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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>the species was “abundant and widespread,” with between 4.3 million to 9.8 million of the trees in California.

That is neither an endangered nor a threatened species. Tough shit.

>according to environmentalists, because around 40% of the plants grow on private land. The Joshua trees could be razed to make way for homes and infrastructure.

The environmentalists can propose to buy the private land, if they can't (or won't) then tough shit: They aren't the landowners and thus should have no say.

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I don't like the idea that landowners should have complete control of the land they own.

Owning land, more than anything else, should be considered a responsibility -- we have a finite amount of it and (mostly) can't make more. I personally feel many societial problems arise from poor use of land (in the UK, the lack of house building has both pushed up both rents and house prices to extremely unreasonable levels).

If your problem is with land use, especially UK land use in cities, it’s much more the zoning and planning permission that’s to blame: if anything there’s too little landowner control and too much social control (at least, social control of the wrong sort.) Building new housing supply into an overpriced market is generally quite profitable, and will be pursued by private landowners when not illegal.

This. I would even do away with the concept of individuals owning land and just give people some restricted usage rights.

> I would even do away with the concept of individuals owning land and just give people some restricted usage rights

Q: How would this affect those who purchase land to build a home?

A time-limited right of use. If you're a good steward of the land, it gets renewed. Leaseholds are (or at least have been) a fairly common and workable thing.

Not owning the land would that lead to a tragedy of the commons with people building houses not building to last.

Several options… have the state build houses… or fine people if they build houses with too bad quality… I don’t see an unsolvable issue here.

You could not purchase land to build a home anymore.

You could maybe get land lent to you and pay a rent on it (to the community). But it wouldn’t be „your“ land.

Ownership is not always complete.

Nature and natural resources are in fact a societal good and shouldn't be dominated by a small class of people within society. Sure someone "owns" that land (whatever that means since it was "owned" by others before the Europeans came) and they have certain rights but they should not have all rights.

Imagine a powerful landowner owning _all_ plots of land on which Joshua Tree existed, imagine that landowner unilaterally deciding to destroy all the trees. They have made a decision for future societies that is not theirs to make. The property own profits, society pays.

>>the species was “abundant and widespread,” with between 4.3 million to 9.8 >>million of the trees in California.

> That is neither an endangered nor a threatened species. Tough shit.

I think that's what people said about the passenger pigeon also.

Anyway, I don't think everyone shares your view that land owners can do whatever they so please. I certainly hope there's some protection against the my neighbouring landowners starting up a toxic vaste dump on their land next to mine.

Nobody is going to manage to buy every piece of land that Joshua Trees grow on.

If someone tried that, the last few trees they did not own would get more valuable, and there would be massive efforts to save them to make money.

The invisible hand fixes things. Laissez Faire.

Owing something usually give you the exclusive use of it but does not allow you to do what you want with it. You cannot walk in the street with a running chain saw even if you own it. Same thing with your car, you must respect a lot of rules. If you own a Picasso you cannot burn it. It is a political choice to let someone destroy a forest but not a Picasso.

* OwNing something

why is a picasso more important than an ecological system?

It is question asked by the soup thrown at paintings in museums recently. Like saying "Why do you consider that paintings must be protected and not the possibility to keep living on this planet ?" At least it is how I interpret it.

It is about rules elaborated by an educated society. Not perfect rules, but at least rules that preserve what this society consider "important". Many example show that humans that live in a given place are very well aware of how important is a "healthy" ecosystem and give rights to "a good life" to this ecosystem: Wanganui river in New-Zeland, lac Erie in US (this attempt failed), constitution of Ecuador, etc... Elinor Ostrom wrote interesting about this rules (governing the commons), she had the nobel prize for that.

Is not more important, but we can preserve both at the same time.

And those gluing this hands to valuable old master paintings are still imbecile puppets, no matter the alleged reason to do it in their minds.

> but we can preserve both at the same time

Sure, spending million on 'priceless' art... while spending as little as possible on preserving our ecosystems?

Who is spending millions on priceless art "instead to save the planet"?

Many arts museum's are private. Its duty is to preserve important human culture artifacts, not to save the planet.

>If you own a Picasso you cannot burn it.

If I own a Picasso I can absolutely burn it if I want to. Don't like it? Buy it off me before I do, or don't sell one to me in the first place.

If you live in the US you can do that, and you can and will be prosecuted under the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). Other industrialized nations tend to have similar protections. People always have the choice to break the law, and if you go so far as to do something irreversible (like burn an original Picasso) a jury of your peers might not be so understanding of your god-granted individual liberty to be a Vandal.

To my reading VARA only applies to living artists

Seeing as Picasso passed away long ago, presumably there would be nobody to prosecute me under VARA[1].

[1]: "In most instances, the rights granted under VARA persist for the life of the author (or the last surviving author, for creators of joint works)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act

Interesting. Seeing as you need a licence to export certain works of art and antiques (from the UK) I wouldn't be surprised if there's a rule to prevent people from destroying a painting. However, I've never heard of such a rule. Perhaps because it's not something that people usually want to do. (A Picasso might not be old enough to be protected as an antique, of course.)

IUCN have it as ‘Least Concern’ but NatureServe have it as ‘vulnerable’ which is one of their ‘threatened’ statuses. I don’t really know about NatureServe though. I think their methodology is different in how it treats cultivated/non-native populations.

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