It's all mine! Mine! Mine! Ha! Ha! Ha!
'Property is theft': first given voice by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840, the slogan became one of the clarion calls of the nineteenth-century anarchists. This rallying cry has come to mind recently while I've been (once more) considering the fate of the wild places of Highland Scotland. It's property rights that call the tune. Windfarms (or Wind Cities, as the John Muir Trust has begun to call the bigger ones) are built largely on the estates of mega-rich landowners, who stand to make a mega-buck that they don't need in the first place by leasing out their land to multinational energy companies. They can make a few more scraps by permitting small hydro schemes to be constructed on their estates, another costly and inefficient scheme involving lots of pipes and benefitting nobody other than - oh, the estate owners, along with the poisoned portfolios of a bunch of bandit politicians.
There's also the issue of new tracks on these enormous estates, bulldozed across the hillsides in increasing numbers. These are horrible scars on the landscape, disfiguring the hills for miles around without a thought for ecology or beauty. What a contrast they make to the stalkers' paths of yore, many of which still thread their way neatly through the heather, blending unobtrusively with the landscape; indeed, becoming part of the landscape.
Google 'Ledgowan Estate' to discover what a particularly bad example of an estate thinks of people who dare to walk on 'its' estate (and this despite the excellent Right to Roam legislation existing in Scotland). And over recent times the estate has torn an ugly line across kilometres of hillside near Achnasheen, slap bang in the north-west Highlands - all in the name of agriculture, of course. Very recently I have seen (I couldn't have avoided it if I'd tried) the scar of another track freshly gouged into the heather and peat climbing up beside the stream that leads up local Munro Fionn Bheinn (whether this is part of Ledgowan or a neighbouring estate I have been unable to ascertain). It all looks almost like a deliberate trashing of the landscape.
All of this, of course, is given tacit approval by the Scottish misgovernment. It's all a cartel, really - landowners, politicians, multinationals, in a symbiotic yet poisonous world of their own, and a law unto themselves. To me, this is the grave error of those who enthuse about the possibility of Scottish independence. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our independence flag-wavers persist in the blind belief that it's actually got something to do with anybody or anything outside the confines of the local cabal. Naive, naive, and just what the Empire wants us to believe. A nice piece of diversionary theatre.
Property is theft. Actually, I disagree. 'Theft' implies that there is somebody to steal from, and something to steal. In the case of land - most clearly with wild land, nature - this is a ludicrous notion. How can anyone 'own' a hill, a mountain, a forest, a desert? Of course they can't; it's impossible. Property, in this case, is not so much theft as a deluded and hubristic fantasy. If we look deeper, we find that it's a concept of mind control, designed to foster the falsehood of a separate self which erroneously believes it can appropriate bits of the outside world to increase its sense of personal importance. On a personal level, I am fortunate enough to live in a house that I no longer need to pay for; but I don't consider that it is literally 'mine'. It is a shelter and a launchpad for my current various projects. It is a place that I endeavour to treat with care and respect, and I live mindful of the fact that one day my material being will return to the wider elemental world, as will the house where I live. That 'landowners' behave as if they really do own hills, fields etc, viewing them purely as a means for personal gain and sod the rest of us, is an expression of a fundamental lie that has been driven into us from an early age. Property is not theft: it is a notion based on a fundamentally and deliberately flawed view of the universe.
