Children who are born to the comfortably off have a different start in life to those who are born into poor families - as such there is and will always (unless change can be established) a situation that creates class differential among children and adults. Establishing that from a very early age, poor. people have a far greater need of a reasonable level of wealth creation than the wealthy who have already gained wealth to live comfortably without necessarily having to do very much to maintain wealth.
As a consequence poor people of which there are more than rich, are forced into a situation whereby they need to continually create a modicum of wealth, which they use to maintain life, hopefully with some sort of dignity. So poor people become automatically - by virtue of need of them - wealth creators for those who have already got wealth in order that they do not starve; consequently what this means is that the more wealthy in the world are engaged in a wealth creating activity in order to maintain the value of wealth (and to live) but also they are engaged in "using" poorer people to create the wealth, who are treated as an expense. However, whatever your views on the ethics of ownership, man cannot escape the wealth creating drive and you can refer to previous chapters to develop an opinion about wealth creation and its lurking dangers.
My view of ownership of property and assets is with express disquiet as I do not believe it is possible to establish ownership just by barter or wealth exchange.
The fact is that man is born onto the planet naked with nothing other than parental love and man leaves life without being asked if he wanted to, and when, Consequently we can say that a human being has no control over birth and death and as a result has an inbuilt right to pursue life and gain a life of quality and dignity - a right to equal chance, because life is not by invitation or consultation: it is only fair that those born should be made room for as opposed to having to struggle to gain a foothold on the ladder that is life. Life is relatively short by degree but when man is born he should not face an argument about ownership with his fellow man as what invariably happens is that life becomes a challenge and a competition rather than being part of a fostering society with life rules created that allow new humans to develop without education or undue religious power. The single biggest element of which there is competition on earth is that of land and property. What has been established long since is that man can gain ownership of land or property by barter or wealth, usually the latter. Thereafter it becomes the case that the individual has title to land and property evermore, passing such onto relatives upon deaths This means that land and property become channelled into a narrow view of ownership. However the single fact that there is death raises the question of how can there be such a thing as ownership when man cannot permanently and infinitely retain possession.
The combination of the fact that man is a temporary visitor to the planet means that he cannot gain ownership of any part of it because the planet will be here after and before him.
The most that humans can ever do is be custodians and leaseholders of land and property till death, because the real issue is not that man does or can own parts of the planet: this is overridden by the context of earth being the owner of man and this must be a legitimate argument as man only exists because of the earth. There could readily be earth and no man as suggested earlier in the book. Man cannot escape the clutches of earth both in his physical and mental presence. To say that the earth owns man, and by a system of leasehold man is able to gain relative control of sufficient earth to conduct his life satisfactorily, is enough.
All sorts of problems arise out of a notion of land ownership such as who has the rights as to what is on, above and below the land.
If we take Arabs as a point in question, who walked the earth in comparative poverty up until the early twentieth century, their oil has made them wealthy people by exploiting an element from below the earth. I would suggest that even though they may own land directly above an oil deposit, oil, like rock, is a crucial element in the formation of the globe and has existed for millions of years. In the twentieth century oil becomes destroyed, man gains wealth, but only gains wealth by destruction, consequently killing the chicken that laid the golden egg!
Questions can be asked about sand, gravel, stone, gas, gold - all these things were on the earth before man - is it sufficient to hand over the ownership of many elements to comparatively few, so that they can support the not-so-fortunate to own a gas deposit or an oil deposit?
If you accept that ownership of land is also ownership of what is above and below the land, to be hypothetical about it, where do you stop? One could make a case for ownership of the centre of the earth, or miles into the sky; so ridiculous is the notion of individual ownership of the earth's elements because we do not own the earth, the earth owns us; we are all children of the earth.
How do we pay the earth back? We damage it and its environment in order to pursue wealth. Because we land ourselves with the notion that we should buy land and property, we land ourselves with debt for so doing, causing us to put increasing pressure on the earth, in order to be wealth-creative; i.e. the reason for constant and growing pressure on the earth's environment is largely due to man pressing the earth to be wealth creating in order that he may have land, property, food, and warmth at least.
This effect turns man into the equivalent of what the cuckoo is to bird life, as to what man is to animal life. The cuckoo shoulders his way into existence at the expense of other birds; man maintains his existence at the expense of the world's finite resources and its environment and its wild animal and bird life.
There has been a strong campaign over the last ten years to turn rented property into home ownership and much pressure to buy property in general.
The nonsense of the above is that: (1) most mortgages have 25 years to run - so ownership is questionable for 25 years; (2) property will only be wholly owned at a late stage in life. There is an argument to say leave the property to children, but what is evident from that is that second and third generation home owners will put less strain on the earth for resources than the new owner, thereby driving a wedge between two types of home owner. The result will be that the, working class who cannot afford to buy homes will require greater wages than the middle class who own their home by legacy, and this will seriously disturb the job market.
Ownership represents the key drive and force behind wealth creation and since the developed western world has hinged on property ownership, either privately or publicly for many years, the thrust to create wealth in order to pay for ownership has a deep-seated route. What we can say, however, is that ownership acts as a spur to wealth creation; in turn wealth creation puts pressure on the earth's elements and environment. Consequently it is possible to say that the drive for ownership is primarily responsible for our Green problems.
What is happening is that the desire for private and public Ownership has created an ever-growing need for things and services to buy/sell to effect the transfer of ownership. So great and growing is the thrust of the desire for ownership there is now industrial and commercial activity effected in its own right solely to create transfer of ownership.
In order to respond to the drive for ownership, the earth has come under ever-increasing pressure to create and supply goods and services, but as goods and services are largely transferred for wealth, there is in effect a thrust toward ever-increasing wealth creation. In real terms increased wealth creation implies pressure on the earth's tangibles, hence environmental problems as the earth begins to curl at the edges, unable to protect itself from the human onslaught to exploit it.
Things are bad enough flow but as more developing countries develop the ability to create additional ownership and wealth creation values, these just add to the scale of the problem facing man and compromising the earth. In effect, environmental problems are a money problem, an ownership compromise, a social problem and very difficult to address.
