♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein, and today I'm gonna be in conversation with Simon Winchester, who's the author of Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

And we are coming to you from the Robert Smith Auditorium at the New York Historical Society.

Thank you very much for being here today.

WINCHESTER: It's a delight, thank you.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, the Earth itself, if you listen to scientists, is roughly five billion years old, or so?

WINCHESTER: Just about 4.6, yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So, when the Earth was formed, there wasn't, uh, the continents that we now know, right?

It was different kinda shape.

Wha, when did land actually come to the Earth?

WINCHESTER: Well, it was all land, it was all solid, and it's, the question really should be the other way around, when did the water start emerging?

Basically land came first, water came next.

But land, there were these gigantic, what we call supercontinents now, the first one called Rodinia, and then there was Ur, and then there was all of a great litany of names of these things as they formed and then broke up, and re-formed.

And the big sort of development with some, the whole business of Pangaea, which was, what, 450 million years ago, that then broke up into what we now have today.

RUBENSTEIN: When did, uh, people realize that the Earth was really not flat?

Was that uh, a long time ago, or... WINCHESTER: Well, yes, I mean, the... (laughs) the Greeks, I mean, the Greeks, so many things they did, Eratosthenes, after all, did this experiment of seeing the angle at which the sun shone at midday down a well in Alexandria, and another well in Aswan, a, also at midday on a different day, and found that there was an angular difference of about seven degrees between the two, and he realized consequently that the Earth was a great globe.

And he'd ma, measured with extraordinary accuracy, actually, how big the planet was.

RUBENSTEIN: So when did the concept arise that humans could actually own part of the Earth?

I mean, ownership?

WINCHESTER: Ah, yes.

Well, that's sort of central to all of this, it's, the idea of ownership goes back to idea of farming.

I mean, winning product from, from the land.

And the realization, perhaps, and I use as an example.

They, you know, one chap might be growing his wheat, learning how to do it, I mean, digging holes with a fire-hardened stick, and then sprinkling seeds and crops emerge, and you realize that if you make enough of them, you can actually harvest them and make something out of these.

If his land is more fertile, produces more crops than the land belonging, or at least the land being farmed by a chap on a hill nearby, he will say, "Uh, don't touch my land.

This is, this is better land.

I'm going to own it, this is mine."

But on a macro scale, when countries had monarchs and so forth, it was then, there was a sort of intellectual approach rather than approach based on greed and need, which was that God must own the land, and the representative of God on Earth would be the titular owner of the l, ever, all the land you can see.

And the titular owner, let us say, in my country, in England, would be what was then the representative of God on Earth, which was the King or the Queen of England.

And indeed, that still obtains today, that in England, all the land in England is still owned, deep, deep, deep down, if you go through all the titles, it belongs to the Queen.

And we, mortals who think we own it, but we own it in what is called fee simple, which means that we own it, we can transfer it, we can sell it, we can buy it and do all the things that you think you can do when you own a car or any other thing, but in fact deep down, it actually belongs to the Queen.

So if you don't pay your taxes on it, she takes it back.

RUBENSTEIN: So, is there evidence that thousands of years ago, uh, the concept arose that people in ancient, uh, societies own land, and there was some deed or some other, uh, written manner of confirming that somebody owned land?

Or how did people actually prove that they own the land?

WINCHESTER: Well, uh, yes i, indeed they, they had deeds.

I mean, you, you see deeds in, uh, Oxford, for instance.

Going back to the 11th and 12th century.

In this country, obviously not so old, but when I was doing research on, um, on Henry Hudson's, uh, expedition, he of course working for the Dutch in 1604, came up the Hudson and, um, started dealing with the local natives who, the Lenape down here, or Mohican, and then Iroquois further up north, and they would, um, be encouraged to part with their land, which they had never considered that they owned, but they superintended or lived there or hunted there or whatever, and they would, the, Hudson's people, would in Dutch write documents.

And you would see that the Mohican or whoever would sign them, never having signed anything in their lives before, with little pictures of deer, or little Xs, or whatever.

Those were used legally now as the earliest deeds of documents in, let's say, Duchess County, New York.

RUBENSTEIN: When did mankind say, "Well, we oughta have some maps so we actually know what is what and where is where."

When did maps actually start?

WINCHESTER: Well, I supposed the oldest map of the planet anywhere is Ptolemy, and he goes back once again to classical Greek times, classical Roman times.

So there were maps of increasing sophistication as people started, uh, wandering about.

I mean, particularly the Mediterranean is pretty well-mapped from, um, from 800, 900 BC, I mean, a long time ago.

RUBENSTEIN: How were the early maps done?

Did people kind of use apocryphal stories, somebody said, "Well, this, there's a mountain here," or did people actually go out and look at the mountain?

WINCHESTER: No, th, they went there.

The, they went, there were surveyors way back using plane tables and, uh, devices that, you know, measured the angle of the sun, and height of trees, the height of mountains, and so forth.

It's been going on for a long time.

Ever since Euclid, really.

RUBENSTEIN: When did people say, "We want to know, uh, what the shape is of the Earth, and, and we're gonna have longitude and latitude," where'd that idea come from?

WINCHESTER: Once again, the Greeks.

Um, yes, I mean, the, okay, if you're at sea, you can't see any land, you have no reference points and things, to, to, t, latitude is relatively simple to determine, because of the angle of the sun at noon, I mean, we know where the sun is, over the tropics at noon on a certain date.

So we can always determine the latitude.

But the longitude requires you to know with extraordinary precision what time it is on the ship.

And that required, if you remember the book, John Harrison making a chronometer, which would keep time accurately no matter the storms and the changing temperatures and so forth on the ship.

So we knew latitude from way back, longitude properly from the middle of the 18th century.

RUBENSTEIN: The circumference of the Earth, when was that, actually, um, plotted, and when did people guess what the circumference was, and when did they actually learn what the circumference was?

WINCHESTER: Well, uh, th, the guess was not so much a guess, it was a, it was, uh, it was calculated by Eratosthenes.

And he got it at, oh, I can't remember the figure, but I'm going to hazard a guess, at 39,000 kilometers, which is about, I think NASA now it's 40,036 kilometers.

So considering all he was doing was measuring with a stick and a plum bob in Ancient Egypt, when it was run by the Greeks, um, 3000 years ago, was pretty good going.

RUBENSTEIN: Now was, when did the idea start, "We should map the entire world."

Where did that idea come from, and how long did that take?

WINCHESTER: Basically the end of the, um, 19th century, there was a, um, a conference in Switzerland, I think.

And, um, a German or German-Swiss, uh, mapmaker said ... Because the problem was, with all these entities, all these countries, these nations constantly are battling with one another, there was no, um, uniformity to maps.

He said, "Let's make a map of the entire planet.

Let's map it at a universal scale of one to a million.

Let's do it all in meters, let's do it all in the same colors, the same typography, all in English, and make the projection of these maps such that if you stuck them all together with tape, they would form a globe one millionth the size of the planet," which is about the size of a house.

And, um, everyone thought, "Terrific idea."

The International Geographical Congress said, "We'll do this."

And money was raised to do it, and it began in about 1902.

And these sheets, they're called the IMW sheets of one to one million started coming off the presses.

But they, very cleverly they arranged that no country should map itself.

So the Germans should map, let's say, Brazil, and the Americans would map southern China, so that there was a sort of cartographic neutrality toward this.

It takes 850 maps to map the land surface of the entire planet, about 2000 to do the whole, the whole surface, but most of that would be blue, of course.

And the maps started coming, and then the s... First World War put an end to it.

First World War ended in the 1920s, a big effort, then the Second World War came.

By the end of the 1960s, there were about 600 had been completed, and then by the end of the 1980s, the pace was slowing down.

And by about 1985, I think it was, there were about, of the 850, about 800 had been produced.

And it was now under the supervision of the United Nations, and they'd lost the will to do it.

And there was a conference in Bangkok saying, "Well, it was a nice effort, it's taken us 100 years, we've nearly done it all, but let's abandon it."

RUBENSTEIN: When did the concept arise of countries having boundaries between them, and were the boundaries supposed to be rivers or mountains or natural demarcations, or did politicians come along and say, "Let's make this the demarcation line?"

WINCHESTER: Well, I mean, there, there hangs many tales.

I mean, the oldest border in Europe is the border between Andorra and Spain, I think, which was about 1200 or so, and the only border that has remained where it is.

But the one that fascinated me, and sort of horrified me, in a way, was the border created between India and Pakistan.

And that was in 1947, when we the British decided, you know, "We've got to stop running this place," and Lord Mountbatten, um, said, because despite, you know, people like Gandhi saying, "India must be one country."

Um, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was the Muslim League president said, uh, "No, we've got to have Pakistan, and Muslims have to go to Pakistan."

So they created, as you well know, two wings, one on the east of the country, dividing Bengal into what is now Bangladesh, but was then East Pakistan, and dividing the Punjab into West Pakistan.

And, uh, but, who, where's the border going to be?

There was no border.

So Mountbatten rang up this blameless civil servant in London who he knew vaguely called Sir Cyril Radcliffe, very nice Welshman, who had never been to India, never been east of Paris, in fact, and said "I've got a job for you to do, and you have about six weeks to do it.

I want you to fly over here and divide part of my country, India, i, in, create a new country, Pakistan."

And so, um, Radcliffe came over, um, with a map, most of them were very out of date maps, demographic maps showing the Punjab in tiny little villages, and this one's mostly Muslim, this one's mostly Hindu.

And he went up into the hills, he manfully plowed through this and drew 1700 mile-long border between the, and created Pakistan, and then did the same through Bengal for, um, East Pakistan.

And then left, and said, "Okay, Mountbatten, there are your two countries."

And he left, and of course as you well know, the borders were promulgated three days after partition, which was on the 15th of August 1947.

So the people were told, "Okay, your country's yours now, but the Muslims, that's your bit-" "and that's your bit in the east."

And there was mayhem, and there were, they say two million people died as a result.

Cyril Radcliffe was so appalled, "This bloody line," he called it, with what he had created, that he burned all his notes and never spoke of the subject again, and returned the fee, it was a very modest fee that he got for it, and never spoke of it again, and died a broken man.

RUBENSTEIN: It is said that, uh, Winston Churchill helped to divide the, uh, Middle East countries at some point, or other British officials, is that true?

And it's just done by, uh, looking at maps and figuring out, "This would be a good line for Jordan, or this would be a good line for... WINCHESTER: I mean, the classic one is, um, is the division of Korea, when the, who is it now, the, the chief of the Army staff in, in America, they were listening to the broadcast of, um, from the Emperor of Japan, they could just hear it over, over the short-wave radio saying the war is over, um, because they were terrified that the Russians were coming in, the Americans.

So, um, Dean Rusk and, uh, another chap were colonels sitting in the outer office, and they said, "We've got to tell the, the chief of staff that, um, we've got to stop the Russians coming southwards through the Korean Peninsula," 'cause that is the big fear, "So we got to draw a line."

And so they found a National Geographic map, you know, they used to come with these f, inserting maps into copies of, uh, the geographic magazine, and they pinned it up on the wall and drew a china-graph line along the 38th parallel, and tha, the Russians accepted it, and two countries were created.

RUBENSTEIN: When did the idea arise that, uh, we should conserve certain land, we shouldn't just use land for agriculture or development, we should actually have parks?

WINCHESTER: Well, the first sort of attempt to put under federal control land to preserve it for the greater good of humankind, American humankind, that was Yosemite, and that was, uh, Lincoln.

And, um, of course a lot of, uh, the environmentalists were pleased by that, but the people that were not pleased, uh, were the, I think it was the Miwok Indians who were living there.

And, um, they were essentially turfed out.

And so this is land to be preserved from the depredations of humankind, no matter whether they're visiting tourists from New Jersey or whether they're from, people who've lived there for thousands of years.

And so there's a lot of controversy about whether the national parks, and obviously Yosemite was a precursor to the park system, were a good thing or a bad thing, whether they were the theft of land from the natural owners, who were, after all, the Native Americans.

RUBENSTEIN: So land is always being created on the Earth through volcanoes, I suppose... WINCHESTER: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Spewing up, uh, magma which becomes, uh, land.

But then because of climate change, land is being degraded or eliminated.

So which way is, is, we're getting more land, are we getting less land because of all these factors?

WINCHESTER: We're getting less land.

Becau, I mean, okay, just to take America as a classic example.

I mean, the, the west coast is, is growing insofar as there's a subduction zone, and so there are volcanoes spewing out all sorts of stuff, which is adding or changing the, the, the geological and com, topographical aspect of the west.

But on the east, it's sinking and it's being gnawed away by the sea much more rapidly.

So there's no new real estate being created on the east, so we're losing land.

Not much, I think we've lost 13,000 acres in the last decade, which is not much.

But it s, it inevitably is happening, because the sea level is rising, you know, that thing about rising tides float all boats.

Well, rising tides drown all continents, and that is what's happening at the moment.

RUBENSTEIN: And do you see a lot of, uh, countries creating land out of whole cloth?

China's creating some islands, is that a very common technique, or do you think that will proliferate?

WINCHESTER: Well, I think it will, and I find this fascinating, that the Dutch in the 1920s decided that they would create an enormous amount of brand new land, create indeed a whole province.

It's called Flevoland, and it exists to the east of Amsterdam.

And the way they did it is you've got this enormous body of water in the middle of the Netherlands, open to the North Sea.

So first of all, you build a huge damn, and that took many, many years.

So then you take about a million acres at the southern end of it and draw a rectangle in the water.

And decide you're going to turn that into land.

So you build a series of sort of cofferdams around it, and put in gigantic pumps which run night and day for 15 years, and pump all the water out so very, very slowly, what was water, what had been sea, it is now freshwater, you see mud arising.

But then you bring airplanes over, loaded with grass seed.

First of all, big reeds and they lay seeds from the air, and you see the reeds growing.

And you set fire to them, by dropping gasoline on them, and they turn into ash.

And then you plant more.

And gradually you get layer of ash about a foot thick, and then you th, put grass on top of that.

And slowly, you produce soil.

And then in the 1980s, soil was strong enough that you could actually drive vehicles onto it, so you put on roads and railways and you turn it into what it is now, which is probably, it makes Nebraska look topographically fascinating, it is so flat...

So boring.

But it is part, now, an ineluctable part of the Netherlands.

It's, it's got its own capital, Lelystad, it's got schools, farms, and all the rest of it.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the, the biggest owners of land on the face of the earth are governments, I assume, governments own the most land.

WINCHESTER: Yes, the governments, and in England, the church, the Queen, the church.

RUBENSTEIN: But who are the biggest individual landowners, let's say, in the United States or around the world?

WINCHESTER: Well, the biggest in the world is an Australian lady called Gina Reinhardt, and she owns, I think it's about 32 million acres, which is about the size of England.

And it's dotted around Australia, mainly, um, land from which you can win iron ore.

In the United States, the two biggest landowners are, um, Ted Turner, of, um, CNN, and, uh, John Malone, of another cable television company.

And, um, Turner owns, most of his land is in the west and southwest, so northern New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming.

Malone owns quite a chunk in, in the west, but also a lot of forest in, in Maine.

But the villains of the piece, um, are a couple, um, called the Wilkes brothers, um, who live in far west Texas.

And they are an extraordinary pair of young men, they're young, they had a fracking liquid company, so not exactly the noblest of professions, um, which was bought for, I think it was $4 billion by a, a sovereign wealth company, a foreign company, and all of a sudden these men, who had made a lot of money out of fracking had got $2 billion each in cash, and they decided that they would buy land.

And so they went on a spree, which they're still doing today, buying up lots and lots of land, beautiful forest land in the down slope of the Rockies, so Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and crucially, cutting off public access to it.

And so forest roads are closed, and there are security cameras and big beefy men with guns keeping it away so that these two men can build resorts and that kind of thing.

RUBENSTEIN: In most parts of the world, when you buy land, do you actually own the land, uh, the minerals or things under the land, or you just own the surface of the land?

WINCHESTER: No, you do, unless of course you're a Native American.

I mean, the ruination of Native American land holdings were, among other things, they had no access to the minerals underneath the land that they so miserably live on now in these quote reservations, when we've got to remember that these are the original owners, the original inhabitants, and yet so many of their rights have been taken away.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, let's talk about this country.

When this country was, uh, let's say, quote, discovered by Europeans... WINCHESTER: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, who was living here then?

WINCHESTER: Well, a, a large number of Native peoples, of a variety of, of, of tribes... RUBENSTEIN: And did the Natives say, "Well, we own this land," or are they just kinda living on it?

WINCHESTER: No, not really.

We, we, we are tenants, and they didn't have words like tenancy, but the people who enunciate it probably best are the Aboriginal people in Australia, who say, "We live here, and we're, been living here for 65,000 years," I mean, this is the oldest people on this planet, in the Aus, Australian, middle of Australia.

"But we don't think we own it.

I mean, you can no more own this land than you can own the air or the wind or the sea.

We live on it.

We take our sustenance from it.

It is, it is our mother, if you like.

We don't own our mother, she doesn't own us, but we take care of her."

RUBENSTEIN: Well, when the settlers came over, the King of England or other, uh, royal figures would say to the people coming over, "You own this land, we're gonna give you this land, or I'm gonna give you this land," what right did the European leaders have to give land to these settlers?

WINCHESTER: That's a very good point.

It's the, the question of, the doctrine, I should say, of what's called terra nullius.

The land is terra nullius.

It is empty, so we have an absolute right to colonize it, to take it.

RUBENSTEIN: When the British sent settlers over, um, they occupied what we now called colonies, and they went to the Natives and said, "Well, we'd like to buy this land from you," did the Natives really understand what they were selling?

Or did the people who were buying it really, um, think these... WINCHESTER: Well... RUBENSTEIN: Natives actually owned the land themselves?

WINCHESTER: I mean, the, the classic example is that speech which Chief Sealth, who was the chief of the particular tribe that lived in the far west of what is now Washington state, and that, uh, was, was req, asked to give up, to sell two million acres, um, to settlers.

And he said, "I, I don't own this.

I, I can't ...

I accept that you want to live here and build a city," which later became Seattle, but I, I understand what you want, and I can't stop you from taking it, but I don't own it, so ... Move in, but you're weird people."

And then we treated them in an extremely weird and abominable way.

But this was repeated all over this country, in a rather more sophisticated way, we like to think, in the east, but, um, and then we had all these treaties with them, and then we broke all these treaties.

RUBENSTEIN: So the main message that you wanted to convey through this book about land is what?

WINCHESTER: Well, I think I go back to Locke and the Enlightenment.

I think I believe that if you have, are lucky enough to have, or somehow can superintend or own land and grow things from it and turn it to be a productive part of this planetary surface, then you, it is neat and proper for you to enjoy some rights.

Now, whether those rights are what are called the bundle of rights, which include, you know, the right to exclude people.

I mean, in theory, I can say, "You, David, are not allowed to come on my land," and I can call the police and tell you to go away, because you're not allowed to trespass.

I wouldn't be too upset if that, those kind of rights were given to people who have modest, reasonable amounts of land, and I think people like Jefferson and so forth thought that, you know, 40 acres, tops.

To own two million, to own 32 million, that seems monstrous to me.

So I think the message should be moderation in all things, that life is better if people approach the land with respect and modesty for it.

RUBENSTEIN: So in the end, you'd rather be known as an author than a landowner, is that right?

WINCHESTER: Oh, good gracious, I'm ashamed to be a landowner.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

WINCHESTER: I want, when I die, it all to be owned by everyone.

RUBENSTEIN: I'm not sure I share that view, but okay, uh.

(laughs) I wanna thank you for a very interesting conversation.

WINCHESTER: Thank you, David, very much.

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