The Reality Bubble
Page 25
In the case of Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog, clearly the residents have more in common with each other than they do with any other group on the planet, despite the fact that they live in different countries. At the same time, while one nation may claim to be distinct from another, contained within its boundaries there are always ethnic groupings, political factions, and religious differences no matter how seemingly homogeneous the country. That’s because there is a tendency to conflate nation-states with territorial states. As John A. Agnew writes in Mastering Space, “This seems innocent enough, but it endows the territorial state with the legitimacy of representing and expressing the ‘character’ or ‘will’ of the nation….Many states are clearly not nations in this singular sense.”
That certainly became the case for many countries in Africa as the colonial European powers carved up the continent without much thought for the people and the ethnic groups who inhabited it. In the Horn of Africa, Somali peoples had their homeland split into British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, French Somaliland, the Somali region of Ethiopia, and the Somali region of northern Kenya. For nomadic groups and pastoralists in particular, colonial borders restricting their movement often meant that their traditional lifestyles were disrupted if not destroyed. Many had to settle and compete with bordering groups for resources, leading to an increase in conflict.
In other instances, it was the reverse that led to problems: completely separate ethnic groups lumped together within boundaries that did not share customs or a heritage at all. Take one of Africa’s newer countries as an example. Angola comprises ten different ethnic groups, who really have only one thing in common: they were all colonized by the Portuguese and in 1975 they overthrew them. The Europeans took what they could with them when they pulled out, but they left their borders and a country that hadn’t previously existed.
Basically, belonging to the same country as someone else does not mean you’re the same, any more than belonging to a different country means you’re different. Think of it this way: There are approximately 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. And language is one of the primary unifiers of culture.*3 Given that there are 195 counties, that would mean that on average a country contains thirty-three different linguistic cultures. Consider Papua New Guinea, with more than 800 spoken languages, or Indonesia, with 742. Clearly, national boundaries do not map onto cultural groupings. It just doesn’t add up.
There is another way of looking at borders. While national holidays, foods, and customs celebrate the things we share with people on our side of the border, it may well be that there are people we want to keep out. We are animals after all, and as animals we sometimes fight over territory. Our animal natures can however be placated when space and resources are plentiful. This is why uncharted space, like outer space, is largely uncontested. There is so much room in the solar system and the universe that it’s really pointless for us to fight over it. Similarly, in desert lands, small populations of nomads had the right to roam across vast tracts of territory for millennia. As Fred Pearce writes in The Land Grabbers, the changes we are seeing now are relatively recent, as only “a generation ago, the Bedouin and their camels roamed the deserts of the Middle East.” But even then, “It wasn’t a free-for-all. Rights of ownership and access were tightly negotiated and policed, but without fences, formal laws, or national boundaries.”
Because nomads often adapted to harsh and infertile places like the desert, steppe, Arctic, or tundra, these populations were typically small and nimble, taking advantage of vegetation and game as the people migrated with animals and the seasons. In fertile regions, however, human tribes began to settle into permanent homes. Ten thousand years ago, with the advent of agriculture, we were able to create large food surpluses for the first time. Along with developed settlements that needed to be defended, more food also meant more people. Clashes occurred when space was at a premium. And when settled groups could no longer expand outwards, a new type of human group formation evolved: we began to expand upward. This was the invention of hierarchy.
Hierarchy allowed for social complexity and the coordinated rule of larger groups. In New Scientist magazine, Debora MacKenzie examines the evolution of nations, noting that “larger hierarchies not only won more wars but also fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage, record-keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed.” But importantly, “These were not nation states. A conquered city or region could be subsumed into an empire regardless of its inhabitants’ ‘national’ identity.” In other words, empires tended to be multicultural thousands of years ago, and that never really changed.
But the real scourge of early city-states and empires was not so much other city-states and empires as it was those who had not settled and had not devoted their energy to farming. That is, the free people: the nomads.
From the settlers’ perspective, a nomad is someone who doesn’t care about your border or your division of space. Those that migrated tended to be physically much healthier and stronger than farmers. Some rode on horseback and used bows for hunting, and as such they were considered natural warriors. So farmers had every reason to fear nomads. History, as we know, is filled with the bloody conflicts of the two groups, from Biblical times up to the present day. But while stereotypes abound, were nomads really predators, or were they prey?
There are two accounts of nomadic peoples. One suggests they were invaders, extorting and raiding agricultural societies, and another suggests they were defending their traditional ways against expansionist agricultural societies. In truth, both are accurate; it just depends on who you are talking to.
The last indigenous people of the EU, the Sami people, support themselves by fishing as well as herding reindeer. And yet the Sami need to fight the nation-states that exist on their traditional lands. As one Sami man declared, “The governments of Finland and Norway are trying to make salmon fishing illegal for the Sami and give new fishing rights to rich people who have built cabins on our homeland.” So who should the rights belong to? People who have lived there for thousands of years but do not “own” the land, or people who may not have any real ties to the land but own the private property?
The question will become ever more pertinent with global population growth putting space and resources increasingly at a premium. Now that we live in a world of states, we consider it a sin to be stateless. Still, the idea of an imaginary line that someone could step over to pass from one state to another is a fairly recent one in human history. It was not until 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, that Europe established the nascent concept of what we now call sovereignty and put an end to centuries of violence. Emperor Ferdinand II had wanted to impose Roman Catholicism in his domains (where local powers were increasingly Protestant). This triggered the highly destructive Thirty Years’ War, which soon involved nearly every country in Europe.
The bloody conflict lasted from 1618 to 1648, by which time Ferdinand had been dead for eleven years, and resulted in eight million deaths. The 224 principalities, duchies, and other small domains that made up what we now know as Germany (where most of the fighting took place), lost 20 to 30 percent of their population by some estimates, making it one of the deadliest wars in history. In the end, all parties had a strong incentive to sign the peace treaty just to end the nightmare. But it’s unlikely anyone knew they would be setting a precedent that would change the world. The novel idea finally agreed to, and which paved the way for the United Nations centuries later, was that state boundaries gave the new territories rights to their own policies and religious practices. It was more or less the right to be left alone, in exchange for the commitment to leave others alone. Today, that’s basically what we mean when we talk about sovereignty.
That radical idea had implications at the individual level. Now that political control was no longer exercised in a direct line putatively through the will of God, acting via the king
, down to the lowly subject of the state, a new alignment was required for statehood. And this alignment was through investing directly in the state in the form of private property. The individual now entered into a contract and became legally accountable for the land that they possessed, and in turn had a vested interest in the larger political entity they belonged to. The territorial state then provided the role of protectorate. As John Agnew suggests, the state became a “harmonizer of society.”
For the first time in history, the individual—the commoner—held an important place in society. As Brian Nelson, author of The Making of the Modern State, writes, “Individual choice, particularly economic choice, now becomes possible.” And with this interdependence between the state and individual, the abstract notion of “rights” came to the fore. After all, “One’s claim to the right of property…becomes valid only to the extent that one recognizes others’ claims and accepts the legal duty to accept them.” And while the notion of private property existed as far back as the ancient Greeks, for the Greeks, property wasn’t something an individual had the right to trade in. Land transfers between families were difficult and required religious authorization, and private land appropriation by the state was unheard of except in cases of exile. Only with the creation of the modern state did we come to see an allegiance to abstract space. The common person’s idea of “my country,” “my state,” and “my property” could only evolve with the idea that the space in question could be thought of as “mine” and bought and sold as a “thing.”
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YOU MAY NOT SEE the divisions of “space,” but they are everywhere. Even the column of space above your head and below your feet has rights attached to it. Home ownership is one way to own space, but the air rights above and the subsurface rights below might belong to somebody else. This was not always the case. For most of history, if you held property it was assumed that what was above and below it was also yours; the space that “belonged” to you extended into infinity. The idea was based on a doctrine called ad coelum, which can be traced back to the thirteenth century. In essence, it declared, “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos,” which is Latin for “Whoever’s is the soil, it is theirs all the way to heaven and all the way to hell.” Pretty dramatic for real estate.
The idea of owning space up to the heavenly kingdom was brought back down to earth in a rather unlikely way. It was dismantled not by soldiers with swords or guns but by hot-air balloons and an angry chicken farmer. In 1783, after the first hot-air balloon had slowly drifted across the French countryside, the question of air trespass arose, and soon, with the advent of air travel by plane the question was pushed to the fore. Once that had happened, it was only a matter of time before restrictions came into force. In 1925, the United States Congress passed the Kelly Act, which granted “feeder” routes to airmail services. Then in 1926, the Air Commerce Act established official airways that granted the government air rights to all airspace above 500 feet (152 metres) in urban areas. This meant that trespass laws could no longer apply.
But not even the United States Air Force could violate the sanctity of private space. In 1946, a plucky chicken farmer named Thomas Lee Causby, from Greensboro, North Carolina, took the government to court for aerial trespass over his land. Causby’s farm was less than half a mile from Lindley Field, an airfield used by the military in the Second World War. Each day, as the planes took off and landed, they would fly just twenty-five metres above his chicken coops. The blistering roar of the engines put the chickens in a state of shock and they stopped laying eggs. As the case file notes, “As many as six to ten…chickens were killed in one day by flying into the walls from fright. The total chickens lost in that manner was about 150.” Causby was forced to shut down his business.
In court, Causby won, and for his suffering (and the birds’), was compensated for flyovers between 83 feet (25 metres) and 365 feet (111 metres), the first height being the lowest level at which airplanes flew over his property, and the second height establishing the zone of public easement in rural areas. And while the ruling may have been relegated to dusty law books, it is remembered for one thing: it brought ad coelum to an end. The government could not claim that it “possessed” the space down to ground level any more than land owners could extend their property rights indefinitely up into the sky.*4
With the recent advent of drones however, the law has had to make additional adjustments to air property rights. The Federal Aviation Administration does not allow unmanned aerial vehicles to fly higher than 400 feet (122 metres) so that they do not interfere with low flying aircraft. But with the ability to hover over homes and peer into windows of residential towers, drones and property rights still clash in this legal grey area.
That’s what happened on July 26, 2015, in Bullitt County, Kentucky, when David Boggs watched in horror as William Merideth aimed a shotgun at his new Phantom quadcopter and with one loud bang brought it down. Merideth claimed the drone was trespassing over his property, and while the two men disagreed on the height of the flying machine—Boggs said it was two hundred feet (sixty-one metres) while Meredith said it was under one hundred (thirty metres)—the craft was still within the airspace of the private landowner. And so, according to the judge, Meredith was within his rights to shoot the drone down.
Zooming farther up, even more airspace has been contested, measured, and divvied up. As satellites orbit our planet, they fly not just over individual properties but entire nations. So countries have had to agree on the boundaries where they give up their sovereign air rights. And while there remains some disagreement, in general the horizontal band from 30 kilometres (where the highest planes and air balloons fly) up to 160 kilometres (where the lowest orbiting satellites pass) is designated as the zone where a nation loses its claim to air rights.
Within this band is another invisible border. According to the Fédération aéronautique internationale, which serves as the governing body for astronautics and aeronautics, the official line between Earth and outer space is at one hundred kilometres. Beyond this limit, any human traveller is considered an astronaut. This is also known as the Kármán line, where our planet’s gravity begins to lose its grip on spacecraft. *5 Once this line is crossed, a set of laws applies that is different from those on Earth, as defined by the United Nation’s 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In space, no nation can claim territorial sovereignty. It is ironic however, that it is out there and not here on Earth that space is free and a “province for all mankind.” That the shared common exists in a place that most of us can’t access, let alone inhabit.
Peace rules (at least for now) in space, and weapons of mass destruction are strictly forbidden. As a domain that is open to all for exploration, claims of ownership over title or territory may be prohibited, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t scams. There are companies online for instance, that offer the rights to “purchase” a star’s name, but none of them are officially recognized. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is currently the only governing body empowered to name space objects, and “as an international scientific organisation, the IAU dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of ‘selling’ fictitious star names, surface feature names, or real estate on other planets or moons in the Solar System.”
While it is true that individuals cannot make claim to celestial bodies, private companies are laying the groundwork to exploit resources in outer space. The United States Congress recently passed the Space Act of 2015, which has led some scholars to argue that it violates the Outer Space Treaty. With advances in privately funded space flight and in the spirit of capitalism, the act encourages competitiveness. It has been updated to allow US citizens to “engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of ‘space resources,’” including water and minerals, opening the door to potentially mining comets and asteroids for metals like gold, silver, iridium, osmium, palladium, and platinum—just as Americans once sailed the seas looking for
guano.
All of us exist on a tiny speck within our galaxy. That being the case, our claims to owning real estate in outer space are about as absurd as an ant claiming to own all of the real estate in New York City. For scientists and entrepreneurs, however, this quest to create settlements in outer space is the new frontier. Given the limited resources on Earth and our growing population, moving to another planet is seen by some as “humanity’s hope for a future beyond Earth.”
In the meantime, our home planet continues to be exploited. The world beneath our feet holds immense value, as it contains the raw metals that are reshaped into our cars, trains, and planes; the ingredients for the drywall, glass, concrete, and brick we use to build our cities; the minerals that power communication through our laptops and cell phones; and, of course, the soil that grows our food. It should be no surprise, then, that the ground is the biggest battlefield of all.
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ON THE CORNER OF SEVENTH AVENUE and Christopher Street, next to a cigar shop, you’ll find the smallest piece of real estate in New York City. Shaped like a slice of pizza, the plot of land is a mere five hundred square inches (3,226 square centimetres). It is covered in a mosaic that defiantly reads, “Property of the Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes.” It was the last sliver of land held by David Hess, who refused to give up a fight with the city to keep his private property.
In 1910, New York City began buying land and demolishing buildings in order to widen the streets and build a subway. Hess refused to sell his five-storey building but was forced to relinquish his property anyway under laws of eminent domain. All he was left with was five hundred square inches. If that weren’t enough, the city rubbed salt into the wound when they requested that Hess donate what was left to be used as part of the sidewalk. Hess refused, which is why this tiny piece of “spite” real estate still exists today.