Today 5th June is
WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY. The World celebrates nature. The theme for World
Environment Day 2017 "Connecting People to Nature", implores us all
to get outdoors and into nature, to appreciate its beauty and its importance,
and to take forward the call to protect the Earth that we share. Land is the
foundation of environment.
Land encompasses
surface, space, soil, provision of food and water, and a basis for urban and
industrial development. Land stands for property and is a production factor
besides labor and capital. Land embodies many more dimensions, such as
homeland, place of ancestry, a prerequisite for realizing individual freedom,
and a basis for survival or wealth.
In traditional
ancient societies, land was considered a gift from God that allows satisfying
primary needs for food and shelter and, therefore, it is not transferable nor
has it value. As put poetically by Polanyi (1944:187): “Land is tied up with
the organization of kinship, neighbourhood, craft, and creed – with tribe and
temple, village, guild, and church. … It invests a man’s life with stability;
it is the site of his habitation; …; it is the landscape and the seasons”.
With the entrenchment
of market economy or capitalism societies are changing, and a growing number of
people are gradually losing the link with their ancestral land as a common
asset. Instead of viewing land as a sacred trust, a gift of God to all humans,
the idea of ownership and private property as a sacred right was introduced. The
sanctification of property rights is an essential feature of markets. The
market economy separates the man from the land, and turn both into commodities
freely available for sale and purchase.
Bringing land
into the ambit of the marketplace was a slow process, which followed centuries of
violent dispossession initially in Europe, then Americas, Australia and New
Zealand. First agricultural capitalism created the need for enclosures of vast
tracts of land. Spearheaded by philosophers like John Locke (1689)’s The
Second Treatise of Government, new theories of property were developed to
facilitate accomplishment of this transformation. Theories of property have
become a bedrock of contemporary economic thought and arguments favouring private
property over the public need for commons.
Since as early
as 13th Century in Europe, years of violent dispossession of commons
were and continue to create poor people as described by Karl Polanyi (1944:
37): “The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down
ancient laws and custom, … by violence… They were literally robbing the poor of
their share in the commons, tearing down the houses … [of] the poor. The fabric
of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human
dwelling testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged,
endangering the defences of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its
population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and
turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves”.
According to
Thomas Malthus, the poor were responsible for their lot because of
overbreeding, leading to an imbalance between the population and the food.
Unless this overbreeding was checked, it would lead to the spread of vice and
misery, which is the natural result of poverty. Thomas Malthus (1798:
61)’s An Essay on the Principle of Population argues that feeding the
poor would aggravate the problem of poverty by creating even more poor. With
appropriate laws of the time, the dispossessed poor are driven into a pool of
surplus labour required for mass capitalist production. A clearer expression of
the necessity of poverty for providing labour is given by Burke (1877, cited by
Winch, 1985: 240), who wrote: “When we affect to pity as poor those who must
labour or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the condition of
mankind.” Ricardo (2010: 45) wrote that “The principle of gravitation is not
more certain than the tendency of (laws providing relief for the poor) to
change wealth and vigour into misery and weakness ... until at last all classes
should be infected with the plague of universal poverty.”
As argued by
Karl Polanyi in his 1944 monumental classic The Great Transformation: The
Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. The commodification of human
beings and land required by the dominance of the market has done tremendous
damage to society and environment. The value of human life has been degraded to
their earning power. The world was peaceful until people started selling land,
labour (turning human lives into saleable commodities in order to create a
labor market) and money – three commodities very crucial to the efficient
functioning of a market economy.
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