Basically it's like this, We're Screwed (actually our kids)

[Coralie]

Native Americans and most indigenous people have tended to preserve their commons better than those who firmly believe in property rights--"It's mine and I can do whatever I want with it" regardless of long-term consequences.
What is the origin of property rights? At what point in time did those who happened to have more land or horses or sheep or whatever become the divine and true owners and could pass their property to their progeny forever?

[Doug]

What is the origin of property rights?

DOUG
There are various "social contract" theories, from Hume to Rousseau to Hobbes, and so on, regarding the theoretical basis for property rights. Historically, no one knows the true origin of property rights. The notion of property predates recorded history.

At what point in time did those who happened to have more land or horses or sheep or whatever become the divine and true owners and could pass their property to their progeny forever?

DOUG
As noted above, no one really knows. But the "right" of the king to lay hold of property is very ancient, going back to prehistoric times. No doubt part of it lay in the claim that the king had a divine right to property.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Native American cultures did not have individual property rights (just tribal/clan territories and resources - pretty much a "if you didn't make it, how can you claim it" point of view), nor did the ancient Celts - that was forced on both by WASPs. I don't think it was scandinavian, either - their deal was everything belongs to the leader/king - you could have the use of it "by grace and favor" of the king for your lifetime - or even the lifetimes of you and your direct descendants - but it ultimately came back to the king, and could be taken back anytime the king decided you'd committed an act of treason (as defined by the king). I'm thinking individual property rights of male citizens was a Greek, Roman, and Prussian combination, very elitist at first, and only expanded as the definition of citizenship expanded, which makes it definitely the "new kid on the block" - Following individual property rights for women is a lot easier, since it's a lot more recent. Single women did not own property until the 18th century. Married women did not own property until the 20th century. (& that's one of the rights the fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim, want to take away again - for all their talk of "protection" and "decency", what they mean is money and power).

[Hogeye]

Native Americans and most indigenous people have tended to preserve their commons better than those who firmly believe in property rights...

This used to be the prevalent belief, but it has been pretty much rejected in the last few decades. One popular book "Collapse" (which I'm reading) blows that "noble green savage" theory away with numerous examples. The most famous is the ecocide of the indigenous Easter Islanders. Then Jared Diamond goes into Pitcairn (&nearby) Island, the Anasazi (US southwest), the Mayas, and so on. Bottom line: ancient peoples were just as stupid as people today about the environment.

Native American cultures did not have individual property rights (just tribal/clan territories and resources - pretty much a "if you didn't make it, how can you claim it" point of view), nor did the ancient Celts...

You are mistaken on both counts. Most aboriginal societies have property rights. What used to confuse people is that many indigenous hunter-gatherers didn't have property rights in land. Now we know they generally did have property rights in tools and weapons and such. Land simply was not scarce enough (in the economic sense) to "graduate" to property status until the agricultural revolution.

Here's a paper you will no doubt find interesting, Barbara. It looks at, among others, the Yurok Indians of California, who even let people from other tribes own land. Bruce L. Benson - Enforcement of Private Property Rights in Primitive Societies: Law without Government (pdf)

The purpose of property is to solve the scarcity problem. Property has been around as long as scarcity. It's a natural human construct.

[Dardedar]

Here is a little sample of a roast of M & M by Mann. Just skim, you won't understand it:

"MM in their more recent rejected submission to Nature, instead filtered out the 'hockey stick' pattern of low-frequency variability in the North American ITRDB data through the incorrect PCA truncation described above, which censors this pattern by retaining too few Principal Components series in the data."

HOGEYE
Let me help you understand it, Darrell. Translation: Mann evades the main criticism of M&M,...

DAR
a) Why should I be confident of your translation skills?
b) How do you know he evades the main criticism of M & M, have you read this?:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121

c) Mann and other climatologists have written extensive rebuttals to M & M and those who like to go on endlessly about the hockey stick. He counts 27 smack downs so far and counting:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=199

Others:

HERE

and HERE

d) As I have shown you before, after rebutting his (usually unqualified) critics on this, he even says fine, toss the hockey stick. It's not needed. Now there is a chartiable fellow.


HOGEYE
I'll start a new thread featuring an excellent global warming debunking page offering an alternative theory to Mann's greenhouse gas hockey-stick theory.

DAR
Good. Perhaps read the link at "b" above if you still think M & M haven't been responded to.

D.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Hogeye - re: your response to Coralie's comment on indigenous peoples preserving their commons - we don't know enough about what happened at Easter Island - for all hypotheses to the contrary - to say exactly what happened there, but there is definite evidence that the Anasazi left because of climate change making the area untenable for large (ish) numbers of people. There is some evidence of the same for the Mayan culture (that and war). A number of south seas islands (such as Pitcairn) were fine until European ships stopped by - sometimes just to get water and food - and introduced rats (sometimes dogs and pigs, as well) which trashed the island ecosystem. The problem of invasive species is not new.

As to your response to my comment on property rights - since we had been talking about commons, that is what I was dealing with - no "real" property in these cultures - you could not own land or water, any more than you could own air (and scuba tanks don't count, since what you are paying for is actually the tank and the compressor, or use thereof, to fill it). Ownership was restricted to anything you could carry/haul around with you (i.e., Plaines Indian tepees belonged to the women who moved them from site to site, as did "gatherer" tools, food prep and storage tools, etc. Men owned their weapons and hunting tools.)

[Hogeye]

Here's where Mann's cronies lie through their teeth in their "analysis" in your link b:

2) What is the point of contention in MM05?

MM05 contend that the particular PC convention used in MBH98 in dealing with the N. American tree rings selects for the 'hockey stick' shape and that the final reconstruction result is simply an artifact of this convention. - Dummies guide from Mann's web site

Straw man - they totally avoid the main criticism (that the North Amercan tree ring data is garbage, and has nothing to do with temperature) and instead look at a minor afterthought. Then pretend they answered the main objection. Very bad "science," but that's what you get when you replace objectivity with movie-star hero-worship.

Darrel, it's a lot simpler than you make it out to be.

1) There are known and verified global climate phenomena called the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) and the LIA (Little Ice Age).
2) Mann's model does not show these two climate phenomena.
Therefore, there is something seriously wrong with his model.

Now, I know you believe Mann's claim that the MWP and LIA were regional rather than global, but the evidence shows that both occured at various places on earth, and was in fact a global phenomena, from Kenya to China to Tazmania to Peru.

[Hogeye]

There is definite evidence that the Anasazi left because of climate change making the area untenable for large (ish) numbers of people. There is some evidence of the same for the Mayan culture (that and war).

You are mistaken on both counts. The Anasazi ecocide was mainly due to human-caused environmental changes - deforestation and unsustainable irrigation practices. It is true that there were periodic droughts which aggravated the problem (especially since they had no written language and the droughts generally occurred at longer than one generation intervals) but since this is the normal climate for the southwest, this can't properly be construed as climate change. The evidence for human-caused environmental degradation is found in the archeological evidence - packrat middens, garbage mounds, etc. For details, read Collapse by Diamond. Similarly, the Mayas committed ecocide with deforestation and soil destruction.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The climate of the Southwest has not always been as dry as it is now - would have to have been wetter or the Anasazi wouldn't have settled there in the first place - while there is evidence of deforestation, there is little physical evidence one way or the other as to whether or not it was a "manmade" problem (deforestation is also a result of climate change, as well as a cause of it - earth's cycles are very interdependent). When it comes to both cultures you've got a "which came first" situation - did they cause the local climate change, or just react to it. Considering what we know of their culture, it is exceedingly unlikely that they would have wantonly destroyed the forest. The only reason we are is to haul the wood to other locations for lumber and paper products - the indigenous peoples wouldn't have use for that much wood (cutting at an unsustainable rate), nor the technology for shipping it to the coastal groups. So you are possiting a people who destroyed the forest for the heck of it. I don't think that one's tenable.

[Dardedar]

Darrel, it's a lot simpler than you make it out to be.

1) There are known and verified global climate phenomena called the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) and the LIA (Little Ice Age).

DAR
If you have a reputable qualified source backing up this claim I would like to see it.

2) Mann's model does not show these two climate phenomena.
Therefore, there is something seriously wrong with his model.

DAR
Since Mann's model deals with global phenomena, this would not be surprising. But even still, I don't think you have this right. If you consider the error bars of Mann's famous chart, it does show warming at this time.

Now, I know you believe Mann's claim that the MWP and LIA were regional rather than global, but the evidence shows that both occured at various places on earth, and was in fact a global phenomena, from Kenya to China to Tazmania to Peru.

DAR
This undated article from a non-expert (now dead) who was interested in this subject at some hobbyist level doesn't rise to the level of responding to the established peer-reviewed science on this topic. You need a better source.

And you might consider reading a more expert consideration of the matter here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=171

And here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=153

More on this later, I have to run off to work now.

D.
--------------------------
From Scientific American:
“More recently, Mann battled back in a 2004 corrigendum in the journal Nature, in which he clarified the presentation of his data. He has also shown how errors on the part of his attackers led to their specific results. For instance, skeptics often cite the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming Period as pieces of evidence not reflected in the hockey stick, yet these extremes are examples of regional, not global, phenomena. "From an intellectual point of view, these contrarians are pathetic, because there's no scientific validity to their arguments whatsoever," Mann says. "But they're very skilled at deducing what sorts of disingenuous arguments and untruths are likely to be believable to the public that doesn't know better."

[Hogeye]

The climate of the Southwest has not always been as dry as it is now - would have to have been wetter or the Anasazi wouldn't have settled there in the first place...

No; in the early days there were simply fewer people to support. Furthermore, drought can be caused and/or aggravated by humans. I.e. As people deforest, the rain is no longer held by tree roots and released slowly; instead it all flows away quickly. This is an example of human-caused climate change.

While there is evidence of deforestation, there is little physical evidence one way or the other as to whether or not it was a "manmade" problem.

On the contrary, there is ample evidence from packrat middens and trees used in construction.

When Native American farmers moved into the Chaco Canyon area around A.D. 600, they initially lived in underground pit houses, as did other contemporary Native Americans in the Southwest. Around A.D. 700 the Chaco Anasazi, out of contact with Native American societies building structures of stone a thousand miles to the south in Mexico, independently invented techniques of stone construction and eventually adopted rubble cores with veneers of cut stone facing (Plate 11). Initially, those structures were only one story high, but around A.D. 920 what eventually became the largest Chacoan site of Pueblo Bonito went up to two stories, then over the next two centuries rose to five or six stories with 600 rooms whose roof supports were logs up to 16 feet long and weighing up to 700 pounds.

Why, out of all the Anasazi sites, was it at Chaco Canyon that construction techniques and political and societal complexity reached their apogee? Likely reasons are some environmental advantages of Chaco Canyon, which initially represented a favorable environmental oasis within northwestern New Mexico. The narrow canyon caught rain runoff from many side-channels and a large upland area, which resulted in high alluvial ground- water levels permitting farming independent of local rainfall in some areas, and also high rates of soil renewal from the runoff. The large habitable area in the canyon and within 50 miles of it could support a relatively high population for such a dry environment. The Chaco region has a high diver- sity of useful wild plant and animal species, and a relatively low elevation that provides a long growing season for crops. At first, nearby pinyon and juniper woodlands provided the construction logs and firewood. The earliest roof beams identified by their tree rings, and still well preserved in the Southwest's dry climate, are of locally available pinyon pines, and firewood remains in early hearths are of locally available pinyon and juniper. Anasazi diets depended heavily on growing corn, plus some squash and beans, but early archaeological levels also show much consumption of wild plants such as pinyon nuts (75% protein), and much hunting of deer.

All those natural advantages of Chaco Canyon were balanced by two major disadvantages resulting from the Southwest's environmental fragility. One involved problems of water management; Initially, rain runoff would have been as a broad sheet over the flat canyon bottom, permitting flood- plain agriculture watered both by the runoff and by the high alluvial groundwater table. When the Anasazi began diverting water into channels for irrigation, the concentration of water runoff in the channels and the clearing of vegetation for agriculture, combined with natural processes, resulted around A.D. 900 in the cutting of deep arroyos in which the water level was below field levels, thereby making irrigation agriculture and also agriculture based on groundwater impossible until the arroyos filled up again. Such arroyo-cutting can develop surprisingly suddenly. For example, at the Arizona city of Tucson in the late 1880s, American settlers excavated a so-called intercept ditch to intercept the shallow groundwater table and divert its water downstream onto the floodplain. Unfortunately, floods from heavy rains in the summer of 1890 cut into the head of that ditch, starting an arroyo that within a mere three days extended itself for a distance of six mdes upstream, leaving an incised and agriculturally useless flood-plain near Tucson. ...

The other major environmental problem besides water management involved deforestation, as revealed by the method of packrat midden analysis. .For those of you who (like me until some years ago) have never seen packrats, don't know what their middens are, and can't possibly imagine their relevance to Anasazi prehistory, here is a quick crash course in midden analysis. ...

In the Chaco Canyon area Julio went on to collect and radiocarbon-date 50 middens, whose dates turned out to encompass the entire period of the rise and fall of Anasazi civilization, from A.D. 600 to 1200. In this way Julio was able to reconstruct vegetational changes in Chaco Canyon throughout the history of Anasazi occupation. Those midden studies identified deforestation as the other one (besides water management) of the two major environmental problems caused by the growing population that had developed in Chaco Canyon by around A.D. 1000. Middens before that date still incorporated pinyon pine and juniper needles, like the first midden that Julio had analyzed, and like the midden that he showed me. Hence Chaco Anasazi settlements were initially constructed in a pinyon/juniper woodland unlike the present treeless landscape but convenient for obtaining firewood and construction timber nearby. However, middens dated after A.D. 1000 lacked pinyon and juniper, showing that the woodland had then become completely destroyed and the site had achieved its present treeless appearance. The reason why Chaco Canyon became deforested so quickly is the same as the reason that I discussed in Chapter 2 to explain why Easter Island and other dry Pacific islands settled by people were more likely to end up deforested than were wet islands: in a dry climate, the rate of tree regrowth on logged land may be too slow to keep up with the rate of logging.

The loss of the woodland not only eliminated pinyon nuts as a local food supply but also forced Chaco residents to find a different timber source for their construction needs, as shown by the complete disappearance of pinyon beams from Chaco architecture. Chacoans coped by going far afield to forests of ponderosa pine, spruce, and fir trees, growing in mountains up to 50 miles away at elevations several thousand feet higher than Chaco Canyon. With no draft animals available, about 200,000 logs weighing each up to 700 pounds were carried down the mountains and over that distance to Chaco Canyon by human muscle power alone.

A recent study by Julio's student Nathan English, working in collaboration with Julio, Jeff Dean, and Jay Quade, identified more exactly where the big spruce and fir logs came from. There are three potential sources of them In the Chaco area, growing at high elevations on three mountain ranges nearly equidistant from the canyon: the Chuska, San Mateo, and San Pedro Mountains...

The final blow for the Chacoans was a drought that tree rings show to have begun around A.D. 1130. There had been similar droughts previously around A.D. 1090 and 1040, but the difference this time was that Chaco Canyon now held more people, more dependent on outlying settlements, and with no land left unoccupied. A drought would have caused the groundwater tableto drop below the level where it could be tapped by plant roots nd could support agriculture; a drought would also make rainfall, supported dryland agriculture and irrigation agriculture impossible. A drought that lasted more than three years would have been fatal, because the modern Puebloans cn store corn for only two or three years, after which it is too rotton or infested to eat. - Jared Diamond, "Collapse" chapter 4 'The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors

The only reason we are is to haul the wood to other locations for lumber and paper products - the indigenous peoples wouldn't have use for that much wood.

As you see above, you are mistaken here. Indigenous people use wood for construction and fuel. And it's not just indigenous people: Even today in Haiti, the main cause of deforestation is not lumber or paper products, but the peasants' use of charcoal.

This is not to say that climate change wasn't a factor. Diamond gives both as factors, with "human environmental impact and climate change intersecting."

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Your source only shows that pinons disappeared - not that they were essentially clearcut by the indigenous people. A rise in winter temperature of only a few degrees could do that, because the bark beetle eggs wouldn't be winter killed, and the larva would girtle the trees. That's a situation currently killing pine forests from New Mexico to Canada. Once you have a forest of dead trees, one good forest fire (the like of which we have been having regularly over the last decade) would take out the local forest - especially since they didn't have modern firefighting equipment. Your midden indicates a use, but doesn't indicate an overuse, of forest. Your source also confirms what I said about that area having a wetter climate when those folks settled there. The years-long drought just prior to the evacuation of the site is also consistent with climate change (and with bark beetle infestation and forest fires). I imagine the ancient peoples didn't leave immediately, with established housing of that nature, they would have tried to hang on - and just because modern Puebloans can only store corn for 2 or 3 years doesn't mean the Chacoans couldn't do better - they have a different type of corn for one thing, for another quite a number of food production and storage techniques have been lost to The People since white folks came - but ultimately, without water, no location no matter how otherwise desirable, is viable.

As to the Haitians - the land was clearcut by international timber companies first, and the poor indigenous peoples pushed onto marginal lands - that combination means fuel needs being met traditionally will not only prevent the deforested area from recovering, but will encroach on whatever forest is left. If the timber companies had not taken their bite, indigenous peoples' needs would not have led to deforestation. (That it has is why Heifer International distributes methane-generator fuel stoves in societies where they have livestock "partners", as well as providing seeds/seedlings for reforestation.) We are talking different situations from the Anasazi. It requires a merchantile reason for removing enough trees to cause deforestation - simple living needs won't do it, because water is the determining factor - if there's enough water for X number of people, there's enough vegetation to support them.

Once you get into merchanting societies, you have a whole different ballgame. Most of the Mediterranean Islands were once heavily forested, and there is written record of how & why they became barren. The Greeks cut the trees to build both war and merchant ships, and took the rest for "fine" furnishing for the wealthy (this was after they "defeated" the indigenous peoples and drove them off island). Once the trees were gone, so was the topsoil - and the islands are largely barren still.

Now if you want an example of indigenous Amernican peoples who deliberate burned forests, look to the Southeast. They deliberately fired (controllable) sections of the southern forests as the forests were progressing from pine to oak-hickory stands. They preferred the food sources of a pine forest and apparently pine wood for tools (understandable - have you ever tried working well-aged oak?) and so interrupted the natural succession. However, the Southeast is a lot wetter than the Southwest (SE's drier period was about 6,000 years ago) and they were only burning out the hardwoods and underbrush to maintain the pine stands - again, a sustainable situation.