Rethinking Property Rights

SEVEN YEARS AGO this month, I became a landowner. My husband and I put our names on the deed to a quarter-acre plot of land in an unassuming Chicago suburb. According to U.S. property law and common understandings, I have a right to do what I want with this land, even “up to heaven and down to hell.” That phrase goes back to a medieval Roman jurist’s proclamation that whoever owns the soil also owns what’s above and beneath, an idea that sociologist Colin Jerolmack has explored in depth (no pun intended) in his book by the same name about fracking in a rural Pennsylvanian town.

As Jerolmack documents, the United States is “the only country in the world where private individuals own a majority of the subsurface estate.” These laws are the confluence of America’s enshrinement of individualism, skepticism of big government, and confidence in the “invisible hand” of the market to work to everyone’s benefit.

I witness the effects of this policy up close. In parts of my town, the groundwater is contaminated by a factory that dumped radioactive sludge from mineral extraction into the soil they presumably owned. On the land under my name, I am wary of growing food in the soil because it contains higher-than-usual levels of arsenic and lead, probably deposited by the decades of trains going through the now-defunct tracks behind our house. I purchased truckloads of topsoil from elsewhere to plant a garden.

Like Jerolmack, I’ve been made starkly aware of the impossibility of “live and let live” in an age where the diffuse environmental impacts of individual land use decisions have piled up into an enormous planetary crisis. Those of us in the U.S. cannot “let live” without drastically rearranging how we, as decision-makers in the country arguably most responsible for climate change, live. If we want to be good neighbors, we must rethink our “rights” to the land.

I’ve started putting quotation marks around the “our” when I think about “our” land. Take the stands of trees around the edges of “our” lot. They break the biting winter wind and shade us from the baking summer sun. But these trees benefit not only my family. They filter the air and water that many animals and people will eventually breathe and drink. They hold the soil in place and house beneficial insects, critters, bacteria, and fungi in their limbs and roots. Can I consider the impact to life besides my own when I decide what to do on “my” land?

If we are to heal our ecological wounds, we need to shift from settler views of individual land ownership to Indigenous views of communal land stewardship. It will be cumbersome and inconvenient to consult others. But I take heart in this promise from the First Nations Version of Matthew 5:5: “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.”