nearer. Much of the Green movement is simply shadow-boxing.
Franzen’s suggestions? We should be doing more to protect endangered species, many threatened with extinction. We should stop producing false optimism and start preparing to accommodate the coming tsunami of refugees from lands that will be inundated by rising sea-levels or who will be driven out of lands stricken with chronic drought. We should curtail as severely as we can many of the power-using luxuries that we now take for granted – but this will require a push-back that is probably not possible.
And we should accept that the Earth is soon going to be a hotter and more hostile environment for human beings. Therefore, we should work at the Earth’s problems day by day, doing what is good for humanity here and now and not holding on to false hopes of rescue. As Franzen writes: “Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.” (p.39)
That is the only hope Franzen offers us.
Incidentally, What if We Stopped Pretending? was itself originally published in the New Yorker as a riposte to some of Franzen’s critics and, of course, has earned Franzen yet more angry criticism.
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