Deep Dive with Shawn

Ground Control: How Trump’s Territorial Ambitions Threaten Global Stability (w/ Dr. Michael Albertus)

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Dr. Michael Albertus, professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of the book Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, as well as the recent Foreign Affairs article The Coming Age of Territorial Expansion, joins the pod to discuss the history of land power, land owernship, territorial ambitions and their larger implications on global politics and socio-economic disparity. As Donald Trump advocates for claims on territories like Greenland, Canada, and parts of Panama, we question the ramifications of such rhetoric on international relations and American democracy.

We trace the colonial roots that continue to influence income inequality and social mobility across America, and encourage listeners to ponder the potential crises triggered by climate change-induced migrations that may force us to reconsider land ethics. Furthermore, Dr. Albertus discusses how our current understanding of land ownership and public policy may need re-evaluation to promote equity and shared resources, engaging directly with the delicate balance between private land investment and collective societal benefit. 

By examining this concept of land power, and these contemporary issues facing America with age-old conflicts over land, power, and resources, Dr. Albertus urges us to think critically about the paths we pursue to safeguard our democracy against the backdrop of shifting global realities. 

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Dr. Albertus:

You know, one of the things that worries me about this is the fact that it's a strategic game, right, it's one that involves the interplay of multiple global powers. In other words, if I decide to grab Greenland, the United States decides to grab Greenland, that means that Russia can't grab Greenland, or that China can't grab Greenland right, china can't grab Greenland right. And, as a result, you know, they might start to think, hey, what are the other pieces that are on the board here and what can we grab? And maybe we should try and grab that now, before somebody else grabs it right, so it can generate a race to do this sort of thing and speed up those dynamics speed up those dynamics.

Shawn:

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. As Donald Trump's great American image takes shape, it's clear that that vision includes expanding the borders of the United States, as he makes claims on Greenland, canada and Panama. Is this just bluster? How does Trump make this a reality, and what does it mean for the future of global stability and American democracy? In this episode, we're going to explore the intricate relationship between land power and society and the profound impact that land power has on governance and democracy.

Shawn:

My guest today is Dr Michael Albertus, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the new book Land Power who has it, who Doesn't, and how that Determines the Fate of Societies. Dr Albertus argues that land ownership shapes the evolution of societies, determining equality, development and environmental stewardship. This idea takes on new relevance as we witness President Trump's renewed calls for territorial expansion. These demands reflect the worst excesses of land power thinking, harkening back to colonial era land grabs and disregarding national sovereignty. Trump's approach not only strains relationships with long-standing allies, but also threatens America's global influence. By focusing on territorial acquisition rather than diplomatic cooperation, the US risks isolating itself on the world stage, and isolation might sound good in theory, but it's rarely a good thing in practice. So in this episode, we examine how land distribution impacts economic inequality, social mobility and democratic processes. We'll also consider the potential consequences of Trump's aggressive land acquisition policies on international relations and America's standing in the global community.

Shawn:

All right, if you like this episode or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, dr Albertus. Thanks for being here. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for inviting me on the show. Absolutely.

Shawn:

I think this is kind of an apropos topic for discussion right now, for a handful of reasons, I think.

Shawn:

For different reasons and in different ways.

Shawn:

We've been confronting the reality of land ownership and land power globally, but also very specifically here in the United States, since the dawn of our country, but in some very particular ways for the past couple of decades, and even when we don't necessarily know that that's what we're talking about, when we're talking about things like reparations and tribal rights and land recognition, etc.

Shawn:

All of these things actually have roots in historical patterns of land ownership, and I think to some degree we have thought, or we've made the mistake of thinking, that land and boundaries are settled issues, largely at least in the northern and western world, that we've transcended a history in which people were subjugated and enslaved and exploited over land. But that's really just patently false, and maybe the most obvious examples today include Russia's claim on Ukraine, trump's ambitions for Greenland and Canada, maybe even Trump's claim on Ukrainian minerals. So, while an understanding of land ownership and its implications is an historical exercise, it is also very truly an exercise in contemporary geopolitics, and this is something that you study and therefore something that you have thoughts about. So I'm glad to have you here to talk about it.

Dr. Albertus:

Yeah, I have plenty of thoughts about all of that. It's a very interesting contemporary moment in that land is entering the stage, sort of front and center now and as such, you know, these territorial claims, territorial competition, competition for resources as well, which are of course rooted in territory, are all at the forefront now of kind of a changing global race for power.

Shawn:

And so maybe we should start here, because I think, I mean, this might put us in an interesting space for conversation, in that you, studying this, might have a well, you clearly have a broader, deeper bench of understanding, and so you might see this, the current state of play, very differently than myself, and I would consider myself to be the layperson.

Shawn:

So I think of the global order as having been established primarily around the end of World War II, and that includes not only the boundaries that we have, for the most part, established since then, but also the ambitions that people have to expand their territory as being clipped wings since then, but also the ambitions that people have to expand their territory as being clipped wings since then. And so we've had this to the layperson, the boundaries that we've had, for the most part, at least for the great powers, are pretty much established right, and so at least the last decade has been, I think, somewhat jarring for people like me to imagine that there are European countries whose boundaries are perhaps still at play right, and now here in the United States, this discussion, serious discussion, of expanding US territory. Where I'm going with this is to somebody like you, is this as shocking as it is to somebody like me, or is this just something that, in the context of history, ebbs and flows?

Dr. Albertus:

I would say both in some sense. I mean, it's shocking, I think, to a lot of present observers just because it's such a significant departure from the way in which the global order has operated over the course of the last roughly eight decades. But on the other hand, when you take the broader sweep of human history, there has always well I shouldn't say always well I'll talk about the limits, but for you know, millennia there has been an effort to assert control over territory and extract power and influence through that control over territory and then to project that power and influence over space. And so in a lot of ways, the global order since World War II is something of an aberration when we look at it from the perspective of several hundred years or even millennia of human relationships with the land.

Dr. Albertus:

And I hesitated when I said forever, because humans have related to the land in very different ways over the course of human history and in particular, there was no real reason to own land per se when you go back, let's say, before 10,000 BC or before even about 5,000 BC, when we started for the first time to see settlement on the land, year-round settlement in sedentary societies that started to occur around 10,000 BC, and then permanent agricultural towns started to take root around 5,000 BC, and then that created a new relationship with the land because, all of a sudden, rather than say following resources seasonally, things like animal herds or wild harvesting of berries or nuts or something like that people were fixed in space and the control over that space meant control of surplus on the land, and that generated a new relationship between the land and power and as a result, you know, and ever since, that has been something that's really central to most human societies and in that sense, this last 80 years is something of a deviation from that and, for reasons we can get into later, I think that have to do with population dynamics and the current structure of geopolitics, as well as climate change.

Dr. Albertus:

I think there are a lot of pieces that are now shifting and, as a result, we're going to see a very dynamic picture in the coming decades.

Shawn:

So I'm glad you bring up this concept of private land ownership and providing a little bit of context as to how that evolved, because, born out of this assumption that there has to be some type of a balance struck between both private land ownership and public land ownership, people can always quibble over where those boundaries lie, but the reality is that private land ownership and public land ownership. People can always quibble over where those boundaries lie, but the reality is that private land ownership has not always been something that has existed, and so I guess I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about how society structured itself in such a way or in a time when private land ownership didn't exist, and how the evolution of society changed as a result of the introduction of things like private land ownership, and how that continues to inform our social development today.

Dr. Albertus:

Sure, I'll say that, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of diversity in early societies and in, more generally, in indigenous societies, in terms of relationships with the land and territory. But, for best we know from historical records and from more current practices as they've been documented over the last several centuries, humans and human societies were, you know, prior to becoming sedentary, were relatively mobile, whether year-round, all the time or, you know, part of the year, and as a result there was often a relationship with a territory, but that territory didn't necessarily have definitive boundaries in the way that we think of definitive boundaries today, and property rights were oftentimes kind of layered or sort of diffuse. So there wasn't anything like the contemporary notions of, you know, individual, alienable, exclusive property rights. Rather, rather, people had access, let's say to you know, certain permissions about using hunting grounds in certain seasons and that might have passed through, you know, family lineages or clan lineage, lineages and, depending on your own ancestral links, you might have access to several different hunting grounds or other territories or that sort of thing. So the but these relationships were really relatively diffuse.

Dr. Albertus:

And then that changed pretty radically, as we saw, you know, the the greater, as we saw, population expansion, as we saw, you know, more sedentary societies taking root and developing and spreading.

Dr. Albertus:

You know, more sedentary societies taking root and developing and spreading. And then, of course, you know, starting to delineate land ownership because that meant control again over surplus and that model went viral, so to speak, with, you know, with colonization and imperialism and as that, you know, as people settled, especially from European countries, to new lands around the globe and brought those notions and forms of property rights with them, and then they spread quite substantially. But of course that spread was uneven. I mean, even if you think about the United States, if you look at the eastern, if you look east of the Mississippi, there's very little public land east of the Mississippi. If you look in the western part of the United States, it's about 50% of land. It's even higher when you look at Alaska. And so you know the early patterns of settlement had a big impact on the share of, you know, public land versus private land and that sort of thing as well.

Shawn:

So one of the things that I find particularly. I guess maybe the word is interesting One of the things that I find as maybe a relationship that we can overcome, in that it's preordained, is that there might be a critical mass when it comes to population at which maintaining public land becomes untenable or impossible, meaning that the relationship is such that the greater the population, the greater the land scarcity, which kind of lends itself to private claims of land ownership as almost like a matter of survival. If that's the case, is there any possibility in a society like ours today in which we could tilt the balance such that we have much more public land by ratio than we do private land and still maintain essentially stability and peace with such a large population?

Dr. Albertus:

Yeah, those are really. I would say that they're interesting questions. On the land nerd. So, yes, I would say that there definitely seems to be a pretty significant relationship between population and land scarcity and things like privatization or, more generally, you might think about enclosure. So, you know, the global population in 10,000 BC was just a handful of millions of people, something like, let's say, the population of modern Latvia or Finland or something like that. I mean, it was extremely, extremely small. It was a few hundred million by the year zero and it was a billion by 1800.

Dr. Albertus:

Obviously, today we're at 8 billion, and so that has huge implications for thinking about people spreading out on the land and, you know, and needing to access resources, especially in agrarian economies, but even well beyond that, because, of course, we still are all eating food off the land, right, are all eating food off the land, right, that's produced on the land and so so, yes, so there.

Dr. Albertus:

So there's an inherent, I think, tension between having kind of public common pool resources and, you know, large populations, and so that doesn't, however, mean that necessarily that we're kind of doomed as populations continue to increase, for a couple of reasons.

Dr. Albertus:

One is because you know the human population is going to go from 8 billion today to about 10 billion sometime before the end of the century, at which point demographers predict that the global population is going to crash effectively rather than plateau or slowly decline, and so we might be retracing, you know, 8 billion, 6 billion, 4 billion, relatively quickly, and that's going to open up new possibilities for, you know, public land.

Dr. Albertus:

The other thing is that there are different ways to conceive of property rights or ownership over land, and if you think about something like, let's say, conservation easements, right, that's an interesting notion that is being increasingly applied to public land sorry, to private land in the United States, which is to say that people can contract with, could be state governments, could be private land trusts or other outside parties to restrict, let's say, cutting down trees on their land or to try and preserve an ecosystem on their property, or something like that, and that can end up having certain features or certain aspects of ownership over land that can help to strike a greater balance between private interest and public good. So there is this.

Shawn:

This is almost like a bifurcated way to think about this.

Shawn:

This next question, which is a building off of what you've just said, is how governments local, state and federal we can keep this specific to the United States are managing that balance between private and public land ownership, and the examples that you've just given have to do with kind of regulations about what you can or cannot do on your private land and to what end.

Shawn:

And to some degree, some of this is designed with climate in mind or with an ecosystem in mind or environment in mind and the potential impact, the devastating impact that private land ownership and activities on that land could have.

Shawn:

But the other side of this is that land ownership also plays into economic inequality and barriers to upward social mobility. These are concepts that we're wrestling with today and I think when we think about them, we talk about them in the context of the impact that maybe religion has had on inequality or the impact that a heteronormative society or gender does. But land does too, and land distribution and land power and land ownership have also influenced these in ways that I think we don't talk much about. But you do. And to tie this back to the initial part of the question I guess I'm wondering well, two parts. One is how has land ownership and land power influenced economic inequality and social mobility in the United States? And then, if we think about the balance between private and public land policy and regulation, what are some things that governments could be doing that touches on alleviating some of that tension related to economic inequality and social mobility?

Dr. Albertus:

So land confers social, economic and political power to those who hold it and to those who own it. And because land is power, those who own it come to dominate those forms of power, whereas those who don't come to be dominated in different ways, and we see this repeatedly in the context of American history. So if you think about smallholding farmers in New England in the early colonial period and how that form of economic equality fostered, you know, political equality and democracy as well as social mobility within New England. And if you contrast that with a place like the American South where you had the plantation economy and you know, and Blacks were enslaved, there was very little social mobility, of course, almost none enforced social immobility in fact, and extremely high economic inequality. It's an incredible contrast between those. And we see land is really central to that discrepancy or that difference between those two different areas, and we can think about that in the West as well, right, and how it ended up actually perpetuating itself in certain ways. So you know, if we think about how reconstruction in the post-Civil War era failed and Blacks didn't get 40 acres and a mule and as a result they were consigned to sharecropping still for many decades in the South and that impacted, you know, ultimately, patterns of migration to the North and segregation in the North and zoning restrictions in urban areas and all kinds of things like that. And we also see some of these patterns play out in the West, you know, where white settlers had an ability to access land through the Homestead Act and Black Americans did not. And so again, we see really, really different patterns there of how that impacts, you know, economic equality and inequality on the American frontier, as well as social mobility across those different racial groups, right, and if we think about how, you know, this relates to public land and private land. I mean some of this directly filters into what land is public and what land is private.

Dr. Albertus:

So, you know, in the wake of the Mexican-American War, for example, the US gained hundreds of millions of acres of land in the American West, all the way out to the Pacific Ocean.

Dr. Albertus:

A fair amount of that land was privatized and given to almost exclusively white settlers at the expense of, you know, native Americans who were on the land, as well as, you know, blacks, who didn't have an opportunity because they were still, for the most part, living in the South and under, oftentimes, you know, working in sharecropping arrangements and the like on former plantations, and so that's a very direct link as well.

Dr. Albertus:

But you know, today we can think about how, you know, public and private land ownership plays out in the American West and certainly some of that is, you know, has racial kind of overtones, but most of it doesn't kind of overtones, but most of it doesn't. Most of it has a lot more to do with, um, you know, economic factors and um and social factors and tensions between, you know, groups who are would would like to have a land preserved for purposes of, you know, recreation, um and enjoyment and the like, versus, uh, the desire by the federal government, let's say, to maintain public lands for the purposes of, you know, leasing out those lands for revenue purposes or other purposes, and so we can get more into that if you're interested. But there's a lot of rich kind of relationships there.

Shawn:

So one of the narratives about our politics that does, I suppose, stem to some degree from land allocation and distribution and thus, by extension, land power, and that is the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism and the struggle between what people have and what people don't have. And I think there is inherent in kind of the democratic or the true democratic model, this idea that allocation of resources, that at least opportunity should exist for everybody. And if that were the case, then that does suggest that there needs to be some type of policy that confronts land reallocation or land redistribution, if not at minimum a new approach to land distribution moving forward, even if it isn't redistribution, but that kind of runs straight into the opposition, which is that anything along these lines is really communist and socialist and anti-democratic, and I'm not sure how to characterize this, or if you would disagree with me on this, but it does seem to me that without some new policy that deals with redistribution and reallocation, it really is a challenge to American democracy moving forward.

Dr. Albertus:

Right. So you know, land remains the most valuable economic resource on the face of the earth, valued at about 200 trillion or something like that, to the extent that we can really value it. So it's a really powerful, powerful resource and it's extremely valuable. So it's no surprise that it's heavily contested. Valuable, so it's no surprise that it's heavily contested. And what we see is that you know, and it underpins, I should say, in contemporary times, a lot of the value of real estate and housing. You know, for about 40% of you know, property value average in the United States is land, the value of land, and in places where there are housing shortages and where property is more expensive, let's say in the Bay Area or New York, it's considerably higher than that, something like two thirds, let's say. And so in my view, and so that means that this is a very valuable resource. There's only kind of so much to go around, so to speak, and, like you say, how the decisions that we make about who gets access to what have important political implications, and let me tell you a couple of kind of stories about that in the recent-ish American past in ways that are, I think, germane to this discussion. So if you think about other housing shortages. Let's say, in the course of the 20th century what that meant for challenges to democracy.

Dr. Albertus:

We could think about, you know, housing shortage due to labor and supply issues in World War I, and you know when vacancy rates went close to zero in housing and people started stacking up within houses and the government and public officials were worried about the spread of disease, but also they were worried about the spread of communism under those circumstances. And so you know, introduced a bill to build housing for workers on the home front at a pretty massive scale and did that housing for workers on the home front at a pretty massive scale and did that. And then we had another housing crisis in the Great Depression. At the outset of the Great Depression we had Hoovervilles, what were known as Hoovervilles, basically homeless encampments that were sprouting up, you know, across the country, and the government decided to step in and create a federal housing administration under FDR because they were worried about issues of unrest and the failure of capitalism. And then we had again in the wake of World War II. There was another housing crisis. Prices were rising quite quickly and dynamics that are relatively similar to today, and there was a shortage of housing and one of the major pieces of legislation then was the GI Bill in order to try and give veterans a pathway to the middle class through home ownership.

Dr. Albertus:

And again, truman was pretty clear in how he created that, in terms of how that was created and the logic behind that legislation, which had to do again with giving people a chance at the American dream and underpinning American democracy through property ownership. And that had its inequalities as well. There was again the big racial discrepancy between white veterans and Black veterans and the ability to access housing. But it was clear that that was a priority for American democracy. And you know, when we get closer to the contemporary housing crisis, let's say there's good research that shows today that you know, home ownership is associated with greater participation in local town hall meetings, greater voter turnout rates. You know donations to political candidates and all that sort of thing. You know, effectively a form how we might think about, you know, contemporary local participatory democracy. It's still connected to homeownership and land ownership in ways that hark back to small holding farmers in New England 300 plus years ago.

Shawn:

I'm glad you bring this up because I'm going to preface this by saying I am a progressive. But before I owned a home I thought about housing very differently than I do now. I thought about it as security and safety primarily right, like someplace that I could go and feel safe. If there is an element of ownership, I could protect my things right. But when I bought a home, of course there's, you know, safety and security that comes with that.

Shawn:

But then there's a monetary element to it which is about the land that I have. I don't want that taken away from me and I do think that I do participate, probably, in our democratic processes more. But I do catch myself approaching it from a different perspective than I am maybe even comfortable with it, which is well, how much is this going to affect my taxes or how much is this going to affect my home value? And that there's a certain tension in that, in being a homeowner and I guess to some degree a land owner then, by extension, and being a progressive that really does care about land scarcity and about inequality, and I'm not sure if that ultimately, while I practice democracy more, plays out in a purely democratic form, if that makes sense.

Dr. Albertus:

Yeah, that does make perfect sense. I mean, and if you think about contemporary debates in, let's say, zoning restrictions, right, and housing affordability, I mean some of the places that are the most liberal places in the country. San Francisco, for example, is notorious for nimbyism, and I'm not saying that's necessarily what you're doing or what you're advocating, but it simply shows that there's a lot of times the tension between sort of political beliefs and how that kind of filters through homeownership, because people care as homeowners about a lot of things, about their community, right, the character of their community and what that means, you know, and how buildings should look and this, you know, certain nostalgia for, whether it's nostalgia for the past or a, you know, an appreciation for the status quo, since, after all, one's selected into that. You know that neighborhood or that area and seeing it change in some ways is, you know, can be seen as you know that neighborhood or that area and seeing it change in some ways is, you know, can be seen as you know, whether threatening or simply bringing in something that's quite different from what one might have expected, right, and so that, yeah, so we see oftentimes that you know, some of those tensions playing out in, you know, amongst homeowners of all political stripes and and you're right, it filters into other things too, thinking about property taxes and and many different things.

Dr. Albertus:

So so, yes, I think that homeownership, um, you know, changes, changes of perspective in a certain way, and and that is related to to how people think about kind of their you know what we might call time horizons, or whether we're thinking about, okay, I'm going to be, I know I'm going to be here now for the course of many years, and so I want to have a community, a neighborhood locale that reflects, you know, what I hope it to be for, not only today and next year and a few years, but in 20 years or in 30 years, and that has different implications for how we think about the present.

Shawn:

Considering land scarcity into the near future globally, but specifically in the United States, and the implications that that has for our localities and the type of governance that we have and the influence that it has on things like populism and nationalism and xenophobia, etc. What are some good policies or things that localities and municipalities should be thinking about when it comes to land regulation moving forward?

Dr. Albertus:

Right. I mean, the answer to this could, in theory, I think, change over time, but in the present, it's pretty obvious, in my view, that the problem is basically a problem of undersupply in the ways that we need to access land for the broader health of our communities and the ability to integrate. You know, folks who are at the margins of the economy, who are feeling the heat from renting, who are facing down an increase, let's say, in institutional investing, as well as young people right, who are trying to crack in for the first time to, you know, to new jobs and into home ownership in a way that will give them this also this vested kind of interest in the future over the long haul, and enable them to build generational wealth in ways that prior generations have been able to do. And so, in my view, that has to do with things like you know. How are you going to create affordability and open up land and development and building? A lot of that has to do with, you know, changing how you regulate construction and building codes and as well as zoning restrictions and trying to drop zoning restrictions more generally.

Dr. Albertus:

So if you think about a place like you know, a very big contrast would be a place like Tokyo right, where it's one of the most populated cities in the world. Its population has increased in the last several decades, despite the fact that Japan's population as a whole has, you know, stagnated and even started to decrease. But housing prices have not gone up in Tokyo at all in a way that reflects what has happened in, let's say, you know New York City or London, or you know, frankly, most you know cities in the United States, both big cities, even you know medium tier cities and even a lot of small cities and a lot of that. The difference between those has a lot to do with zoning and zoning restrictions and the zoning restrictions in Japan. You know, in Tokyo in particular, you know there's not a, you know, permitting and restrictions policy that applies to individual properties in the way that it does in the United States.

Dr. Albertus:

Right, when in the United States you want to build on a particular property, you've got to go through all these different hoops and city council and get all these different permits and you want to change zoning in an area, that's really difficult, takes a long time and, as a result, there's a big lag in building right and there's been a pent-up lag really since the Great Recession, whereas in Japan, there's a simple set of codes, you have different nuisance levels.

Dr. Albertus:

There's 12 nuisance levels, and if you're below a certain nuisance level, in terms of building, the idea is residential, is residential, is residential, and so you know.

Dr. Albertus:

If it's not, if you're not trying to build a factory or something like that in the middle of a neighborhood, then you can build, and that has facilitated greater housing access and affordability over the long term, and I think we could take lessons from that in you know, and try and apply them to a lot of the locales in the United States, and there are ways to think about doing that for states and the federal government to try and incentivize a lowering of these zoning restrictions and in places where there are real bottlenecks, especially in the American West, where there is a lot of public land, using small bits and pieces of public lands that are already within city boundaries or are at the very, very limited and strategic fashion can also be helpful for alleviating some of the housing crisis that we have right now.

Dr. Albertus:

There are other ideas and policies out there too, like providing first-time home buyers with a credit or providing favorable loan terms for folks as well, but all that has the problem that there's still, at the end of the day, right now, a supply constraint and that really needs to be addressed.

Shawn:

I think, as long as we live in a place that has limited resources and we're talking about land, so limited land resources, land scarcity relative to an increasing population one of the practices that I feel that might have run its course but to change it would produce a massive backlash, is this idea of owning land in perpetuity.

Shawn:

I used to live in New Zealand and there are large swaths of New Zealand wherein you buy the house but you lease the land, and this might be true of you know other places as well, but in the United States we're pretty much inculcated into believing that once we've bought land, as long as we pay our taxes, that land is ours and that and we can pass that on to family members and we can expand that if space permits, and that land just becomes unusable or unavailable to anybody else until we or some our ancestors decide to sell that land, and so that does allow for certain people to gobble up quite a bit of land that never has to then return to the people, and I wonder if that's something that it doesn't seem feasible, but it's something that we should be considering as in need of renovation, something that we should be considering as in need of renovation.

Dr. Albertus:

That's right. It's a very particular way of thinking about land that is an anomaly from the perspective of broader human history this notion of you know, private ownership, and again, you know, once you have land, it's yours and others can't access it until you decide that you're going to, you know, to sell it or give it away or the like. And there are other countries that don't have that at all, right? So China is another example of a country that has no private land ownership. Land is zoned either as urban land or as rural land. Rural land is vested in and there are leasing arrangements over that land and those leasing people can contract and buy and sell and the like in terms of these leases and these lease arrangements, but there is not the private ownership of land in the same way that it exists in the United States. And so what we have here you're right is kind of I wouldn't say it's unique, because it exists in many other parts of the world as well, but it is particular.

Dr. Albertus:

And we see now in recent years people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison that buy up large parts, large swaths of land and then they become the owners of that land and what they want to do with that land is up to them.

Dr. Albertus:

And yeah, they cannot return to the public domain unless they decide that that's what they want to do with it. Right? And so it's a very restrictive form of thinking about ownership and in that sense it also inherently has to have these broader societal implications, right, because if some people decide they're going to enclose large tracts of land, then that has implications and externalities for other people. Their inability to access that land, maybe they're the inability to decide, let's say, if that landowner wants to cut down all the trees and that impacts the environment or impacts biodiversity or contributes to climate change, and we don't have the capacity. Other people in society don't have any say over that, but they have to suffer the consequences, right? So inherently there is this kind of social dynamic behind property, whether you want to formally, you know, recognize that and incorporate that in a legal structure or not.

Shawn:

So I feel like we need to talk about the recent US expansionist view that we've taken. So Trump has set and I guess by extension, the United States have set their eyes on acquiring Greenland, canada I don't know if that's tongue in cheek, doesn't you never really know maybe parts of Panama, etc. And that would disrupt radically the global order. And so obviously there are geopolitical implications. But for someone in your line of work and through the lens of your work, what worries you about this, if anything at all?

Dr. Albertus:

There's, in fact, a fair amount that worries me about this. So, for a variety of reasons, you know, as we talked about a little bit earlier, this, the global order and in the last eight decades since the end of World War Two, has been one in which outright territorial land grabs have been, you know, more or less off the table. There have been a couple of exceptions to that, but they've been exceptional. There have been very few outright land grabs in that time period. When you compare that, let's say, to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, or in the hundred years prior to World War I, when there was, you know, the amount of territory that was changing hands was quite significant, really quite significant. I mean it was only in the late 1800s, let's say that Italy unified as a country, which was basically the culmination of a process of territorial conquest by one part of Italy over others, and the same was true with Germany, right? So you know, the formation of modern countries and nation states as we see them, that occurred through territorial conquest and it was relatively recent. And so there's a lot on the horizon now and there's a lot that might be, you know, subject to reshuffling in a new world in which we have, you know, a return to those prior dynamics, in which the global order is, you know, eroding in many ways and the norms and the laws against grabbing territory are eroding, and you know that raises the possibility, of course, of not only outright war, but also increasing strategic competition over resources and, again, over territory. And one of the things that worries me about this is the fact that it's a strategic game, right, it's one that involves the interplay of multiple global powers. In other words, if I decide to grab Greenland, the United States decides to grab Greenland, that means that Russia can't grab Greenland, that China can't grab Greenland, right, and, as a result, they might start to think, hey, what are the other pieces that are on the board here and what can we grab? And maybe we should try and grab that now, before somebody else grabs it, so it can generate a race to do this sort of thing and speed up those dynamics.

Dr. Albertus:

There's another element, too, which is that it's hard to see how climate change does not play a really important role here, and we're only at the forefront of what we're going to see when it comes to changes that are on the horizon from, you know, dynamic and shifting climate. So you know, as the you know, polar ice caps are melting to a greater degree, seas are rising and some places are being hit by more systematic drought or more extreme weather patterns and the like. That's going to shift the habitability and the attractiveness of different territories in ways that are unprecedented in human history. In ways that are unprecedented in human history, and so Greenland is a very good example of this. Greenland, right now, a lot of it is still covered by ice.

Dr. Albertus:

It can be difficult to access resources and the like, but by basically all climate predictions, that picture is going to change dramatically in the course of the next 50 years and certainly by the year 2100, such that a lot more of Greenland is going to be ice-free throughout the year.

Dr. Albertus:

It will be much easier to conduct mining for valuable natural resources and the climate is going to become more attractive.

Dr. Albertus:

And, furthermore, northern know, northern shipping routes are going to open up in very new ways, such that there will be northern shipping routes that run along the northern part of Canada, the famous Northwest Passage, as well as along the northern coast of Russia, and those are going to become major shipping routes, and Greenland is a waypoint along those shipping routes, and so there's also a geostrategic reason why one might want to have an outpost there.

Dr. Albertus:

And so you start to extend that logic and you think about hey, now what about Antarctica, a place where a vast territory that has been covered in ice for the course of human history and is basically inaccessible in many ways, and there's long been international cooperation to use Antarctica for scientific purposes, and some of that is starting to erode now. There's already encroachment and the abrogation of some of those agreements and we could see how that might unravel in the future. And then you start to go down a rabbit hole, as I have gone down a little bit, and thinking about how that's going to affect other places. You think about the American Southwest or North Africa becoming far more far drier and hotter and agricultural productivity declining and people leaving those areas and moving to other areas and the sorts of population pressures that's going to generate in areas that are currently less populated. There's going to be a lot of moving and shifting and I think we're I think Greenland is kind of an early warning signal for that.

Shawn:

So this is probably a leading well, this is a leading question. But considering all of that, so this new kind of expansionist view that the United States seems to be taking the land scarcity that we're facing, which has economic implications, inequality implications, that creates tension, political tension, and then also all of the potential impacts associated with climate change, as you just outlined, is the world ready for this?

Dr. Albertus:

I don't think we're ready for this at all.

Dr. Albertus:

I don't think that there, you know, I think that it comes at a bad time in some ways, because, you know, the global order is starting to's it's a rather dynamic period in that sense and because we're in now, you know, an increasingly multipolar world, with, you know, the the rise of China and Russia becoming more aggressive as well, you know, and other countries that are starting to to become more powerful.

Dr. Albertus:

It's a it's a challenging time and it's one in which the post-war order that was predicated on competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is no longer so well-suited in this current moment and in the years and decades that are ahead. And, as a result, I don't think that we're very ready for this and I think that we're going to see more and more of these, you know, territorial land grabs and proposals for land grabs on the horizon in ways that are going to. That might seem surprising, but I think they're going to start to become part of a broader pattern that and I believe it'll be a relatively decipherable pattern as well that's a function of these expectations of changes in migration and changing climate and what all that portends for the future.

Shawn:

While I think that generational divides along political lines no longer hold the way that we maybe have thought they have over the last 20 or 30 years, I do see a bit of a silver lining, which could be completely empty air. But I do notice that some of these folks that seem to be very resistant to change and are aggressive and seem to be posing some type of a threat to the global world order are aggressive and seem to be posing some type of a threat to the global world order. They're really the older guys in China and Russia and the United States. But if you look at places like Europe for the most part Canada, south America, for the most part, barring Brazil you know there are a lot of. There's a lot of younger folks that are coming up and leading the country and taking control, and I do have a little bit of hope that that means we may see a shift in the near future, but I don't know.

Dr. Albertus:

That gives me some hope too. I'm hopeful of that. I mean, I think that younger generations are very attuned to, you know, long range issues of climate change, since they're going to be living it. And you know breathing, breathing it and having to deal with it and and I think, in many cases, have a lot of um. You know, refreshing um takes on the world and ways for thinking about our politics and our environment and our economy and the like.

Dr. Albertus:

I also do. You know I am concerned by, you know, trends like, let's say, in Europe. You know, the rise of the far right in you know, a number of countries in Europe and even in the United States, and you know, inclusive amongst young folks at rates that we haven't seen in recent decades, at rates that we haven't seen in recent decades, and so so I'm also attuned to that and that also gives me some pause, or makes me believe, at least, that it's not going to be a sort of end of history kind of conclusion and that we're we're definitely sailing for, you know, kind of a brighter future, but rather that it's going to be something that that people are going to have to fight for and it's not going to necessarily come of its own accord or in our lifetimes.

Shawn:

Okay, final question you ready for it? Yeah, what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately? And it doesn't have to be about this topic, but it can be.

Dr. Albertus:

Well, one thing that I'm doing a lot lately is running, which is something that I usually.

Dr. Albertus:

Oh Well, one thing that I'm doing a lot lately is running, which is something that I usually do a lot of, but I find myself doing even more of it in these times as a way to kind of center myself and clear my mind and a lot as well about kind of climate predictions.

Dr. Albertus:

And you know, when thinking about the future, as well as you know a couple of other things that I'm working on, I've been thinking more about the, the reconstruction era in American history and that real you know what I would think consider to be a missed opportunity in sort of getting things a lot better than we did. And you know, thinking about work of the Freedmen's Bureau and how a lot of that work was undone and captured in different ways by vested interests and whites who sought to peel back you know progress that was starting to really occur in the South in that time period, and so you know thinking about that even a little bit for our you know our modern political situation. You know how do we get things right, how do we get things wrong, what does that look like and for whom? So I've been thinking through a lot of that more lately as well, like and for whom. So I've been thinking through a lot of that more lately as well.

Shawn:

I've been doing the same and I've also been focusing on rebuilding Europe and then, I suppose, the global order after World War II, because I think what's becoming clear is there's a lot that we got right, but also a lot that we got wrong then as well, and I think there's this little glimmer of hope that we tend to kind of focus on the worst possible outcome. But I have this hope that there's maybe at least a 50% chance that, yeah, things get pretty bad but it shakes out for the better in the end and that we learn from that.

Dr. Albertus:

Yeah, agreed, I mean, I would say, you know, one of the things that I mentioned sort of in passing but should be taken quite seriously is the fact that the global population is probably going to decline pretty substantially in the next century and that's going to completely rewire how people relate to the land, to their environment, to each other within society. Everything, I think, is going to be reshuffled. When that actually starts to occur and you know, you can see glimmers of it already in certain places like Japan or Germany, um and, and I think, but at a at a far larger scale, that's going to happen and, and in many ways I think that that could represent a new dawn for humanity. If we can kind of get it right, if we can position ourselves in the next decades to take advantage of that and to get that right to build a much more sustainable way of relating to the land and the environment and each other. Frankly, I think that that could be something that's really quite exciting, and there's a lot that can you know. There's a lot of opportunity there.

Shawn:

Dr Albertus, thanks for the conversation and here's to brighter days.

Dr. Albertus:

It was a pleasure to be here. Yes, I'm looking forward to these days.

Shawn:

Trump's aggressive rhetoric toward acquiring Greenland, canada and the Panama Canal reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of modern geopolitics and land power dynamics. As Dr Michael Albertus explained, such territorial ambitions are misguided and potentially harmful. These policies could severely damage international relations, undermine US soft power and destabilize long-standing alliances. Trump's approach ignores these nuanced realities, potentially exacerbating issues like poverty, inequality and climate change, instead of fostering cooperation and mutual benefit. Such aggressive land grabs hearken back to colonial-era thinking, which history has shown to be detrimental to global stability and progress. In the end, america will reap what it sows, and it won't be good. Alright, check back next week for another episode of Deep Dive Chat soon, folks. Thank you, thank you.

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Shawn C. Fettig

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