GROUNDS for CONFLICT
For most of human history, land was something from which we drew sustenance and found shelter. That remains the case today, of course, but land has also become a scarce resource that has been comprehensively mapped, demarcated and allocated. It has become, most of all, property.
As a consequence, land has become a global cause of conflict to rival religious hate, nationalism, imperialism and inequality. And, in economies such as New Zealand, a worryingly important means of wealth creation and upward mobility.
Measurement is the basis of all property – you have to know how much you have to know what it’s worth. We’re talking about 15 billion hectares globally, but a more urgent and greatly disputed question than size, when it comes to land, is ownership. There are today multiple ways in which this huge mass of land is subdivided – geologically, politically, nationally, agriculturally, legally and possessively.
Land, in its dizzying scale, is the latest focus of British journalist Simon Winchester, bestselling author of 33 books including The Map That Changed the World and Krakatoa: The day the world exploded. His latest, Land: How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world is a book that makes you rethink, in the most profound sense, the concepts of property and ownership.
The genesis of the idea lay in Winchester’s decision to buy nearly 50ha of land next to his house in Upstate New York. He mentioned to his wife, a Japanese-American, that it was the first real slice
