Agrarianism and the Good Society: Land, Culture, Conflict, and Hope

6. Back toward Community

The institution of private property is one of the chief mechanisms through which a society interacts with the natural world. Property law creates a framework for managing and using nature. It explains who gets to do what, and where. When a landscape is divided into private parcels, it is not the land that is fragmented; nature remains an integrated whole. What is fragmented is the legal power to make decisions over land. The law prescribes how individuals can acquire managerial powers over particular segments of this natural whole. One question that presses itself upon American law and culture today is whether the rules that prescribe property rights ought to be influenced, more than they are, by nature itself. Should the legal rights a landowner possesses vary based upon the physical features of the land? Should the right to reshape or develop land, for instance , depend upon terrain features or the plants and animals that live there? Much of what we know about nature’s functioning is assembled within the scientific discipline of ecology. We can therefore rephrase this question: should our ecological understandings of land help shape our legal framework of private ownership, in terms of what can be owned and the rights and responsibilities that landowners possess? When it comes to land, property law and ecology are kindred disciplines. Ecology explains how activities on one land parcel can affect landowners and land uses elsewhere. BACK TOWARD COMMUNITY 6  108 Agrarianism and the Good Society Property law then evaluates these spillover effects, deciding whether activities that cause the spillover effects are lawful. To answer this elemental question about landowner rights and nature, it is useful to bring ethics into the mix of relevant considerations , for reasons that will become evident. When we do this— whenweconsiderprivateproperty,ecology,andethicstogether—we are better able to spot patterns of overall cultural development. A pattern of conflict and change that is obscure in one of these three fields can become clearer when we see the same pattern in another. A development that is seemingly contained within one field can appear different when we realize that it is a piece of a larger cultural change, driven by forces that transcend and encompass the field itself. These three, related fields of knowledge are similar in that each is characterized by an inner tension or duality. And it is the same tension, the same duality or fault line, that runs through much of American culture. We can describe it, for the moment, this way: On one side is the tendency toward abstract reasoning and individualism or atomism. On the other side is the tendency toward particularity , context, and community. The first side emphasizes the parts and accords them independent status. The other side points toward the connections and dependencies among the parts and highlights the importance of well-functioning interactions. This tension or dichotomy , once we see it at work, provides a useful framework for understanding the trajectories of these related fields. It helps us to see how the fields are buffeted by larger cultural forces and to identify the cultural changes that might be necessary for society to enhance the health of its lands and communities. Looking ahead we face a choice: should we move in the direction of greater abstraction and individualism or instead in the direction of greater attention to connections and dependencies? For those who desire a culture well rooted in land, the answer is rather clear. We can begin the story in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1870. Harvard College at the time was in poor shape, and Harvard Law School was even worse. Higher education had fallen on hard times in the midst of one of America’s periodic waves of anti-intellectual- 109 Back toward Community ism. Enter Charles William Eliot, who was hired by the leaders of Harvard College with the charge of shaking up the place to give it respectability and rigor. Eliot was a mathematician and chemist by training, and he believed he knew just what Harvard needed. The home of intellectual rigor, he asserted, was in the hard sciences, particularly the physical sciences. The way to straighten up Harvard, accordingly, was to infuse its various programs with the logic and methods of inductive science.1 To take over the law school, Eliot brought in Christopher Columbus Langdell. Bold and decisive, he was just the man for the job. Legal study, Langdell decided, should be...