Community Conversations

Private Property

A Position Paper by Dr. Deland S. Anderson regarding Community Conversations held at the Pratt Museum on 16 May 2003.

Deland Anderson, as facilitator, opened this conversation with a brief gloss of the concept of private property developed by the influential 18th century English philosopher John Locke. Locke’s notion was that each individual has a God given right to unlimited private property. This has come down to us in our culture as the American Dream. Each of the fifteen or so participants that evening grappled with this mythology, especially with regard to how it is being played out in the town of Homer and surrounding Kachemak Bay.

According to Locke, the natural world is the creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good deity. This world, he maintains, has been given to humankind for our sustenance. As such the bounty and beauty of nature is to be held in common for the fair use of each person. But even in this Eden the Deity does not pick the fruit for us, so we must mix our labor with what is given to create produce. And, according to Locke, that investment of labor gives us title to what we produce. His example is an oak tree: the tree hangs ripe with acorns which belong to all in common until someone comes along and gathers those acorns—at that time the acorns are transferred from common to private ownership through the act of harvesting. No one else has a right to those acorns, or even a share of them, because they did not work to gather them. Hence, in the kingdom of nature, each in his or her own measure labors to produce what is necessary for life. Some naturally produce more than others because they are capable of greater labor. But waste, says Locke, is abhorrent to the Creator, so it is wrongful for a person to hoard what cannot be used or preserved or bartered. In other words, in the state of nature there is no surplus, hence no capital. Life and produce is limited by the concept of waste. On this model human history meanders along in rhythm with the cycles of subsistence living. Some years are lean, some ample. But, the philosopher points out, at a certain point in the history of humankind a new concept was born: money. With the invention of money, produce could be converted to currency, and the prohibition on waste became obsolete. For, though acorns may be eaten by worms, a pile of gold coin never spoils. Hence the new course of human history is determined by the success of individuals in converting acorns to gold. This is the underlying concept of European expansionism since the Renaissance. Its implementation is most conspicuous in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere and Pacific Islands. Alaska is a case in point: since the natives weren’t using all of those sea otters, and seals, and whales, they were free for the taking, or so the thinking went. The settlement of Kachemak Bay proceeded according to the same general pattern and involves the harvesting not only of marine mammals, but also fish of all sorts, game, timber, minerals, oil and gas, and most recently, raw land itself.

Following this gloss, the facilitator suggested a close examination of the notion of a God given right to unlimited private property. The ensuing discussion was some two hours long, and ranged between such general themes as comparisons of capitalism, socialism, and communalism to specific concerns over development plans in Homer and their anticipated effects on the common good of the community. The consensus that emerged toward the end of the conversation was that it is the right and responsibility of the local citizenry to prevent negative effects on the common good by private property use.

One participant, who has a background in real estate, posed the provocative idea that individuals don’t own their so-called private property: all they own is the right to pay the government property taxes in exchange for limited uses of the land. This, he maintained, is no different in principle from renting. If you don’t pay your taxes, he quipped, you’ll soon find out that you don’t own your property. Moreover, you can’t do whatever you want on your property, like grow a pot farm, for example, or build a big factory. Another participant, however, added that in the case of Native Allotments in Alaska no taxes are paid on the property. Hence they own their land outright, and do not in any sense rent it from the government. Nevertheless, it was noted, because these lands were apportioned on an individual basis rather than collectively to tribes, the Native Allotment Act is another means by which Native peoples were brought under the aegis of individualism and private property, and consequently deeper into to fold of Western culture. ANILCA, another person pointed out, ended any further claims to private property by Alaska Natives, but at the same time legally entitled Natives to subsistence rights from common lands. Consequently it recognized an alternative to Western style economies based on private ownership or resources. This prompted one person to remark that Alaska, unlike the rest of the U.S., is relatively close to the time when people related to the land without any concept of private ownership. What Westerners might learn from this Native cultural perspective among other things is that the grid of longitude and latitude is an impediment to establishing boundaries of ecosystems. Thus we might have to think differently in terms of private property boundaries and access corridors if we are to preserve fish and wildlife critical habitats or even wilderness areas.

Even though our Western culture is rooted in the concept of personal property as delineated by the grid, we still recognize the importance of the common good. This notion is based in the observation that some resources or places are more important for the whole of society than they can ever be for a single individual. Hence, we agree to share some things, and to never allow them to fall into private hands. In New Zealand, one participant noted, urban development of waterfront is seen to be deleterious to the common good, so it is legally prohibited. How different Homer would be, it was remarked, if such a principle were in place here. Buildings would be set back from the beach and the bluff, the Spit would be unoccupied as in times past, and watersheds would be protected from stream bank erosion and pollution. As it is now, the only protected watershed in the area is Bridge Creek, the source of drinking water for the town of Homer. In addition there are, of course, regulations on the use of wetlands and salmon streams, and critical marine habitats in the area, but at the same time residents are not prevented from running raw sewage straight into the bay or from building on the edge of a crumbling bluff, where sooner or later their houses and junk cars and the like will end up in the bay. Because of the extensive erosion of the beach bluffs around Homer and the earthquake-caused subsidence of the Spit, a strange situation exists: people own land underwater. What used to be bluff or beach is now tidelands, claimed by long standing local custom as public property. As more and more people come to this area, more and more conflicts ensue about the right to use the beach.
The influx of people into the area and even the growth of population in the U.S. in general, have led us to question and test some of our long held assumptions about private and public property. As one participant noted, the more people you have in the area, the less freedom anyone has. Conflicts arise over the use of trails. Squatters are rooted out. Urban grids are superimposed upon topography and ecosystems, limiting the availability and movements of game. It is the cultural assumption of Westerners, someone remarked, that permits this. Native Alaskans consider themselves as belonging to the animal kingdom, not as ruling it from above. Consequently they limit their uses of the land in deference to the rights of all the denizens of the country. This sense of circumspection leads, paradoxically it might seem, to a greater sense of ease, a deeply held sense of freedom. Witness the observation of Captain James Cook upon encountering the self-sufficient natives of Australia: these people are the happiest on earth because they want nothing. We may well assume this observation held also for those peoples inhabiting the waters one day to be known as Cook’s Inlet. Nevertheless, he claimed both Australia and Alaska in the name of King George of England. The principle behind this is Locke’s: since no one had built fences around the land, it was unoccupied, and hence would become the legal property of whoever mixed his or her labor with it, i.e., it belongs to the developer. This stunning bit of logic subtends the British legal principle known as terra nullius (unoccupied land).

In strong contrast to this concept of development, Anderson encouraged the group to consider the value of untouched land. A remote area in the northern tropical region of Australia has been preserved both for the native peoples who have always lived there and for all of humankind. Kakadu is a World Heritage Site and a powerful economic engine for Australia’s tourism trade. Another use of undeveloped land was recently introduced to the Alaska legislature by Representative Ethan Burkowitz. Because there exist laws limiting the release of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, there exists a market for preserving undeveloped ecosystems. It seems that, since forests, and wetlands, and waterways sequester carbon dioxide, the promise to preserve ecosystems can be bought be corporations that produce carbon dioxide emissions. Thus a balance is to be struck between the amount of carbon dioxide a given interest produces and the amount of CO2 sequestering it has purchase: no net increase in greenhouse emissions. One participant, with a background in commodities trading, brought attention to a growing market in eco-capitalism. A dollar amount is assigned to intrinsic values such as clean air, water, aesthetics, etc., and that becomes a part of the market. This is, of course, a truism in the local real estate and tourism markets, but no one has ever taken the step to quantify in general how much these intrinsic values are worth. An anecdote contributed by a local author drove the point home. It seems Homer once had a mayor who was fond of saying, “You can’t eat the scenery.” Well, he’s long gone, and we’ve proven that a lot of us do in fact eat the scenery; protecting this scenery and sharing it with others is how we make our living.

This talk of turning the view into dollars didn’t sit well with some of the participants. They expressed the perspective that thinking in terms of money was the problem itself and should never be done in regard to something as priceless as beauty. One participant enumerated some of the basic problems of a money-based economy: cheaper (lower quality) goods, low wages, underemployment, chronic unemployment, etc. Not long ago in this area, he remarked everybody’s time was of equal value. The goal was to make it, to make a living for your life long, not to make a buck. A story from Seldovia made the point: a fellow came to the village, liked the look of it, wanted decided to settle down, and so he went around and asked what needed to be done that no one else was doing—it seems he made it as an outboard engine repairman. The timely corollary to be drawn here is that many businesses in the area have only made it by finding a niche in the local economy, not by coming into town and trying to take over the market share of another business in order to rub them out. But we in Homer are in the midst of just such a conflict between locally owned niche businesses and Outside owned megastores. People talk now in terms of fast food or grocery store wars, corporate giants vs. little mom and pop stores, a quaint town or a roaring strip. Longtime local residents rehearsed the list of stores that have been driven out by larger competitors and predicted the imminent demise of many more if Fred Meyer moves to town as is expected.

This led one participant to focus on the notion of competition. Competition, he remarked, was the key to economy. Without it, no one would bother to work. The facilitator added that it wasn’t just competition plain and simple perhaps, but competition over limited resources. People had to fear the future to work. They had to be afraid of unemployment, falling standards of living, unavailability of goods and services. But, these descriptions better describe England in the 18th century than Kachemak Bay prior to that time. Thinkers like Darwin, Malthus, Locke, and Hobbes created a climate of fear by describing life as war, as a survival of the fittest. A century ago business interests such as the salmon packers in the Inlet made that fear a reality when they undercut the subsistence economies of the local populations and thereby created a destitute, and accordingly, reliable labor pool. The corollary here is that if the acorn is not turned into gold, we will limit our population in step with natural resources, whereas if we do turn the acorn to gold, we will be ensured of shortages because of overpopulation.

One person picked up this train of thinking to wonder whether our communities in Kachemak Bay would be more properly described as capitalist or communist (communal). Someone noted that the mix of values and practices in this town made us socialist, balancing precariously between private and public concerns. Another remarked that, while this might be true on the local level, on the national level we are far from being socialist--we aren’t even democratic! Rather the prevailing political system is that of plutocracy: clearly in this country money trumps the principle of one person, one vote. And, it was further added, the money owns the media, determining whom we can elect. Moreover, most of our tax dollars go toward protecting the interests of moguls in the media sector. This is especially apparent if it is recognized that media includes not just television, radio, and print, but also phone, internet, power, fuel, roads, air travel, shipping, etc.

At this point the conversation turned to talk about the private use of land around Homer. This episode of the discussion centered upon specific development plans in the town as well as more general planning and zoning issues. The development plans mentioned were the very controversial plans of Fred Meyer Store to build in the heart of Homer, some large subdivisions within the city limits that would present tiny lots and no green space, and steep slope development on the Homer Bluff. Names were named, and some accused others of profiteering at the cost of the common good.

Anderson picked someone from out of town to vilify in order to develop the sub-themes at hand. What would happen, he posed, if Bill Gates came to the area and bought up all of the available land, private, public, Native, and set out to pave it. Immediately someone had an answer: aside from preventing paving in the Bridge Creek watershed, nothing could be done, as there are no provisions against it and a whole host of people who would support it as an economic boon. Though this was an extreme example, it did prompt those present to say what they wanted for this town: they want to protect its uniqueness and not sit back and watch as it becomes Anywhere, USA; they want to keep local ownership of businesses; they want to build a consensus in the community to promote a high quality of living; they want to develop legislation to reflect the consensus; finally they want to establish a means of enforcing such legislation that is stronger than the present advisory committees.

In conclusion it may be noted that this conversation signals a sea change in this community. In previous generations people were free to pursue their lives and livelihoods with little thought to limiting growth, use, and consumption of natural resources. North to the Future! The Last Frontier! The Great Land! --these are the slogans which describe that era of rapid development and massive economies of extraction. But today we struggle to prove that this is not just the Last Place to be Paved. We endeavor to share a vision of Kachemak Bay and Alaska as special and worth saving for generations to come. We are resolved to find a way to live out our lives here without destroying what drew us here in the first place.