In his latest book Local, Alastair Humphreys visits the suburbs, exurbs, and industrial-rural lands surrounding his home, encountering plenty of litter. At first, he’s disgusted and thinks poorly of those who’ve tainted their environment. People he encounters blame the Travelers, saying that because they don’t own the land they don’t treat it well. But after meeting some friendly Traveler kids, he reflects a bit deeper: is burying the litter in a shared pit, as landfills are, really so much better?
And while the litter is the most visible damage done to the landscape, what about all the invisible damages — chemical pollutants despoiling the water, emissions befouling the air — done to the land by those who own it in the name of industry? What about the ecological destruction caused by intense sheep-grazing methods, which has become invisible due to shifting baselines? Owning the land is no guarantee someone will care for it, in fact is justification for the extraction of resources from it.
The presence of a discarded liquor bottle is more obvious than the absence of birds that might have lived there. Pollution and ecological “cold deserts” are much worse environmental harms than a candy wrapper or a soda bottle, but because we can see them, we get more upset about litter. It’s easier to explain away the other damages for having a “virtuous” (in the modern sense) cause: making money. Nor do we demand those land owners clean up their messes, restore the damages they’ve done.
In the Seattle area, the Duwamish River has been polluted and damaged in all ways — litter clogs the shores, chemicals bioaccumulate in the fish, its channel has been constrained and flood plain cut off. Local volunteers are doing the physical cleanup of the litter; the EPA will soon complete a cleanup of the contaminants at the Superfund site, and locals worry that once the river is nice again, they’ll be priced out of the area. They’re asking that planning start to ensure the community that lives there can stay: “While the [EPA] has developed guidance for environmental justice best practices in its public engagement, it hasn’t implemented a strategy that helps to hold physical space for affordable housing or community-oriented development.”
Is it environmental justice if you clean up the chemicals that have been harming the locals but then let them be immediately driven out so someone else benefits?
When the Maui fires happened last year, all of us were thinking it: this is going to be a massive landgrab for haoles. Even the President mentioned that the government wasn’t going to let that happen. I haven’t seen any followup reporting on how successful that effort was 🤞 (Looks like they’re cracking down on illegal AirBnBs?)
Antonia Malchik highlights the primacy of land ownership in the modern world:
In their book The Prehistory of Private Property, authors Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall repeatedly go back to the main difference that they see in a private property society versus one where private ownership of, say, land, much less water and food, is unknown: freedom to leave. That is, if you want to walk away from your people, or your place, can you do so and still support yourself? Can you walk away and find or make food, shelter, and clothing? In non-private property societies, the freedom to walk away and still live just fine is the norm. In private property societies, it’s almost nonexistent. You have to work to make rent. Land-rent, you might call it. Someone else owns the land, and you have to pay to live on it.
And our system offers few protections for people’s right to have a home available to rent: instead, we shrug and say the market will take care of it, while zoning for single-family detached units and requiring excessive parking minimums. (It says a lot about a society when we’re more anxious to have free parking than enough housing.)
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