Of all the things that a person can own, land seems the least justified to me. There is a finite amount of it, you did not create it, you cannot destroy it, and essentially all ownership derives from conquest, in recent or ancient history.
Land is where you can build a shelter. My current experience as a refugee made me realize the importance of shelter and food. The rest comes afterwards.
Basically, all land on Earth has an owner. Be it individuals, corporations or governments. It's finite, so highly valuable.
I'm currently unable to return safely to my homeland because the current land owners marked me as an adversary. I wish it wasn't the case but societal rules have been this way since ever.
It's thousand times easier to me to build something, by using software, in the metaverse/on internet. In the real world, I now have no place to call home, except refugee camps and squats in abandonned buildings.
Land seems like one of the oldest and most "natural" forms of ownership -- Many animals, plants, bacteria, fungi will establish territory and defend it against conspecfics and competitors
They aren't defending land though, they are really defending access to resources contained in that land. If you drop a plant on empty land with no relevant resources for it, the plant will die. It will not become a landowner. Land ownership is a very recent concept in our history. Most of human history on this planet happened with no concept of owning land.
Well, you absolutely need a system to organize who can invest building on land and can reap the benefits. It can't just be a free-for-all with anybody allowed to build anywhere there's space, even if it's currently somebody's backyard.
So once you agree that permission to build needs to be organized, you need to figure out how to allocate that permission, which in situations of scarcity is going to be to the highest bidder.
But people aren't going to invest in building structures that will last for decades unless they know they'll continue to hold permission to occupy those structures for decades.
So either you hand out things like 100-year leases or you hand out ownership outright. In the end, most of the world has settled on ownership because 100-year leases tend to cause massive headaches once you hit the 100-year mark, for a whole host of reasons.
So land ownership is just what works from a practical perspective.
(That being said, I am personally intrigued by a system where the government would lease all land yearly according to market rates, but where higher rates for longer [e.g. 15- or 30-year] terms could be locked in with private banks, much like fixed rate mortgages. The classic problem, of course, is how a government is going to reliably determine "market rates" for land that changes hands only very infrequently. Property taxes already attempt that, but they also often result in value that are obviously not "market". It's much the same problem with assessing non-liquid wealth for wealth taxes.)
When I buy a wooden table it's true that the tree grew from the ground - but I'm also paying for the efforts of the foresters, the sawmill workers, the truck drivers, the table designers, the machine operators, the assemblers, the store salespeople, and the delivery drivers.
I buy a plot of land, on the other hand? The lazy sellers won't even deliver it to my home :)
is this really true? you can definitely do things to it that would make it uninhabitable, no longer "fertile", or any other terms that essentially come to the same conclusion of the land being essentially destroyed.
at least as far as the context of desirability to be owned
Practically speaking, yes. The value of a parcel is largely from its location/proximity to metro areas. I've never heard of someone destroying residential property directly through chemicals or radioactivity, though value can be greatly diminished by local antagonistic developments or rezoning it unfavorably.
It makes poor sense because landowners are often selfish, and choose use cases with their property that maximize personal benefit and if there is a collective benefit to these decisions it is a happy accident. I'm including local species into the collective in this case. Often a landowner will put up barriers (e.g. a fence around a sprawling ranch or a beltway of roads around a suburban development) for species or will introduce invasive species or otherwise lower the biodiversity of a place through disruptive development.
Of course, but that has no practical implications in the near or perhaps even distant future.
Even using the ocean as a fresh water source — which is right here on earth — is a challenge with significant hurdles to overcome.
Even with near infinite land it will presumably be a long, long time before common people can set out into this new frontier and carve out anything like a familiar, safe, let alone comfortable life.
