Owning land

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When people become aware of the catastrophic destruction of natural capital, they either go into denial.
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It couldn't be that bad.
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Or, I can't do anything about it.
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Or they quite rightly become extremely alarmed and think.
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We must mend our ways.
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However, the origin of "our ways" is much deeper than we think.
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We can dream of tighter regulations or more reverent attitudes toward the earth.
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More responsible governments and better technology.
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But the tragic fact is that our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down.
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That destruction flows inevitably from the money system and the sense of self that underlies it.
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Let me repeat that:
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Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down.
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Get used to that.
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When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.
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The subjugation of all the earth's land and everything on and under it starts with a conceptual separation.
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An objectification of the world that facilitates its conversion first into "resources", then into property, and finally into money.
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Older history textbooks speak of "How the West was won" while newer, more progressive editions might give lip service to the idea that the North American continent was stolen from its original inhabitants, the Native Americans.
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From the indigenous perspective, though, the true crime is much greater than that.
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The crime of the Europeans went far beyond murdering the Native Americans for "their" land 
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Which perhaps would not have been unthinkable to the indigenous mind.
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After all, territorial disputes are not unknown among hunter-gatherers.
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The crime, the sin, the sacrilege, was to presume to take the land not from humans, but from something much greater: 
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From Nature, God, the spirit that moves all things.
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America was not stolen from the Indians, because the Indians never owned it.
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The land was not property.
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While pre-agricultural peoples often have a tribal territory.
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They would be appalled at the idea that land could be owned.
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Is not the earth a being greater than any human.
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Or even any group of humans?
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How can a greater belong to a lesser?
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To presume to own a piece of the earth.
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To say it is mine, is from the indigenous perspective a sacrilege so audacious as to be unthinkable.
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To reduce the earth to property and eventually to money is indeed to make a greater into a lesser.
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To turn the sacred into the profane.
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The divine into the human.
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The infinite into the quantified. 

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I can think of no better definition of sacrilege than that.
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Charles Eisenstein