The American Dream – a little cottage on a plot of land all one’s own – is a concept deeply engrained in our national identity. But where did the idea of land ownership really come from and what does it mean for global populations?
These are questions explored in Simon Winchester’s new book, “Land, How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” which will be released Jan. 19 by Dutchess County. Winchester has seen much of the world in his peripatetic career, from his birthplace in London through his careers as a geologist, journalist and prolific author. His work has taken him from the North Sea to Africa, from Northern Ireland to Calcutta, Tierra del Fuego to Washington, D.C., and finally to Hong Kong before he fell prey to the desire for a place of his own.
In the latter years of the 20th century, he bought 123 acres, “a little over three-billionths of the Earth’s surface” in New York state, an event that had “a powerful personal symbolism” for him and which led to his latest book. He said he began to ponder ownership of land, noting that one cannot own water or air “so why can we own land?”
Winchester’s books have been nonfiction bestsellers, starting with the unexpected success of 1998’s “The Professor and the Madman,” a book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, through to his 2018 exploration of the development of technology from the Industrial to the Digital Age in “The Perfectionists.”
But, he said, it is sometimes difficult to persuade publishers that people would like to read about a given subject.
“There are so many dull books about land reform, but I thought it would be interesting if I could somehow tell a more human story,” he said. He does that through engaging tales of land ownership and the attitudes toward it.
With his typical wit and erudition, he traverses the landscape of property ownership, from tribal concepts of communal ownership through today’s mega-land barons, whose hunger for land seems endless.
He reports, for instance, that 10 major Australian landowners control more land area than exists in all of England. One, Gina Rinehart, heir to one of that country’s iron-ore mining fortunes, owns 29 million acres in Australia and other countries (England has a total of 32 million acres). And in the United States, Ted Turner (1.9 million acres) is vying with John Malone, an engineering billionaire (2.2 million acres), to be the country’s largest land owner.
The mega-land barons and their varying attitudes toward their rights as private landowners is balanced against viewpoints in other countries, especially in northwestern Europe, where property ownership does not come with the right to exclude others.
“There is, for now, no suggestion anywhere that the general public should have limits imposed on the right to breathe the air, nor that one might be forbidden to bathe in the sea. Both belong to all,” Winchester writes. “Land, air, and ocean were once all components of the human birthright – and yet in recent years the public nature of land, uniquely, has been greatly reduced, and common human rights of use of it have been massively attenuated, simply through the introduction of private ownership – and helped by such hostile inventions as barbed wire, warning signs, mantraps, bailiffs, and shotguns.”
He finds “pockets of kindly civility,” however, in places such as Scandinavia, where the ancient rule of land wandering – allemansraaätten is the Swedish word for “the everyman’s right” – exists. More recently, Scotland adopted something similar, opening all lands in the country to trespass with only a few common-sense rules such as not passing too close to the property owner’s house, tromping through a garden or letting your dog molest his sheep – an act for which, he wrote, “a dog may be dispatched without benefit of clergy.”
At the conclusion of his book, he ponders how much land a man really needs. “In the end,” he commented, “all we really need is three feet by six feet. The whole book questions the idea of ownership and whether it might change.”
“I feel it is morally unacceptable for one person to own large tracts and agree with Native Americans that no one should own the land. Owning land is not necessarily a good idea.”
But own land he does, and he loves his residence in the Berkshires. “I’ve lived here the longest of any one place in my life,” he said. “I still travel, but this is my base and I love it. I’ve become really grounded in this part of the world. This is geographically and topographically the England I miss.”
He became an American citizen about a decade ago.