Jack Burns Lives!

End Private Property to Solve the Financial Crisis and Create Food Security

For years, I’ve held the believe that growth capitalism, unbridled growth, growth without any biological or geophysical limits, was at the core of our environmental crisis. But at the root of that problem, is private ownership of land.

Too radical for you? Well, other systems have been successfully managed on this planet for thousands of years, even on this continent. Our system is a brash, non-sustainable upstart, doomed to failure unless we make some adjustments and quickly.

Land and property ownership is how real wealth is built, and in the wrong hands, the results are easy for all to see. Strip mining, the recent disaster in East Tennessee, non-sustainable ranching, over-development in suburban areas, resort communities, where the development of multi-million dollar homes drives up land values and essentially forces long term locals out, etc.

It’s abuse. Abuse of the land and it leads to systems of hierarchy and abuse of the less fortunate because many wealthy people (not all) use their power as a cudgel against others.

There’s a strong case for a return to the commons. It’s a popular idea in bioregional groups and think tanks, and Gary Snyder has argued eloquently and persuasively for it in his work The Practice of The Wild.

I believe capitalism can survive, but with changes. It must be bound within biological and geophysical constraints and we need a return to the commons. We need a biophysical economic system.

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Usufruct: End Private Property to Solve the Financial Crisis and Create Food Security
by Chuck Burr
03 February 2009
Locking up the land has been a great way to concentrate wealth, and for a minority to dominate the majority. In England .28 percent of the population owns 64 percent of the land. In the United States the top one percent of the population now owns more than the bottom 95 percent. But it is time to end private property.

We know that the needs of the natural world are more important than the economic system, but privatization sees it the other way around. Privatization of land implies the right of the “owner” to use the land in any way he/she/it sees fit including despoiling the land to “make a profit” at the expense of the local community and all other species. Native communities know this and do not voluntarily give up their common resources on which their communities depend until their communities have been destroyed.

Privatization has led to land use “for profit” and not “for community.” Our suburban system is at the heart of our economic problems and is the single greatest waste of resources in the history of the world. Privatization has led to a living arrangement with no future.

The rest is here.