Reading on Land Ownership

Invitation to Threadable

A few weeks ago I mentioned a project I’m doing with a social reading platform called Threadable. Starting next Monday, October 10, I’ll be leading a three-month reading circle on the Threadable app structured around the subject of land ownership. I just got confirmation that my reading selections have been approved and uploaded to the app, and I’m excited to invite everyone—all subscribers, paying and free, and any friends, relatives, frenemies, strangers, coworkers, book clubs, random acquaintances at the bar, anybody who might be interested—to participate.

This link should get you straight to the app, where you can request to join the reading circle once you’ve downloaded Threadable. (The app is designed for Apple smartphone use. I’ve tried this out on my laptop and it seems to work but looks exactly like a little smartphone screen. Once I downloaded the app it took me straight to the Land Ownership circle, where you can request to join.)

All of the readings are between 10 and 25 pages long. I have one reading per week lined up, starting with Chapter 1 (pages 9-23) of Andro Linklater’s 2013 book Owning the Earth, which I return to repeatedly for its extensive scholarship and knowledge of how and why land gets turned into private property, and what the consequences are for both people and nature itself. The second selection, starting the week after, will be pages 16-36 (in Chapter 1) of law professor Eric T. Freyfogle’s 2003 book The Land We Share, which I chose for Freyfogle’s ability to demonstrate that the laws around land ownership arise out of values and stories a society tells itself. They’re not immutable laws of the universe.

After that we’ll be on to the original Charter of the Forest of 1217, with parts of an accompanying law review article (both accessible online), and then a section of Simon Winchester’s Land (by then I’ll try to have finished my unpublished review of Land and will post it here so I can be transparent about how much I disliked it and why). That’ll be the first session, with the second session focused on the detrimental effects of private land ownership, especially of the Doctrine of Discovery, mostly from the perspective of Indigenous writers and scholars; and the third session on the older philosophical arguments in defense of private property and newer scholarship on how we can start to look at the whole subject differently.

A note on the time commitment: I timed myself reading the first selection while taking notes on it yesterday and it took me about 40 minutes. It’s possible that I read weirdly fast, but I hope the length of the selections won’t be too burdensome for people. Again, none of them are over 25 pages long.

I realized the other day that this public reading project on land ownership will begin on what was once known (and still is in many places) in the U.S. as Columbus Day, celebrating Christopher Columbus; the day is now also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At first this timing felt jarring, given the topic and the fact that Columbus was an eager enslaver and murderer of Indigenous people as well as colonizer of land. It still, to be honest, feels jarring. But maybe it’s also fortuitous. I have a clear purpose for this reading circle, which is to interrogate the very foundation of private land ownership: its legal basis, its history, its role in provoking and perpetuating injustice, theft, and genocide. Why is land able to be privately owned by individuals and what implications does that choice have for the planet and the rest of humanity?

In conservation circles I often hear the line that “private property is bedrock,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think that in many cases private property is what we cling to because so much else has been taken—beginning with land itself. We can see this in the first reading selection, where Linklater gives a brief overview of England’s enclosure movement starting in the 1200s and the tension it created between private profit and the losses of people who no longer had access to the land they needed to survive.

But this is my perspective. Part of what interests me about working with Threadable is that I’d really like to hear more of what other people think. Threadable’s structure happens to be a good fit for my own thought process—reading, taking notes, connecting a lot of seemingly disparate sources—and I hope it will be inviting for others. It will be a space to welcome ideas and discourse. No need (or desire) for dunks or hot takes. All you need to bring is curiosity and a measure of grace for everyone else.

Threadable is still an app in development (you can download it here), and unfortunately for now only functions on iOS (Apple phones). They are working on an Android version. After a couple conversations with subscribers who don’t have Apple but are interested in the subject, I’d like to run a kind of parallel conversation here on On the Commons.

On Threadable, the text selections are uploaded and people can highlight, comment, and have discussions about the text. That won’t be possible here, but I can tell you what book chapters we’re reading and link to texts that are in the public domain, like the 15th-century Papal Bulls that comprise the original Doctrine of Discovery. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like on here, but I’d like as many people as possible to be able to participate in these conversations because I think they’re important. And interesting!

I hope you’ll join, one way or another, in this commons of ideas.