Why do humans kill for land they can never own?
We need to understand war as an ecological issue.
In the Litchfield Hills of northwest Connecticut, part of the Appalachians, you can’t help but notice the geology. It’s everywhere. No wonder Ralph Waldo Emerson—a man who knew a thing or two about the challenges of gardening in New England—is alleged to have claimed that “human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.” Millions of years ago, continental collisions caused an uplift that created towering mountains, perhaps once as high as the Rockies. Then came an Ice Age. And later, about 12,000 years ago, melting glaciers left lakes and scattered rocks in their wake, which are a distinctive feature of the landscape today.
Faced with the immensity of this prehistory you begin to understand just how wrong Robert Frost got it: the land was never ours. The fenced plots and stone walls that characterize this part of New England are markers of superficial time. The cabin-sized boulder in the backyard of the house I’m staying—a so-called “erratic” deposited there by a retreating glacier—is probably several hundred million years old.
And yet 5,500 miles away in the Middle East, thousands of lives are lost and a bitter struggle wages over ownership of land. Terrorists slaughter civilians for it and in retaliation a thin strip of territory 25 miles long and some six miles wide is repeatedly bombed, killing thousands.
Why do humans have such a deep attachment to place that they’re willing to kill and die for it, even when deep history tells us that the earth can never be owned?
“Mid the uneasy wanderings of Paleolithic man,” wrote the historian Lewis Mumford, “the dead were the first to have a permanent dwelling: a cavern, a mound marked by a cairn, a collective barrow.” The first home was a burial place. “The city of the dead,” Mumford suggests, “antedates the city of the living.” Perhaps this is it. Confronted by our insignificance in the grand scheme of things, we have an in-built urge to tether ourselves to earth. The dead are the tent poles that keep us from flying into nowhere.
Cemeteries are another striking feature of this corner of Connecticut, parts of which weren’t formally settled by colonists until the eighteenth century. In the middle of the countryside, you’re likely to stumble across small walled burial plots with perhaps one or two dozen headstones. Are these the first claims by Europeans to ownership of the land, climbing holds bolted onto the New World’s vertiginous rock face?
Burial grounds like these don’t just give meaning to death, they’re also integral to collective memory, and a means of what you might call “place making.” So perhaps, in light of this, we should understand the bloodshed spilled over territory not as something incidental to territorial claims, but as part and parcel of those claims. The land isn’t ours to die for, but rather it’s the other way around: we die to make the land ours.
In The Unsettling of America (1977), Wendell Berry argues that when we evoke the concept of “the environment” we inevitably simplify our understanding of country, homeland, and dwelling place. “Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us,” he writes, “we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land.”
Hold on to that image, if you can, of land and bodies moving through each other. Aren’t territorial wars a grim parody of the natural reciprocity that Berry describes? The bodies of those who die for a land pass into it, but the land doesn’t pass into them. What is lost in the “die-for-your-homeland” credo is recognition of the care and cultivation which Berry’s mutuality of body and place presupposes. To wage a war for land all too often means excluding foreign bodies from it. Just as the native American, Algonquian-speaking peoples in this part of Connecticut, whose artifacts are unearthed in surrounding fields, are routinely forgotten. By excluding this history, cultures create their mirror image in a land that has been made for exploitation; a place that exists to be mined for a people’s history regardless of what other lives and histories it may support. Which is another way of saying that war may be an ecological issue, after all.