This is a follow-up to January's blog on Migration.
This blog is simply about my attempt to understand the nature and origins of our relationship with land, and its impact on the never-ending social and cultural upheavals that seem to defy solutions.
Permit me to meander and tidy things up later. I'll begin with the daily bird behavior I witness outside my kitchen window. Mind you, I am not a birder. I do love birds, and I can distinguish a sparrow from a raven, but I don't know my Anseriformes from a hole in the ground.
I have four bird feeders hanging from an iron 'tree' that sits right outside my kitchen window. This time of year, all manner of visitors: dove, quail, sparrows, cardinals, and other species. There is a constant back-and-forth flitting from perch to feeder. I consulted the Cornell Lab website regarding this behavior and learned that what I was witnessing were power struggles: "Within the same species, generally speaking, males tend to dominate females and older birds dominate younger ones. Feeder hierarchies can also involve birds of several species, with the larger species usually winning out over the smaller."
I also learned that a group of doves is commonly referred to as a "dovecote" or a "dovehouse" and a group of quail is called a "covey" or a "bevy" of quail. Now back to the bird feeders... The dovecote and the covey spend more time on the ground than on the feeders. The dominant bird in each group claims a piece of ground and chases away any member that gets too close. I’ve never seen any actual physical contact, and no one ever seems to get hurt. I find the whole scene a bit comical. I naively thought they would be a bit better behaved. Ha! My guess is that most living organisms instinctively seek to possess some amount of space as ‘mine’.
I also noticed that every bird is constantly 'on watch', gazing from side to side, never fixing on any one spot for more than a few seconds. If they hear me coming or notice the cat getting too close or sense some other threat nearby, they are off in a second. Since we aren’t living in the Garden of Eden, one must be ever-vigilant to survive. The law of the jungle reigns in their eat-or-be-eaten world.
In some ways, our behavior mimics bird behavior or maybe it's the other way around since they arrived much earlier than we did. IMO, as homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa, as tribes morphed into villages and villages into towns-cities-city states, and so on, we have gotten better at cloaking some of our baser instincts, becoming an animal in modern dress. When we kill there aren't as many of us that die, notwithstanding nuclear or biological warfare.
I am reminded of a scene in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Against a desolate landscape, two bands of apes vie for control of a watering hole. The more 'advanced' band has harnessed the power of bones. They bludgeon and overpower one of the opposing apes with their new-found weapon. The 'less advanced' band retreats awed and terrified by this new level of aggression.
At the end of the scene, one of the aggressor apes tosses their bone-weapon in the air. We then cut to a close-up of the bone rotating end over end as it segues into an image of a space station spinning in space -- a hundreds of thousands of years transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers subsisting on wild plants and animals to a distant future.
My two-cent interpretation: Kubrick seems to be suggesting that aggression is a biologically rooted behavior. We possess an inherent, aggressive response in the pursuit of resources -- food, water, shelter, territory, hierarchical dominance, and mate selection.
As to whether humans have an inherent urge to possess land and establish boundaries, much seems to depend on the historical, religious, and cultural context in which the act of possession takes place.
Possession, ownership, and property [POP] represent concepts that have been written about, debated, analyzed, and dissected for a very long time. I became interested in the subject while researching the history of the San Jose Land Grant—a link to that blog is available here.
Question: Is POP an evolutionary adaptation, a fundamental right, or a social construct?
I thought it might help to start with a historical timeline. We are currently in what the Anthropocene Working Group has called the Anthropocene. It includes what is known as the “Great Acceleration”, a dramatic mid-20th century step-change that is impacting our planet.
From here we wind the historical clock back to the period from 1500 to 1945 known as the ‘Modern Era’: divided into the Early Modern Period and the Late Modern Period. Before that, we have the Middle Ages, running from 476 A.D. to 1450 A.D. Earlier still, we have the period called "Ancient History", a time beginning around 3500 BC and ending with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. And then way, way back we have the realm of Prehistory starting ~3.3 million years ago and ending ~3000 BC with the invention of writing. During Prehistory’s glacially slow ‘in-between’ time, early man stepped from the Stone Age, to the Bronze Age, and into the Iron Age ~1200 BC. Read more.
So, at what point along this evolutionary and historical timeline did our ancestors begin thinking of ‘things’ as property? There don't seem to be any easy answers. The idea of property seems to have evolved gradually, codified in cultural, social, and legal frameworks.
I am stopping here because I have run out of time. I will come back to the topic in a later blog. In the meantime, take a moment to think about where you have landed – where you lay your head, the community, territory, and country you find yourself in.
Before we, homo sapiens, came along it was just the flora and fauna. Then the indigenous 'we' showed up, living off the land – sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Then different others of us came along and things began to get complicated.
More to follow...
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