I love reading novels. They inspire and inform me. They get me thinking. It’s been awhile since I read Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing. Yet I can still picture the San Francisco she conjures in her book–the one that loosely resembles the city we know, yet is a place where resource use is in balance and people are fed from the land. It is a place where gardens grow and brooks flow. Where wind power creates energy and gondolas run from hill to hill. It’s a walking city and a place to ride electric carts. Starhawk juxtaposes this idyllic setting with a dystopian one where people are at war over scarce resources. Her novel foreshadows a time that many of us can too easily picture, especially now that climate change is much more broadly understood as something that will not only affect our relationship with the natural world but also economic, political and social structures.

In a preamble to the book, Starhawk talks of the sacredness of earth, water, air and fire (energy): these elements are essential to and are the building blocks of life. “They have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.”

What does this have to do with land conservation? Notice the extent to which free market economies make air, water and land commodities to be taken and used for the highest profit. Notice the extent to which you benefit from such a system. Notice the extent to which you are harmed by such a system. Can you picture another way? An alternate system? Might there be a more balanced system of government and economy? Are there some resources, commodities and services that would be best to be provided without profit?

I don’t have the answer. But when private companies buy up water rights (springs, watersheds, reservoirs) I get nervous. Please notice the extent to which this is happening: try googling water privatization. Water may well be the next oil. Something that will be scarce, yet essential. Something for which people will wage war. It has already happened.

I am a land owner. I benefit from private land ownership. Yet I am also drawn to a system where no one owns land outright. Rather, they become stewards of a parcel, using its resources in a balanced way. Might we have more wild and natural lands in such a system? Might we need fewer resources to make our livings if we did not need hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right of ownership–or the right of tenantship?

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