Notes on Systems that avoid overshooting carrying capacity: Easter Island as an exception

The legend of the Easter Islanders is that they fell victim to the insatiable demands of their monument building industry until their population crashed to almost nothing. Like Easter Island, Australia is keeping on using up all its resources in order to preserve its infrastructure expansion. Like the Easter Islanders, we are victims of our monument building industry.

In France, however, it has somehow been possible to stop the monument building industry.

But the Easter Island was an exception to the Pacific Islander rule. Evolution tells us that similar ‘future eating’ societies would have occurred, but they could not survived for long. It was the societies with the functioning sustainable systems that survived and societies in New Guinea, Australia, and the Soloman Islands go back something like 40,000 years.

It is difficult to think of any system further away from the original stable clan-based systems of Pacific Islanders than the ‘progressive’ economic systems of Australia, England or the United States. The USA has been like an expanding universe from the first coke and iron based big bang that took place in Mother Britain in the 18^th Century to the current attempts by corporate giants to own the genetic basis of life and food production. But, wherever Pacific Island communities hang on to their traditional land-use and inheritance systems, people retain power over their lives and prevent their natural resources from being destroyed, exported, transformed and alienated. The fundamental difference between the traditional clan-based Pacific Islander economies and capitalism is that the traditional clan-based systems do not commodify land.

That is to say that they do not buy and sell land. A number of traditional systems remain viable today. Even today, in New Zealand and Fiji, indigenous land cannot be sold in most cases; it can only be inherited. Many intact societies remain in New Guinea, which is a large mountainous island with an extraordinary number and variety of different tribal peoples. Although British and Dutch colonialism, and now Indonesia's transmigration program, have done great damage to many of these peoples, there is evidence that their systems are self-repairing¹ if the people are able to retain their control over land and the means of production.

In contrast to the typical Pacific Islander land-use planning and inheritance system, the British originated system commodifies everything in its path, transforming the natural, then the social, to private property and profit, and screwing nearly everyone in the process.

Successful Pacific Island societies, however, managed to survive for periods between 40 and 60 thousand years. Colonisation occurred a century later than in many other countries, and the transition from self-sufficiency and order to overshoot and disorganisation was in many cases carefully and scientifically documented by anthropologists whose excellent work now lies in dusty tomes. Not all of it caught the limelight of controversy like Margaret Mead's study of Samoa.

Like the Pacific Islander economy, the French economy had environmental feedbacks that tell it that growth is costing it too much. And, fortunately, approximately one half of the industrial societies on this planet are not afflicted with exponential or rapid growth.

Why Pacific Islander societies, France and Western continental Europe are more sustainable than the English speaking societies

The keys to sustainability lie in systems of land-tenure, marriage and inheritance. It is very important that inheritance be passed down to both sexes equally, so as to avoid the prospect of aggregations of land through marriage.

One of the concerns expressed about post-peak survival is that communities will just start up the future eating syndrome again. It is therefore important that people should know the basic components of sustainable land-tenure and inheritance systems, which beat the population growth and overshoot problem.

The most important qualities of the Pacific Islander Land-tenure system seem to have been incest avoidance, non-sale of land, and legitimacy laws defining who might survive infancy and who might inherit. In addition there was population control through methods which included gender separation, contraception, abortion and infanticide.

These practices were reinforced by caste and marriage laws, other inheritance laws, and gender specific practices. The caste and marriage, other inheritance and gender specific practices varied enormously and the degree and effect of possible variation within them, is complicated but can be established by historical evidence and by running computer programs. It is possible to plot the impacts of whole topologies and variations within them on population outcomes.

Some equivalent features persist in the Roman based systems that were revived by the French revolution and the Napoleonic code.

In France, as in most places, incest avoidance persists. Because there has been less change to French society than, for instance, to US or Australian society, the likelihood of non-related marriage partners is less than it would be in a society with high immigration. In France the caste and marriage laws persist in certain social forms, further limiting the number of opportunities for marriage. This is also the case in Anglophone societies. In France, inheritance laws prevent the passing on of property to other than one’s children or one’s blood relatives. This limits the motives for people to remarry and create new families, since they are unable to dispossess their earlier children. This is not the case in anglo-societies.

Britain has been described as "an extreme case of the development of private property" and it has been said that, by the 13^th century, "with regards to freehold land, systemic dispossession of children [had been] incorporated into the law through primogeniture." ²

Australia and the USA inherited this system, which stemmed from the inability of women to directly inherit (known as Salic law) and from the fact that all children after the first born son had no entitlement to land. Husbands could inherit property via their wives but the wives could not inherit property themselves. Fathers could, by the thirteenth century, sell land that would have gone to their children. This meant that a non-blood family could acquire land that in other societies would never have passed out of the original family. This is the first step to private property and dispossession. To this day, in the English speaking states divorce represents a serious risk of dispossessing children in favour of a new spouse and family; the situation has now been equalized whereby the woman may inherit her husband’s property. That spouses cannot inherit from each other in France could explain the greater acceptance of extramarital affairs and the lesser resort to divorce.

French citizenship laws that depend mainly on birthright via blood relations to another citizen limit the opportunities for immigration. The state is obligated to provide housing and a living to all of its citizens and to migrants with work-permits. This obligation forces the state to cost population growth because citizens complain if they do not get decent housing. In Australia people who cannot get housing learn to blame themselves. People who cannot get work also blame themselves and we are more and more stingy with unemployment relief.

Land is sold in both France and Australia, whereas it was almost never sold in traditional Pacific Island cultures. It could only be inherited. Mechanisms do however exist to penalize the profits that can be made by buying and selling land in the French system. Notably these are extremely high taxes on land beyond one’s first dwelling, huge taxes on land that is bequeathed to people who are not close relatives, including spouses. These taxes are so high that there are properties in Paris that have gone unclaimed for years. The charges on these properties accrue until they can outweigh the market value of the property. Thus any distant relative or unrelated inheritor claiming their inheritance would not only pay high taxes – 50% and above, but they would possibly have a lot of accumulated charges to pay as well. The interesting thing is that the property eventually goes back to the State, in many of these cases. If the property is put on the market, the local council has priority in purchasing it at a lower than market cost. The council usually makes such properties available for community use or builds or adapts them for public housing. Foreigners who purchase property in France for the purpose of speculating or who attempt to leave it to their spouses often get a nasty surprise. No such deterrent exists in Australia for a person to speculate on Australian property.

And so, these are some of the reasons that one part of the world is growing like Topsy and the other part is slowing down. These reasons can be extrapolated to the third world countries where, not only have the old land-tenure laws been broken down and land sold-off to newcomers, but the original populations have been dispossessed. They have been left with only their labour to sell. In countries with no effective laws against child labour and which require a large unskilled workforce, one way that a landless family can increase its income is by having children who can then be sent out to work. In such cases, although the family lives in misery, they can afford to have children. They cannot afford much else, but having children helps them to survive in the short term, when there is little else that will. This was indeed what happened in Britain during the industrial revolution and it was Britain’s landless labour that was exported to Australia to provide free labour for marginal land. In the USA immigrant labour was replaced by slave labour. Australia outlawed slave labour via its White Australia laws which have since become notorious as a sign of fundamental racism. Ironically the same people who benefit from the inflation that population growth brings to land and other resources, have since used the tag of “racist” to break down arguments against high migration and laws that protect local labour, including aborigines in Australia.

4. What I want to do with this material

I want to publicise, at grass roots level, to Pacific Islanders, the merits of their traditional systems and to support and encourage them to return to these. And I want to support and encourage them to lead the world in educating us about how clan based societies can be indefinitely sustainable. And I want this program to benefit the land-poor in other ‘developing’ societies that are cursed with overpopulation and in the so-called ‘developed’ societies with rapid population growth. There is also much to be learned from the Roman based Napoleonic system and the French Revolution which could be added to educate all of us in how to maintain our social capital by sharing what we have with citizens and our children. Ultimately I would like to see the selling of land and other resources disappear, although the use of leases would probably be alright, as long as the obligations to the owner communities were clearly understood. In this regard land-tenure arrangements on Japanese islands could be a useful guide.

I am currently about half way through producing a book on the origins of the Capitalist land-tenure system and would appreciate any help I could obtain in supporting myself whilst I write it. It will take me approximately another year and a half to finish if I devote myself full-time. I anticipate using film, internet and email-lists to link up with other activists who can make use of my observations and theories. I am particularly keen to connect with computer program designers in a project to test the properties of the Pacific Island land-tenure system, in all the variations I can think of, as an electronic game and a research tool.

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