Mark Twain's anecdote "Slide Mountain" is the most famous legal dispute in Nevada's history that never happened. About ten miles north of Carson City in the Washoe Valley we find Slide Mountain, an uncertain terrain if ever there was one. One day back in the nineteenth century a group of practical jokers set out to dupe a U.S. attorney by the name of Buncombe.
Dick Hyde, who was in on the joke, came busting into Buncombe's office. A landslide, he cried, had caused his neighbor Tom Morgan's ranch to slip down on top of his property, burying it to a depth of 38 feet. Worse yet, Morgan now claimed possession of both layers of real estate. Weeping, Hyde pleaded with Buncombe to represent his interests in the buried land. Buncombe agreed.
Justice was speedily attended to later that afternoon. The judge, who was also in on the gag, listened to testimony and then pretended to make up his mind: "Gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven." "If Heaven," he continued, "chose to move the Morgan ranch to the benefit of its owner, then what right did mere mortals have to question the act's legality? No - Heaven created the ranches and it is Heaven's prerogative to rearrange them.
"An act of God had deprived Hyde of his property, he ruled, and there was no appealing God's decision." Buncombe, incensed by the stupidity of the ruling, begged his honor to reconsider. After appearing to mull over the matter again, the judge told Buncombe that Hyde still had title to his land, a perfectly good right, that is, to dig his buried ranch out from under all 38 feet of Morgan's property. Enraged by this gross miscarriage of justice, the U.S. attorney marched off in a huff. Buncombe, to put it mildly, had been had."[1]
Twain points out, in his inimitable way the inherent contradictions in human nature. What arrogant creatures we are to think that we "own" a piece of earth. It is a mark of our greed. However, it should be noted that while Twain critiqued this acquisitive human nature, he was himself a zealous, though failed, capitalist.
Who owns the earth? It is a religious, not an economic question. It is commonly assumed in our culture that property rights are inviolable. But what does it mean to "own" a piece of the earth?
A personal example. Over 20 years ago, throwing caution to the wind, Joyce and I bought a cottage on Seneca Lake. It was a combination investment, retreat and summer residence. Becoming a property owner for the first time (and in debt for the first time), I had cause for reflection.
Rummaging through what the previous owners had left, I had a fresh realization of the passage of time. I became very nostalgic fumbling through the overcrowded tool shed, remembering what a labor of love the place had been to the man who built it. Now I must put my clumsy mechanical skills to work to make it mine as he made it his.
For a time there was a feeling of elation - at last I owned a piece of the rock (albeit the bank thought it did too for many years). Then, horror of horrors, I remembered one of my ecology sermons! We do not "own" the land, we are merely its trustees. The land "belongs" to the earth; our task is to care for the land as earth's trustees.
Henry David Thoreau once asked Ralph Waldo Emerson if he might build a cabin on a piece of Emerson's property on Walden Pond. Emerson offered to give it to him, but Thoreau intimated that it really belonged to the raccoon and the beaver and it wouldn't do to change ownership.[2]
The question of ownership of the earth goes back a long time. I recall a seminal essay by scientist Lynn White in 1970. In it he blamed the Bible for western civilization's environmental sins.
He quoted from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Genesis 1:28, one of the Creation stories. God has just created the earth and humanity: "And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth.'"[3]
These words, according to White and others, gave humanity license to treat the earth as a mine, to exploit it for purely human purposes. This selfish spirit, they contend, set the stage for the western philosophy of exploitation of the earth. However, poet Wendell Berry points out that there is another translation of that section. In the earlier King James Bible we read, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it." There is still sanction for the population explosion, still we are admonished to subdue the earth, but there is that divine caveat - we are to replenish the earth - to treat it as good stewards. The earth is not so much a mine which will one day run out, but a garden which continually replenishes itself - with a little help from the gardener.
Berry resurrects the concept of "Usufruct", the right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another without causing damage or harm.[4] In this case the property really belongs to Nature, the earth, or God. Berry concludes that "It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun."[5] He calls for a new sense of a biblical ecology.
I don't really know why there is this crucial difference in the translation; nor do I know if or how much that biblical account has influenced the propensity of western civilization to risk emptying the earthly mine and polluting the earthly garden. I do know, however, that spiritually this is an important distinction. How we view the earth is not only a spiritual matter, but also an ethical issue. Earth is a mystery to be celebrated, and a problem to be solved.
Berry uses his poetry as a weapon in this struggle for the earth:
"Let us pledge ourselves to the flag
And to the national sacrifice areas
For which it stands, garbage dumps
And empty holes, hold out for a higher
Spire on the rich church, the safety
Of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood
Of the stock market. Let us feast
Today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us
Gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming
The earth for our greater joy in Heaven,
That fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever
In the labyrinths of our self-esteem.
Let us evolve forever toward the higher
Consciousness of the machine.
The spool of our engine-driven fate
Unwinds, our history now outspeeding
Thought, and the heart is a beatable tool."[6]
Our American ethos is to grow, grow, grow, go faster, faster, faster, make and consume more, more, more. Not long ago there was a serious proposal from a Los Angeles engineer who wanted to siphon water from Western Canada to the arid Southwest, necessitating reversing the flow of some of North America's largest rivers, transforming land on which thousands of Canadians live into reservoirs and eliminating the city of Prince George, British Columbia. A similar proposal has been resurrected recently as some contemplate exporting water from the Great Lakes around the world - much as the Gulf nations export oil.
I was in the Southwest recently and heard about their looming water crisis. Arizonans are making a concerted effort to create green nature intended brown. They want this area to support more people than it naturally can. Here we find a terrible tension between human ingenuity to make nature do our bidding, and an incredible arrogance that we know more than nature.
Locally, we have a developer who wishes to build expensive homes on one of the few remaining woodlots in the city. On the one hand, this would mean more taxable property for an economically pressed city, and as a city taxpayer I would welcome a larger tax base. On the other, this is vital green space for physical and spiritual renewal. The "owner" of this piece of land said not long ago on a radio talk show that he was going to build there and no one could stop him.
Does he "own" that land? Legally, I suppose he does. But ethically, if the public is deprived of a woodland in the urban area, is he free to do whatever he wants? And, spiritually, does he really "own" that land?
It is this arrogance that leads to suburban sprawl in Monroe County; to a village I saw in the Philippines being washed away after clear cutting of a mountain forest; to the ugly brown coal strip-mining in the former East Germany which I visited in 1992; to the struggle for water rights in the Middle East I saw last summer; to mining and lumber companies complaining about increased rents on public lands as taxpayers subsidize their profits; to a Wall Street Journal article pointing out that "We can save as much as 75% of our electricity but may never do so because business requires paybacks of less than 3 years."[7]
We have not yet learned to live within our limits, to befriend the land, to savor earth's mystery. We are still hell-bent on subduing it - on owning it for our own narrow purposes. We continue to exploit the earth with little sense of replenishing what we take from it or cleaning our own nest. All this reveals is a preoccupation with controlling nature and making it work for us. We try to transform nature into mere property which we can own.
It reminds me of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's story of the little prince who discovered a businessman, who, as he counted stars and marked them in his accounting book, was asked by the innocent Little Prince, "And what do you do with these stars?" "What do I do with them?" 'Yes." "Nothing. I own them."[8]
The late John Wood, friend and Unitarian Universalist minister, put it well:
"Who can own a sunset or the view from the top of a hill?
Where is the deed to the wind,
or the copyright on the song of a bird?
Ownership? It was all here -- the sun, the song, the hills, the wind.
We came.
And the marks of our coming are upon the land - giver, taker, intruder, helper, destroyer, appreciator, lover, pretender.
The wind chuckles among the hills at the pretense of our ownerships."[9]
The issue is powerfully dramatized for me by Barbara Meyn's reflection "At the Planning Commission." "That it should come to this - that we-movers of earth, cutters of trees, polluters of springs and streams should sit in a heated public room deciding where fences shall be run over the unresisting land, decreeing where power lines should go - and houses of the rich be planted! In the beam of the overhead projector a French-curve map stains the wall, lots laid out like steaks and chops on a butcher's cutting chart.
"I've seen this mountain in another light, toothed with the quiet symmetry of firs, after a night when deer and fox and owl fed and went to sleep, coyote's song brought the dark alive and skunk left a subtle warning on the wind.
"Restlessly I cross my legs, uncross them. I have had my say. Now it is up to the five behind microphones at the front of the room, visibly tired, thinking of dinner, craving a cigarette, a coffee break.
"I forgot to tell them about the salamanders, dark as chocolate, torpid with cold that move up the mountain about this time every year, how easy it is to drive right over them if you are unaware. I forgot to tell them about the golden eagle that clings to the top of the transmission tower, feathers in blue air, talons clutching metal, half in his world, half in one we made."
I cannot resolve these contentious issues - the tension between spirituality and ethics; between our religious sense of the earth as sacred and our ethical weighing of its uses for human purposes. I can only suggest earth is a mystery we try to reduce to ownership at our peril. In making the earth merely a mine for our exploitation, we not only ravage and pollute of global home, but we lose that sense of reverence toward creation which separates us from the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; which enriches our brief sojourn on this earth so it means more than daily getting and spending.
I close with a story that suggests how difficult it is to be a trustee of creation, to live responsibly on planet earth. It is about a man whose uncle considered himself the family environmentalist. The uncle's main concern was preserving the giant redwoods of California. 'He would tell all his relatives about the importance of these old-growth trees that were so beautiful and needed to be saved."
But one summer the uncle found that he needed to replace the pier at his lakefront home. He was advised that the best material for a new pier was redwood, which he proceeded to use.
The uncle still considered himself the family environmentalist, the story continued, but he no longer talked about saving the redwoods. Instead he became an enthusiastic defender of whales."[10]
All of us have a long way to go to get beyond our sense of owning the earth, to learn to live with the mystery of creation, to truly respect that interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
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