Economics and the Land Ethic
Talk given at the Henry George Foundation 2019

Joseph Milne

Let me begin with a quotation from Aldo Leopold:

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to the land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land…is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. (A Sand County Almanac, OUP: 1949, p. 203)

Aldo Leopold was an early pioneer of environmental ethics, advisor to the UN before his death in 1948. He saw ethics had evolved in society first for the individual, then for the community, and now it must embrace the land. As he puts it: 'The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land'. (p. 204)

It follows from this that, so long as we have no land ethic, the land is still property, just as slaves were once property, a mere economic resource towards which we owe nothing. At best we have laws to protect property, because it is someone's property, not because of its natural worth. It is assumed that because something is property, an owner can dispose of it however they wish. It is quite clear, however, that our laws of property are founded on claims of privilege and not on natural justice. It is also clear that land ownership is only a legal concept, not a natural one. This was recognised by the prophets of the Old Testament and by the medieval natural law tradition. But in the Middle Ages a legal claim on land came with duties to the community. These duties were eroded in England by the Magna Carta, which established civil rights on the one hand, and private property rights on the other.

Little has changed since Aldo Leopold's time 70 years ago. In fact, very little has been done to explore the true relation of economics and the environment. It is commonly assumed that economic interests are in conflict with care for the environment. There are indeed those who suggest that Henry George's tax reforms, and the introduction of a land tax, would increase production and lead to further harm to the environment. This is because the 'land question' is seen only superficially, both on the economic side and the environmental side.

The land question is the question of the place of the human species in the biosphere. Land is the biosphere. It is not a mere economic 'resource'. That word 'resource' is a distortion of what land is and of our true economic relation with it. Are one's parents or children a 'resource'? The word 'location', which often replaces the word 'land', also distorts our true economic relation with the land. The language we use about the world reveals how it is seen or misconceived. We may observe, for example, how economic language has moved over the last 200 years from concrete social language to abstract concepts, and eventually to mathematical and statistical language, gradually divorcing economics from the social and ethical realms, and from the natural world. In fact, economists such as Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Hudson have shown that modern 'textbook economics' has practically nothing to do with actual economics. It has become a fictional language. Yet the word 'economics' means the 'household' or 'household management'. It implies wise management for mutual benefit. It directly concerns how we live, use and dwell on the land. The true laws of economics and the laws of nature cannot be in conflict with each other. If they appear to be, then economic understanding must be in error.

It is therefore of great importance to see how the present economic injustices and the destruction of the environment are linked together. Human poverty and environmental harm have the same common cause. They both spring from a wrong relationship with the land. As Aldo Leopold suggested, the social ethic and the land ethic cannot be divorced from each other, since one is an extension of the other. It is perfectly plain that if there is poverty amid abundance, as there is here in the UK, then the social ethic must be amiss. That is to say, we live in a wrong relationship with one another. If we live and a wrong relationship with one another, how can we live rightly with the land, with the earth, the biosphere? If we live out of accord with where we live, how can we live rightly as a community? And if we live out of accord with nature, how can we live in accord with human nature? Yet modern economic theory assumes that land is merely a resource, a passive store for consumption, and that economic exchange is essentially mutual exploitation. By abusing the land we degrade our own humanity.

According to Henry George, people are not naturally exploitative or competitive. On the contrary they are naturally generous and cooperative. This is the natural basis of any division of labour, whether in the family, the workplace, the nation, or humanity as a whole. The prevailing idea of 'competitive individualism', an offshoot of Hobbes and Social Darwinism, distorts our understanding of the natural order of society. Nature works by association and integration, not by competition. If one watches people working we see that, in practice, they cooperate, regardless of prevailing economic theories. They act for mutual advantage. But if in politics and in economics we fail to see how cooperation is natural, then we will make bad laws for governing society. We will legalise things that are unnatural and anti-social - such as usury and gambling.

Land monopoly is clearly socially divisive. I need hardly argue this point here. Yet it is also, and more fundamentally, an unnatural relation with the land. It causes slums and pollution. We have all seen pictures of the unhealthy and degrading Victorian slums. They personify land abuse, and the social abuse that follows as a consequence. But even now in the UK substandard houses are being built for land and social exploitation. Such social exploitation is environmentally harmful. It neither serves the homemaker well, nor respects the best or appropriate use of land. It is humanly and environmentally unnatural. It is driven by the desire to exploit the homemaker and the land. The desire to exploit does not use things in the manner they are best suited to. It lowers the standard of life and erodes community. It also degrades the exploiter.

But of course, if land is taken to be private property, rather than the natural dwelling place of all living beings, then that initial false relation opens the door to a host of others. Land monopoly invites land abuse and social injustice. The economic realm cannot be separated from the environmental realm, and neither realm can be separated from ethics.

So the question becomes: what is the right use of land? This is at once an economic, social and ecological question. It is almost to ask the Socratic question: How ought we to live?

To begin to answer this question we need to step outside the mechanistic framework of current thinking about the world, and even about the universe. If we consider for a moment the ancient understanding of the land we find it expressed in the symbol of Mother Earth, or as the Great Nurse of all living beings. Plato, in the Laws, says that we should honour the earth as our mother. And further he lays down a law that no household may sell their land. And in Aristotle's Politics we read that the land provides precisely sufficient for all our needs, and that to take more than this, or to trade things solely for profit, will corrupt the society. And earlier we read in Hesiod of the Golden Age where all lived in peace and:

all good things
Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land
Gave up her fruits unasked.

And Virgil, also writing of the Golden Age, says:

No tenants mastered holdings,
Even to mark the land with private bounds
Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
herself, unbidden, yielded more fully. (Georgics I/126-29)

The Roman poet Ovid writes of how this was lost:

The earth itself, which before had been, like air and sunshine,
A treasure for all to share, was now crisscrossed with lines
Men measured and marked with boundary posts and fences. (Metamorphosis I/134-36)

The Stoic philosopher Seneca also wrote of the Golden Age:

The social virtues had remained pure and inviolate before covetousness distracted society and introduced poverty, for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own. . . . How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common and were used freely; nor had avarice and luxury disunited mortals and made them prey upon one another. They enjoyed all nature in common, which thus gave them secure possession of public wealth. Why should I not think them the richest of all people, among whom was not to be found one poor man? (The Epistles)

The ancient poets and philosophers spoke in a symbolic language which perceived, so to speak, an eternal reality behind the disorders humanity had brought upon itself and upon the earth. That symbolic eternal reality pointed the human imagination to how we ought to live, and how we might live, if we adopted the pure social virtues and live without avarice. The 'vices' cause us to misperceive the world and our place in Nature: 'for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own'.

This ancient view of things reflected a natural harmony between society and Nature. And when the philosophers of Classical Greece and China considered what was expressed in poetic symbols and myths, they discerned a lawful order than ran through all things. We might say that Nature was itself Law. It manifested itself as Law - not as laws governing Nature, but as its very essence or being. And human nature likewise was seen to be lawful, having its own essence. And this essence of human nature corresponded with the great laws of Nature. The human person was like a small cosmos reflecting and reflecting upon the greater cosmos. For the ancient poets and philosophers, it is this correspondence with the greater cosmos that aligns the human senses and faculties with Nature and enables perception and thought. The word 'consider' means to observe the stars and the order of Nature. Yet our modern sciences take no note of the fact that Nature gives us our senses and faculties, and even less that these are given for a purpose within the great order of things.

From this holistic understanding of Nature arose the tradition of Natural Law. This is too vast a subject to go into here, so I will simply show how it appears on different levels. At the highest level it is simply the Good, or what later was called the Eternal Law. Out of the Good springs Justice. Out of Justice springs the regulation of Nature and society. Out of regulation springs jurisprudence or 'legal' law. From legal law springs custom. The descent from the Good to custom is like a ray of light shining from the Good and informing each level with its own luminosity. This means that the 'rightness' or 'fitness' of each level may be measured by reference to the next level above it. And so the Stoic and medieval philosophers say that any 'legal' or 'positive' law enacted which contradicts the Eternal Law cannot be called a law. An example of the kind of law which fails to meet this criterion is a law which is advantageous to one party at the expense of another. A law is truly a law only when it serves the universal good. It follows from this that any 'legal' law that advantages the 'economy' over Nature or the environment cannot be called a law.

This larger picture of law and 'lawfulness' helps us to discern things we would otherwise miss. For example, Aristotle and Plato both note that the person who keeps the legal law because it is legal is 'just' only in a limited way. A person is just in the full sense only when they keep the legal law because it is rooted in justice itself, and through love of justice itself. Then keeping the law is virtuous. This is a central theme of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Now we might well examine which laws in our time measure up to this criteria. Earlier I gave the examples of legalised usury and gambling. These things are clearly advantageous to one party but harmful to another, and harmful to society as a whole. They are unjust laws and, very strictly speaking, not laws at all - one might want to say 'fake laws'. A real law aligns Nature and justice.

This principle can easily be applied to economic activity. We can ask if any particular activity is true to the economic law of just exchange, and we can ask if it is beneficial to one party while harmful to another, and we can ask if it is universally beneficial to all creatures and to the biosphere. Is it just and good in all these respects? It is perfectly clear that many present economic enterprises fail on each of these criteria. They contravene the Law of Nature, the cosmic law of the ancient poets and philosophers. And we can see that they contravene both the social ethic and the land ethic.

It seems quite clear that we need to replace bad laws with good laws. We are perfectly aware that there are vested interests in bad laws, laws which allow harm to society or to the land upon which all life depends. It may well be that the crisis of global warming is awakening a deeper sense of natural justice then the last several hundred years of industrialisation have done. It may well be that our age will be compelled through fear to adjust our relationship with nature as well as our understanding of society.

But I believe there can be a more noble response than that. Fear provokes irrational response. What is really needed is a reconsideration, in the light of Natural Justice and the Good, of the very nature of human work. It has long been taken for granted that the aim of the economy is to keep increasing wealth, while it is that notion that has driven us to neglect the laws of Nature and treat the land as a mere resource, rather than as the living biosphere and our home. The drive to create ever more wealth has led to social exploitation, massive consumer debt, while only very few get richer. For many people work is a drudge they are compelled to do just to keep the wolf from the door. Much of this work is unnatural and does not fulfil human potential.

A fortunate few perform work that is meaningful and fulfilling, but most do not. George observed that the working people of the Middle Ages could provide sufficient for their needs with three days' work a week. This would be perfectly feasible now if we were not held in debt bondage through land speculation. If that were so, George suggests that the free time would naturally be given to social and cultural pursuits. Even in George's younger days masters and apprentices would often gather to talk and drink together in working hours. It is clear that work was as much a social activity as an economic one - before the big corporations and monopolies with their absentee shareholders came along. But even now there are craftsmen and women, artists, musicians, scholars, doctors, farmers and many others who work out of love for their work and service to the community. We regard them as very fortunate, and indeed they are, but this is because they have found their vocations. They have found the work through which they may fulfil their talents and make a substantial contribution to society. And these callings may best be performed in accord with Nature, neither exploiting anyone nor harming anything.

Surely true work, work in accord with human nature, would make a net contribution to society, and diminish nothing which the land freely provides. There is an ancient principle that if one does something solely for private gain, one is alienated from oneself and from nature. The talents of each individual fit them for association and cooperation. Each human beings' natural capacities are essentially social and life-enhancing. In that most fundamental sense they are 'ecological' and part of Nature as a whole.

Our problem is that, through land monopoly and the ever-expanding abuse of credit, human capacity has been limited, and social life has been diminished. And so what was once 'natural' now strikes us as utopian. Land abuse has blinded us to the natural order of things and diminished our vision of human nature and society. The ancient philosophers traced all political ills to one common cause: the wrong use of things. This is what practical reason is meant to discern, the right use of things. And this principle goes deeper than the question of property or ownership. Property, according the Thomas Aquinas, is justified only so long as it is used for the common good. This was the real basis of the Medieval 'just price' theory and the prohibition against usury. All things and all human activities have right uses, and private gain was not considered one of them. Acquisition is not an end in itself. Money-making is not the proper end of the economy. On the contrary, it deforms it. But fear of want drives people to seek acquisitions as a form of security, and so distorts the real meaning of work. As Plato observes in the Republic (Book VIII), the quest for money-making ultimately leads to oligarchy, where the city become two cities, one for the rich and one for the poor. The economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that we are heading in that direction.

There is no economic reason for intelligence and virtue to be opposed to one another. In meaningful work they are not, while in exploitation they are. Yet neo-classical economics divorces ethics from economics, and imagines the economy as a kind of autonomous, self-regulating machine, as though society itself were a machine. It is this, amoral, mechanistic notion of economics that divorces wealth creating, or meaningful work, from the environment. It sanctions the wrong use of things, and the wrong use of human labour.

It is clear, however, that an adequate response to the present crisis of global warming demands a marriage of intelligence and virtue. Great ingenuity is needed to reform farming methods and non-toxic production of energy. These need to be brought into harmony with the natural order, and intelligence guided by that aim can be enormously creative. We need pioneers as capable as the great inventors of the Victorian era, a new industrial revolution, but no longer based on the exploitation of nature or labour, with injustice hidden under the cloak of social Darwinism.

We should note, however, that 'investors', hedge funds, creditors, insurance brokers and banks, and the whole money-market, cannot bring about such a change. They only take from wealth-creation and contribute nothing towards it. In this regard, as currently constituted, they are no different to land speculation. They merely extract from the economy, from the actual production of wealth. They have no engineers, inventors or discoverers. And like land speculators, they inhibit economic diversity and small-scale enterprise. They inhibit addressing environmental abuse and climate change.

It is here that we also need to consider the proper role of government. It is obvious that global warming and environmental destruction require global cooperation, and this can only be secured through governments working with a common aim. In a sense, this great challenge creates an opportunity for peaceful international cooperation. There is no need in the nature of things for nations to be opponents of each other. But we need to confront the myth that the economy works independently of the state and is self-regulating. That is a misrepresentation of Adam Smith and leads to oligarchy, not liberty. It is only at the level of government and national institutions that the safety and good of the whole can be secured. And it is only vested interests that demand deregulation of finance and exchange of goods. But also - and some Georgists need to learn this - it is the idea that the economy operates independently or autonomously that divorces it from distributive justice. That is what Herbert Spencer and his followers wished to secure and which Henry George so vigorously opposed. Their slogan was 'freedom of contract', meaning that neither law nor government should interfere in whatever contacts were made between employers and employees, or between landlords or tenants. Such contracts involved no societal obligations. They fiercely resisted all the social reforms of Gladstone, arguing that indolence was the cause of poverty.

Here is where the different orders of law I mentioned earlier come in. There is the Eternal Law or the Good, from which springs Justice, and from Justice springs the common regulation of Nature and society. Out of regulation springs jurisprudence, the realm of positive or written law, and from this legal realm springs custom. In this ancient conception of law, found in one form or another in any great civilisation, law descends from the universal to the particular. The good of society as a whole, where it is in harmony with itself and with Nature, belongs to universal Justice. A perfectly good people could live by that law alone, without any need for positive or written law. But that is like saying every human being can be perfectly healthy. That is the most desirable thing, and what the art of medicine aims at, yet is never fully attainable. And so Justice needs to be reflected upon and articulated according to circumstance, and this is jurisprudence, the realm of 'legal' law, of legislation. Law at this level, if it accords with Justice, 'guards' all citizens from social and economic abuses. It ought to guard against land monopoly and usury which destroy society. Scholars trace that function back to ancient Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome. (Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts, p. 44) With the decline of Rome it was gradually lost until revived again in the Middle Ages. Its last great English expression, preserving the medieval legacy, is in Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in the sixteenth century.

Good regulation of the economy comes under jurisprudence, ensuring that self-interests do not override the common good. Good laws here would not need to be plentiful, and where they were abided by government would operate with a light touch. It would not need to redistribute wealth. Such intervention is necessary only where injustice prevails, or where bad laws are made. And where laws protect the interests of the few, then poverty arises and eventually environmental harm inevitably occurs. Only a virtuous society can be truly prosperous and live in harmony with the land and with Nature as a whole. Good laws encourage virtue. And where people are generally virtuous they have good conventions. Good conventions hold community together in everyday affairs. These are conditions conducive of advantageous cooperation. Such cooperation leads to liberty.

My point in all this is that if there is social injustice, there will be economic injustice, and if there is economic injustice there will be violation of nature and abuse of the land. Society is part of the biosphere. The Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold shows us that we cannot divorce society from nature, and that if we do - and as we currently do - our society itself will be unjust, and the economy will be reduced to mutual exploitation rather than mutual cooperation. Let me draw to a close with another quotation from Aldo Leopold:

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than the mere economic value: I mean value in the philosophical sense.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern man is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it: to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. (p. 223-4)