For the Love of Land
Original posting date: June 25, 2009
Have you ever wondered why we humans have to buy land? We should get it as a birthright by virtue of being born on this earth, I say! I haven’t seen a deer paying up for a piece of land for grazing…doesn’t make sense, right?
I know market economics are very complex and land regulation is very important…but, I am sure somebody has worked out the habitable land area to population ratio for our planet. I think this exercise might give us a good idea of the optimum human population that the Earth can support based on available land, so that we don’t have to go apartment hunting on Mars!
We do have to make provisions for uninhabitable places, like extreme climatic zones (the north and south poles for example), extreme terrain, places of great biological importance (like rainforests and several critical ecosystems), so that we leave some land for our fellow species…and we also have to account for transportation, public spaces, agricultural land, industrial land etc. The same planning principles can be applied to the Earth on a larger scale, as the ones we use to plan urban areas on a smaller scale. Once we ascertain the total area available, we can calculate the actual area allocable per person. We can then perhaps assign a minimum land area that each person gets by virtue of his/her birth. If you want more land, then market economics should kick in. I know there is a lot of complexity in deciding who gets what, and where, disparity and corruption will creep in, and it will be chaos…but the basic question remains…why do we have to buy land?
Comments
Abhay
although as Russel Peter says..."the world is becoming beige" ;) :) :P intermixing may break the boundaries and barriers one day.
Somebody...I won't say who, but somebody...;) (i couldn't stop myself from adding that line, heehee)
Assuming that the radius of the earth 6400 km, and 1/4 of the surface area is land, and 1/3 of the total land area is inhabitable yields about 40 million square miles. 6.5 billion people, gives about 1.7 acres per person. Is that more or less than you thought?
Great going with the calculations! I was too lazy to do it myself, until I saw ur comments...the calculations got me approximately the same values (1.6 acres):) I used the numbers from this wiki page about the Earth though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Well 1.5 acres per person is very generous of us I think. I was thinking more like 1000 square feet per person :) stingy me!
But my logic was to provide the basic minimum amount of land that a person might need and extra land could be bought or bartered amongst people. But I was thinking more on the lines that land is our birth right and should not come at a premium...(communist ideology!! I might get in trouble for saying it out loud...hee hee)
I was also thinking on the lines that the amount of area available per person might also provide us with some guidelines about the number of human beings the Earth can support without bursting at the seams. The magic number for sustainable world population.
I totally agree about the nomadic tribes point...and I guess some people still live that way..but the ownership of bare minimum amount of land might just be able to solve the problem of slums and homelessness. Too ideological..but worth thinking about I feel!