Trespassing: An Inquiry Into the Private Ownership of Land - Softcover

Mitchell, John Hanson

3.82

22 ratings by Goodreads

9780738201467: Trespassing: An Inquiry Into the Private Ownership of Land

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738201464 ISBN 13: 9780738201467

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1999

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How did we come to adopt the strange notion of owning land?an exploration by one of Americas finest nature writers.. In this richly entertaining story that reaches back to the beginning of British common law and up to the most recent Supreme Court takings decisions, John Mitchell reveals how we came to accept a system of private ownership. Building upon the heartbreaking story of a tribe of praying Indians who bought into the colonists legal system and settled their own 2000-acre tract, only to be dispossessed and herded into a detention camp, he explores every variation on this important theme. In this richly entertaining story that reaches back to the beginning of British common law and up to the most recent Supreme Court takings decisions, John Mitchell reveals how we came to accept a system of private ownership. Building upon the heartbreaking story of a tribe of praying Indians who bought into the colonists legal system and settled their own 2000-acre tract, only to be dispossessed and herded into a detention camp, he explores every variation on this important theme. An hilarious visit to the Mitchell ancestral manor in Scotland, a brilliant panorama of the single vast grid in

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Review:

Washington Post Book World"

Audubon"

A Thoreauvian wanderer . . . an engaging writer . . . a very big subject with serious ramifications. Washington Post Book World"

The beauty of the book also lies in Mitchell s intimacy with the tract of land the depth of the setting deepens the reader s feel for the humans that populate it. Audubon"

"A Thoreauvian wanderer . . . an engaging writer . . . a very big subject with serious ramifications."-- "Washington Post Book World"

"The beauty of the book also lies in Mitchell's intimacy with the tract of land ... the depth of the setting deepens the reader's feel for the humans that populate it."-- "Audubon"

From the Author:

Here's the background of my various trespasses
In May of l994, bulldozers moved into a pristine woodland I knew of and destroyed a fifteen thousand year old biological community to put up a few houses. The destruction of this complex, biologically diverse ecosystem got me wondering. How did it come to pass that the "owner" of the land could legally kill untold numbers of plants and animals so that a few human beings could live on the tract. That question led me into a veritable labyrinth of laws and traditions relating to the attitudes of various cultures toward the land, everything from a ten thousand year old Native American system of land distribution in which land was "held" by individuals, but not "owned" by anyone, to William the Conqueror's decision to evict the peasants from the beech forests of medieval England, to the current legal battles over the so-called "takings" issue, the struggles of landless peasants in Chiapas, and the right wing, armed stand offs over land rights in Utah and Texas.

How to tell this wide-ranging, international story though? To do this, as with other books I've written (Ceremonial Time, Walking towards Walden) I turned to my own back yard.

In the mid seventeenth century, there was a village of Christian Indians not far from where I live. That "praying town" as it was called, was effectively obliterated by the English in 1675 during King Philips War and its residents placed in an internment camp on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where most of them succumbed. One powerful woman survived the ordeal and returned to the village site to live out her days. She lasted until 1736, and only on her death bed, when there were none of her people left, turned her land over to the English. Archeologists suspect the village site had spiritual significance for her. In fact, according to local folklore, the tract of land described in the book is haunted.

The five hundred acre site of the actual village has been under four ! different systems of land distribution since the seventeenth century, but it's still more or less undeveloped, so I used the story of the legal destruction of the Indian village, and the story of a current struggle to protect part of the site from development to explain this long, convoluted, and often complex history of why we think we own land. The story proceeds from Tecumseh's seminal question when he was told to sell his land to the Americans.` "Sell the land? he asked, "Why not sell the clouds?"

He should be living in our time.

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