There is just not Enough Planet to Own: On the Need for Scarcity-Oriented Concepts of Property

Understood as sets of rules governing the use of objects considered valuable, concepts of property commonly respond to pressing social questions about why and how to obtain such control over these objects. However, objects that are considered valuable or that people want or have wanted to possess feature properties that make them very different from one another. Still, this is not always reflected in the way property is conceptualised in relation to them. This point becomes especially significant when we consider that these objects may be natural resources whose capacity to sustain over time while satisfying human needs is increasingly threatened by the way in which their use is governed. In this chapter, I propose a model of property conceptualisation based on what I consider to be the salient properties of natural resources. I argue that, in most cases, salient properties of a given resource consist of relational properties between the resource and the would-be resource holder, i.e., they consist of what I take to be physical and normative properties of the resource. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to suggest a ‘greentopian’ way of conceptualising property that contemplates the relational nature of the resources that humans have reason to possess and to approach issues related to their conservation from a philosophical and historical perspective.