The earth is the LORD'S

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"He owns the cattle on a thousand hills . . .."


The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters. (Psalm 24: 1 & 2, NIV)



Psalm 24 is a song in praise of the only, one true God of the Hebrew people. If the earth is the LORD'S, then none of it can be claimed by any of the phony gods of their idolatrous neighbours.
Ergo, then there is only one God. Read in a 21st Century context, it can give pause to reconsider how we divide that same earth into pieces and patches and declare and claim ownership of its parts. If the earth truly is the LORD'S, then people can individually only borrow, lease, the land that they occupy. “The earth is the LORD'S,” after all, is an expression of ownership, isn't it?

Land. I grew up on a farm; the farm was comprised of 800 acres or so of what we called “land.” We grew food on that land and it made us a living. No one else could grow food on that land; we owned that land. Legally binding documents in a land titles office declared our exclusive ownership in fee simple and ensured that this land was our exclusive possession in the same way that we owned our '54 Ford and our butter churn; we could keep all or sell some or all at will.

Land appears everywhere: island, homeland, Ireland, Iceland, land a plane, highland, lowlands, indigenous lands, arable land, wasteland, landowner. The most astute investment in our time is apparently in agricultural land. We don't talk about land when we're referring to the entire surface of planet earth; usually land applies only when we divide and apportion the earth's surface and attach conditions to the right to inhabit, to use a given portion. Walls, fences, barriers or natural features define the margins of lands, as in “good fences make good neighbours” and the US president's, “securing the Southern border, preferably with an impenetrable wall.”

Somewhere between the right to roam freely across the planet's surface and being trapped between guns, bombs and a barrier proclaiming “Canadian/American/Hungarian land: KEEP OUT,” an understanding about land in the light of human rights and justice ought to be found, at least if viable life on this planet is to remain a possibility. Currently, the right to exclusive land sovereignty trumps even the rights to health, security of the person, food and shelter . . . and life itself.

Human sustenance depends entirely on the interplay of earth (land and sea), atmosphere and sun. The ability to achieve a sustainable balance between exploitation and renewal of the earth's ability to supply life-needs is in doubt, partly because of overpopulation and partly because economic growth—and not human welfare—has become the standard by which success or failure are measured. The owning of land, whether individually or corporately, plays to an unsustainable future, particularly as more and more land falls into fewer and fewer hands. Increasing populations, migrations have always made of sustainability a moving target; climate change is going to move that target faster and farther than we can now imagine, I daresay.

I look back into my own history and that of my ethnic, Mennonite heritage to try to understand what it is in my past that has formed my relationship to land. Predominantly Agrarian through the 18th & 19th Centuries, the possession of land was critical to survival by East European Mennonites. For my family, opportunity to own land in Canada was a major motivator in their immigration in the 1890s. For those that hung on in a Ukraine existing under the Russian thumb, the confiscation and collectivization of land under Stalin marked the end of a way of life, a reduction to penury and destitution.

I have never personally owned land except for minuscule plots large enough to accommodate a home. Living in a condo renders land ownership even more of an outdated concept for me. Meanwhile, though, all food-producing land on this earth falls under someone's purview, whether that someone is an individual, the state or a corporation. Since the land and the seas are the creator's gift for animal and human sustenance, the ownership, the control over how bits of the earth are seen to be “The LORD'S,” (i.e. for the common good) is going to be critical to a future, a future complicated by climate change particularly.


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