The Earth as Property
I have written about the awareness that has come to me recently about the increasing importance of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues in managing corporations and, for that matter, all manner of investments. That awareness came prior to my formulating the syllabus for this semester’s course in Law, Policy & Ethics, so I added two full class sessions to focus on the policy and ethical issues of ESG in today’s business environment. I broke down the topic into environmental and social topics and wound up inviting my friend Mike Parkinson, who is a physician and public health professional of the highest order. He chose to address the topic of anti-discrimination (a critically important issue in the realm) by using the case of women in the military. Mike is a retired Air Force Colonel who served as a flight surgeon and currently serves on DOD Health Board, for whom he Chaired a recent report with recommendations on the topic for the Joint Staff of the military. While that session, to be held this week, should be very interesting, it is the second session for which Mike suggested I have his environmentalist brother, Dan, speak to the issue of the E in ESG, that I dedicate this story.
Dan is a veterinarian in Colorado and an acclaimed conservationist as the Southwest Regional Director of the Backcountry Hunter’s and Angler’s Association. His passion of late has been the salvation of the endangered and unique species known as Bighorn Sheep, known to exist only in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. I have to admit that I was wondering how he was planning to make a business case out of the issue of the protection of Bighorn Sheep but this week I got his preliminary thoughts about the class, including suggested readings and viewings (You-Tube videos). As I have read and watched these pieces I have become increasingly intrigued by the topic. I have never been much of an environmentalist, but then again, I also haven’t spent much time thinking about it or learning about it. Whether that has changed my perspective or I have simply had a general broadening of perspective by virtue of my retirement, doesn’t really matter. I think there is indeed an important set of business issues involved that the students will benefit from and enjoy, but there is something else altogether.
Dan Parkinson has given a special entreaty to the students (and therefore to me) to read something called The Sand County Almanac, a book written in 1949 by ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold from Wisconsin. I had never heard of the book, but have now learned that it is a bit of a bible for the conservationist community. I chose to download it as an audiobook and since it is a fairly quick read/listen, I have gone through it and must say that it has left an impression on me. While the beginning of the book is structured like an almanac that goes through the twelve months of the year with appropriate seasonal observations about the flora and fauna of Wisconsin and other places familiar to Leopold, it is the essays in the second part of the book that have particularly struck me with great interest. One particular essay speaks of and is titled The Land Ethic and discusses the ethical rationale for conservation.
There is a fascinating discussion of the two manners in which mankind can view and treat its environment. The first and most prevalent manner is for man to view the land and Earth itself as a commodity to be utilized and, indeed, possessed. This is in stark contrast to the more “enlightened” and emergent view that man must have respect for the earth and that he owes it to future generations to treat is as something that needs to be nurtured and maintained rather than inadvertently destroyed by his consumption of it. It is an interesting distinction in thought that juxtaposes the present and future, the short-term and the long-term. Like all great ethical dilemmas, there is little absolute in the resolution of the dilemma. Man has always treated the earth and nature as resources that he had only to find ways to exploit efficiently. With the advancement of technology in the past several centuries, and especially the last fifty years, the ability to fully exploit, and some would suggest, deplete the earth of its resources is no longer in doubt. We have reached a point where the decision is certainly more critical and the luxury of choice between the two manners of viewing the environment is past, or at least self-evident.
I need not repeat the cries about Global Climate Change. We all have Greta Thunberg to do that. What has struck me as needing review is The Land Ethic. I have been thinking a lot about the land of late. The two reasons I have done so entail my hillside here in Escondido, called Casa Moonstruck, and the home I have maintained in Ithaca, which goes by the name of Homeward Bound. I have owned Casa Moonstruck in what is called a “freehold”, which is a fee simple form of ownership that supposedly gives me (and in this community property state of California, Kim as well) the “permanent and absolute tenure” in the land, which means that I own it in perpetuity and am free to dispose of it as I wish. This is certainly the most common form of land ownership in this country, to the point where most people think of it as the only form of ownership. Hence the appropriate name of “real” estate. The status of Homeward Bound is quite different. In 1996 I entered into a leasehold arrangement for 99 years such that I “owned” the property for that length of time and could do with the physical buildings as I chose, but that the underlying land would never be mine, but rather the property of Cornell University. This was not a difficult concept for me since such leasehold arrangements are far more common in England and Europe than in the U.S. and as I liked to joke with people, if it was good enough for Hong Kong, it was good enough for me.
I have been forced by the circumstances of my arrangement with Cornell, which included a gifting of all but a 25-year life use of the leasehold back to the University (a tax ploy that had only marginal value as it turns out and major entanglements now that I have used up my 25 years). This, added to all the outdoor property and landscape improvements i have been making to Casa Moonstruck has made me contemplate the ethics of land.
None of us really owns the earth or even the land on which we live, no matter what the conventions of the law suggest. I have never been a fan of inherited wealth. It feels unAmerican at very least, and certainly not egalitarian. One can hardly die broke as I have recently discussed if one tries to pass on the family estate to one’s heirs in order to have one’s fee simple absolute ownership of the land perpetuate. This new revelation in The Sand County Almanac further reinforces these innate feelings by layering on top the obligation we have to the Earth itself and future generations to NOT consume the land and its resources, but rather to be a good Sheppard to it, preserving it not just for the future, but, indeed, for itself. The Earth is not property, the Earth is our home and no one owns the home of mankind.