Ego Land

The Farmer as the Ego of the Land

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In and of itself, land — like all natural objects — does not imply any norms with regard to good and bad behaviour, but is governed by laws of its own, which have not yet been fully decoded. Placing the issue of the territories of nation-states at the start of a discussion of land does not mean a reversion to the traditional categories of political history. Conflicts over borders have occurred throughout European history.

Land and Power

However, it is instructive to observe these conflicts "from below", as part of the history of land. The immobility of land could lead one to the assumption that land made precise geographical demarcation possible, at least in those regions where there was no moving frontier. However, for a long time, concepts of territorial borders remained much more vague than the lines on our historical maps imply. This can be demonstrated particularly clearly by the history of the border between France and Spain in the Pyrenees , which is interwoven with the history of the emergence of these two nations.

It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that this border was not precisely defined geographically and marked with border stones until It is also significant that this border did not correspond to the topographical features. The Pyrenees border did not follow the mountain peaks, but cut across a river valley, thereby contradicting the French myth of the limites naturelles.

These "natural" borders only became a politically hot topic in the period of the French Revolution as the borders of Europe became fluid during the course of the Revolutionary Wars ; militarily advantageous positions became decisive. The reunion policy of Louis XIV of France — [ ] had ignored the doctrine of natural borders and had made use of old legal titles instead.

While the natural law of the Enlightenment had provided a justification for establishing clear borders, it did not suggest a means of identifying these in the landscape. The concept of natural borders was not informed by a consciousness of geographical living spaces.

Military logic and topographical reality only coincided where mountain ranges marked political borders. From an ecological perspective, the Rhine border should not have been drawn along the centre of the river, but along the watersheds. It is indeed remarkable how long politically decreed borders continued to exist in spite of the fact that they contradicted ecological logic. In German water law, for example, it was only the European Union Water Framework Directive of which introduced the principle that measures to prevent the pollution of waters should take into account the entire territory drained by a river, not just the section which falls in a particular political region.

This was a veritable culture shock for many local authorities. The process of the development of more precise borders occurred in tandem with developments in land surveying and cartography. It was these developments which made the definition of exact geographical borders possible in the first place. This connection is particularly well documented in relation to the Topographical Map of Switzerland which was compiled between and under the direction of the general Guillaume-Henri Dufour — — an important act of Swiss nation-building in which military and political protagonists came together with academically trained experts.

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However, as a general observation, this statement identifies a central aspect of the mobilization of land in the 19th and 20th centuries. The fundamental trend in property law in the modern period is the replacement of a complicated patchwork of legal titles, which were ultimately only comprehensible in their historical context, with a bourgeois property law with procedures for leasing, mortgaging and sale which were stated in writing.

In the modern period, land is principally tradable on the open market. In pre-modern societies, the specific conditions of the respective locality determined whether, and how, landownership could be transferred.

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This process of legal reform occurred in tandem with a simplification of structures of land use. Pre-modern agriculture featured forms of use which were incompatible with the modern understanding of property: The dissolution of these was a central cause of conflict for the European-wide agricultural revolution and an essential step towards a commercialization of agricultural production. Pastoral nomadism, on the other hand, receded gradually since the transformation of the land in connection with the ever more intensive use of land made such forms of land use increasingly less attractive.

Throughout Europe, changes in property law and land use brought the question of land reform onto the political agenda. Even in Finland , where the problem could easily have been alleviated by clearing some of the country's vast forests, changing structures of landownership to the advantage of the landless agrarian population became a key political issue. In the case of Finland, the social conflicts in the countryside were defused by a comprehensive agrarian reform, which the newly independent Finland undertook in the s. The migration of landless rural dwellers into the cities proved a more effective outlet for social tensions among rural society that political programmes aimed at reform.

In any event, a fundamental re-ordering of conditions of landownership only occurred in socialist countries. The collectivization of agriculture was a fervently contested cornerstone of socialist agricultural policy which gave rise to considerable social tension after the fall of the socialist regimes in The spectrum of post-socialist solutions runs from comprehensive privatization, as occurred in Lithuania , to opaque and unsystematic policies which involved endemic corruption, as it was the case in Romania.

There is another aspect to property law which should at least be mentioned here. In the modern period, the right of the individual to freedom of movement tends to come into conflict with private landownership.

This problem is not so conspicuous in the case of agricultural land, but in the case of areas commonly used for recreational activities the issue of access to private property can cause much conflict. Few countries have established such consistent laws on this issue as the Scandinavian countries, where the Right of Public Access, which is treasured by tourists and locals alike, gives all people the fundamental right to move freely in all territories. In the class-based society of England , on the other hand, the principle of "no trespassing" has a long and contentious tradition.

In the 19th century, rights of access were a common cause of tension, such as in the case of woodlands. Forestry reforms amounted to a decades-long campaign on the part of states to establish a monopoly over the use of woodlands. However, these issues have since become considerably less contentious.

The role of woodlands as a refuge for endangered peoples — a role which they have played up to the recent past in other parts of the world such as the Mexican state of Chiapas and the Ho Chi Minh Trail — was ended in Europe in the 19th century by the power of the European territorial states. Only the glorification in folklore of poachers such as Georg Jennerwein — in Bavaria remains as evidence of the potential for conflict which the issue of the use of woodlands once contained. Interestingly, the homogenization of concepts of landownership throughout Europe referred to above was linked with a considerable divergence in the legal treatment of materials found beneath the surface of the land.

These vast differences are illustrated by the existence of complete mining freedom i. A broad spectrum of solutions exists between these two paths, with solutions differing not only from state to state, but from one mineral resource to another. Mining law is one of the few areas of economic law in Europe which even the European Union is reluctant to attempt to harmonize. There is nonetheless a pronounced bias in favour of mining throughout Europe, which results from the transnational view that the extraction of mineral resources is very much in the interest of domestic economies, but that it also carries considerable risks for the companies involved: Of course, legal differences between countries have been less decisive than geological conditions and the technological-industrial complexes used to bring the respective minerals to the surface.

No industry has changed land in such a brutal manner as 20th-century mining. Gigantic earth-moving machinery, enormous opencast mines and other technologies have turned the northern Ruhr region , for example, into a polder landscape in which the pumps must never be turned off. By comparison, pre-modern mining seemed positively idyllic, not only because opencast excavation and technical rationalization subsequently enabled the movement of quantities of earth which were of a different order of magnitude.

The effects on the land — although limited to the locality — were massive, particularly since — even in heavily regulated Germany — a thorough recultivation of the soil only became mandatory after serious controversies. From the 19th century onward, the distance between the sites where mining and processing occurs and the society which consumes the mineral resources has grown. This situation has only partially changed in the recent past, as demonstrated by the protests against power stations in Hamburg-Moorburg and Datteln , which focused on the climatic effects of emissions rather than the question of the origin of the imported coal.

However, transnational networks in mining already existed in the 19th century, and not only in the case of precious metals. For example, the steel company Krupp owned iron ore deposits in Spain ever since and acquired more than 80 per cent of its ore from abroad in the years before the First World War. There are few topics which so clearly demonstrate the gulf between the history of knowledge and the history of science. The most famous description of mining technology in the 16th century is the book De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola — [ ] , which was published posthumously in Expert knowledge about land thus emerged in very pragmatic ways, as this knowledge was required for the exploration of valuable minerals.

Geology only emerged as a scientific discipline in the early 19th century, and it had a significance which went far beyond the subject itself.

The controversy between Neptunists and Plutonists was also a debate about worldviews: Additionally, geological studies allowed for an enormous expansion of the assumed timespan of human history. Soil science, the study of the top layer of the earth, developed as a science over a century later, and — just like geology — it was characterized by a high degree of internationalization.

This is reflected in the fact that an international scientific association for soil science was founded before a corresponding German association, and the former provided the impetus for the founding of the latter. The Deutsche Bodenkundliche Gesellschaft came into existence two years later as one of more than a dozen national sections. Geology and soil science were primarily descriptive, classificatory disciplines which did not fundamentally depend on causal models.

For this reason, the fact that the theory of continental drift, which is central to the contemporary understanding of geological events, did not become generally accepted knowledge until the 20th century did not pose fundamental problems for scientific work in this area before It is necessary in this context to point out that earthquakes are of course part of the history of land, because the European perspective tends to under-appreciate this fact.

It is a paradox of environmental history that the earthquake of San Francisco of entered the collective memory of the United States , while the memory of the earthquake of Messina two years earlier, which claimed a far greater number of casualties, remained confined to the region.

Among the characteristics of land, fertility has always been of particular importance. Up to the present, the capacity to produce and sustain plants is not understood in all aspects because it involves a complex collaboration of chemical, physical and biological processes. To start with, the chemical basis of soil fertility became the object of scientific research, with the Germans Carl Sprengel — and Justus von Liebig — [ ] playing a key role which gained international recognition. The agricultural chemistry which they established provided the scientific basis for the use of fertilizers, which has boomed since the midth century.

Research into the physical conditions required for fertility proceeded more slowly. They were not studied intensively until the disciplines of soil physics and colloid chemistry emerged in the 20th century. However, researching the biological — and in particular the microbiological — bases of soil fertility proved most problematic because the variety of bacteria species involved is bewildering. Soil is often described as "a rainforest in miniature" because a spoonful of fertile soil is comparable to the Amazon Basin from the perspective of the variety of species.

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