property 'rights'

After posting the last item on the economic takeover of Aotearoa, I got to thinking about property rights and our relationship to this 'concept' we find so mightily defended in the West. After all it is only a convention - albeit one that most Westerners agree on - that if we 'own' property we have certain rights.

Globalisation and Autonomy: "Are there other ways to imagine human-territorial relationships that do not reproduce problematic assumptions about different people's characteristics, property, and autonomy? Is there another way to imagine property relations and autonomy that does not divide and dehumanize people? "

Do we need to accept the current notions, or can we: "refuse notions of competing autonomy and individual rights, and propose complex ideas of relational responsibility for the land and each other."

Are the processes of economic takeover, described in the last post, simply part of a last ditch effort by the elite to control the remaining pristine and life-supporting environments of the planet? Are they based on conventions, that one day will be meaningless, as more basic processes of inter-dependence come to the fore and we learn how to live cooperatively, in a low-energy world, using the resources that exist - but are not, and can never be "owned," by mere mortals?