(Roughly) Daily

A “great reshuffle” of the land is underway, Michael Albertus explains– and it will force us to reconsider traditional ideas of property and ownership…

… It can be easy to forget the significance of the ground beneath our feet – and how much it has shaped the societies we live in. For most people, their home is their house – or their landlord’s. It is bought, sold or rented along with the land underneath it, passing between families over the years. But at some point – and probably several times – there have been abrupt changes to that seemingly permanent arrangement. Land tenure can be profoundly reshuffled. It has in the past and it will be again in the future.

As a political scientist, I’ve studied how land power has shaped societies all over the world. From Ireland to Italy, from Chile to South Africa, and across the US West, struggles over ownership and land use are etched in family histories and have determined the fate of nations…

… Today we are in the middle of a ‘great reshuffle’ of land. Over the past two centuries, nearly every society has reallocated land ownership and property rights. And because of the power that land confers to those who hold it, this reshuffling has set societies on distinct trajectories of development. It’s helped some countries become more egalitarian and productive, whereas for others it has embedded racial hierarchies, deep inequalities and economic stagnation.

The global population bubble and climate change will amplify the reshuffling, and a picture of how that will happen is starting to emerge. Land will become ever scarcer and more valuable as populations increase – and the opposite could occur in the next century as the world’s population plummets. Meanwhile, a changing climate will make vast areas of land more attractive and productive while rendering other areas uninhabitable. Amid these changes, the question is how to reshuffle land well. One thing is clear: centuries-old approaches to property rights and ownership are not up to that task…

[Albertus quickly reviews the hstory of property regimes, with special emphasis on the devlopment of today’s, whihc he calls “the Great Reshuffle”…]

… This great reshuffle began in different ways. In some cases, it entailed the appropriation of Indigenous lands on the part of settlers. Other times, it involved stripping large landowners of their property and granting it to peasants, whether collectively, in cooperatives or as individuals. My ancestors in southern Poland won a small plot of land – presumably taken from the local noble family – through the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe.

Land reshuffling rewired nearly every country on Earth and set societies on new trajectories of development, race and gender relations, and treatment of the environment. For some societies, that meant becoming more egalitarian. In the years after the Second World War, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all adopted sweeping programmes that transferred land from landlords to their tenants in small, family-sized plots. The governments of these countries followed that up with generous subsidies. Within a generation, families were sending their children to schools rather than the fields. Urbanisation and industrialisation followed, vaunting these nations to the forefront of the global economy.

Far more countries stumbled. Following the end of China’s civil war in the late 1940s, the Communist Party seized all private land in the country, nationalised it, and then formed large land collectives that incorporated some 430 million people. It was one of the largest experiments in land reshuffling in human history. And it wreaked havoc as China’s forests were felled and underproductivity in agriculture drove the Great Famine. Walking through the fields of a place like Dali in Yunnan province today, as I have done, paints a different picture of productivity that emerged only after China broke up its collectives and allowed families to farm specific plots of land…

In the US, land reshuffling had varied consequences. The displacement of Indigenous communities and reallocation of their land to settlers set the stage for a radical experiment in democracy among smallholding settlers in New England, the slavery and plantation system in the South, and a system of Indian reservations in the West. When I did fieldwork at the Agua Caliente Reservation that centres on Palm Springs, California in late 2023, tribal members pointed to repeated land grabs as the root of attempts by outsiders to break down tribal cohesion and cultural preservation.

Around the world today, people are living and breathing the consequences of how the great reshuffle has rewired societies – from resource depletion to racism, gender inequalities, prosperity levels, and the global pecking order. In the coming decades, addressing problems linked to these shifts will require recognising their origins and crafting policies that turn land into a force for positive social change.

After all, land is still the world’s most valuable asset, despite the economic rotation toward technology and manufacturing in advanced economies. Growing populations and the need to feed them and generate resources for them have driven a spiralling demand for land. This is true even in urban areas, where land prices typically skyrocket. Pressure on the land is only going to increase in the coming decades. More land reshuffles are coming…

… The future lies to the north. Latitudes north of the 45th parallel make up only 15 per cent of the world’s surface area but have 29 per cent of its ice-free land and are very sparsely populated. Even more northern land is set to shed its ice and permafrost in the coming decades and become more temperate and productive. Much of this land is owned directly by governments and Indigenous communities, often with colliding claims; little of it is privately owned.

Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest northerly countries, will undergo the most dramatic changes. Agriculture could dramatically expand through longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and the melting of millions of acres of permafrost. One recent climate model shows Canada gaining 4.2 million square kilometres of arable land suitable for growing crops like wheat, corn and potatoes by 2080 – a fourfold increase of its current stock of suitable land. A comparable amount of land will become newly arable in Russia, positioning these two countries as the world’s key breadbaskets of the future. At the same time, these changes will threaten expansive boreal forests and the forestry industry.

The more temperate climate and increased economic activity in these countries will drive population growth and migration, placing pressure to reshuffle lands. In Canada, 89 per cent of all land is ‘Crown land’ – publicly owned by the federal government and provincial governments. Indigenous First Nations people lay claim to large portions, so tensions could boil over as private interest strengthens…

… As for the US, the picture in Alaska parallels that in Canada. The US federal government owns 61 per cent of Alaska’s land, and a growing share will become arable within decades. With Indigenous claims to a large portion, there will be campaigns to reallocate this land – for instance by privatising more federal land – as it becomes more attractive for settlement and economic activity.

And alongside this thawing, governments, private interests and, where present, Indigenous communities, are poised to clash over sparsely populated territories like Greenland and Antarctica with weak, absent or transitional sovereignty. Indeed, under President Donald Trump, that has already begun.

While looming northern land reshuffles will catch outsized attention, climate change will also foster internal reshuffles on the land in countries across the globe. That dynamic could be scary and destabilising, but it is also an opportunity. Changing land relationships and migration patterns associated with climate change present a possibility to put land in service of society in ways that have rarely been attempted in human history…

[Albertus describes some of the approaches to land rights developing around the world…]

… There will inevitably be mistakes and growing pains associated with such approaches. But these efforts will be increasingly important if we are going to manage future land reshuffling to the benefit of societies as a whole, and without systemic conflict. Everyone from Aboriginal Australian leaders to Minnesotan farmers have expressed excitement to me about this future under new land arrangements.

In the 22nd century, the great reshuffle will shift once again. There will be major changes in the size of human populations, the climate, technology and, inevitably, in politics. The result will be new relationships with the land that could look foreign to what we experience today. Experiments with new forms of property rights will need to go mainstream in order to accommodate shifting populations and climate change in an orderly and equitable fashion.

There is considerable uncertainty in population projections beyond 2100 but, if fertility rates continue their steady decline, the several-millennia-old human population boom is most likely going to bust. If the world converges to today’s average low fertility rate in East Asia, the 22nd century would be one of rapid depopulation, tracing back to some 2 billion people…

… In the 22nd century, many cities may trace Detroit’s trajectory. If housing remains dense, city footprints will have to shrink dramatically. Meanwhile, in the countryside, there will be far more land to go around, but that land may be degraded if it was not adequately protected.

The climate picture in the 22nd century will also drastically alter where people live on the land and how they relate to it. Even if emissions slow considerably, global temperatures and sea levels will rise, and weather patterns will be more extreme. As we explored earlier, a thawing North will continue to open up to agriculture, but land elsewhere will undergo drastic change. Arid and drought-prone areas like northeastern Brazil, the US Southwest and the African Sahel will become increasingly hot and pose a challenge for human livelihoods. Crop yields in the US Southwest are already declining and farmers are struggling to access water for their fields. Some are giving up and fallowing or leaving the land. Meanwhile, low-lying coastal areas in places like Florida and Bangladesh will disappear, as well as entire island nations like the Maldives.

That changing land use will inform the political landscape. Some countries may trace the path that Canada envisions for itself: welcoming immigrants into a dynamic economy. An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration. Other countries may wall themselves off to protect existing landholdings, resources and wealth from outsiders.

Growing wealth inequality could directly impact who owns the land, too. Powerful multinational companies have increasingly amassed land in order to secure their supply chains, crowding out local populations. If wealthy individuals and investors buy up land at a large scale, a significant portion of the world’s population could end up as renters, mimicking patterns of concentrated large landholding and widespread landlessness that prevailed prior to the onset of the great reshuffle.

Amid all these climatic and economic changes, future generations will make choices once again about whether to spread out on the land or to concentrate in shrinking cities. Land will once more undergo a radical reshuffle in either scenario.

If humanity is to flourish, the next century and beyond will again require a rethink of land relationships…

Reconsidering property rights and ownership: “On unstable ground,” from @mikealbertus.bsky.social in @aeon.co.

* Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

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As we ponder just how real real estate is, we might recall that on this date in 1916, the Easter Rising, an insurrection launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period.

High on the republicans’ list of grievences with their colonial masters was the issue of land reform.