No Country for Poor Men (or Women)

[00:00:00]

Quinn: Every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world. What can I do? So every week I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about the very same question, someone who has already answered it for themselves. Someone who's working on the front lines of the future in global health, climate change, AI, food and water, medicine, sustainable agriculture, Alzheimer's research, indigenous data, food stamps, electric school buses. I find out why they're doing the work they're doing, and what we, you and I, can do to support it. To join their work. To fund their work. To find our own way to the front lines of the future.

So this week I want to know, what can we do about land power? It's the most important question. And I'm your host, Quinn Emmett. My guest today is Mike Albertus. Mike is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He's the author of the new book, Land Power. Who has it? Who [00:01:00] doesn't? And how that determines the fate of societies.

In the book, Mike examines how land became power, how it shapes power today still. And how who holds that power determines the fundamental social problems that societies grapple with. Mike studies how countries allocate opportunity and well being among their citizens and the consequences this has for society, why some countries are democratic and others are not, and why some societies fall into civil conflict.

Quinn: For questions or feedback, you can email us at questions at importantnotimportant.com.

Mike, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show.

Mike Albertus: Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

Quinn: Yeah, for sure. Hopefully you'll still feel that way at the end. So the goal really is by the end of our conversation for folks to have a little context for the work you do and why but also why it's important.[00:02:00]

And then most importantly from there, really what they can do about it. The example I always use is it's gnarly to be driving in your car, listening to people talk about climate change for an hour, and then all of a sudden it's over, and you're just kind of like, maybe I'll just drive into that pole. So we want to give people some agency here. But before we get to that, again, we want to build some context. So I have my favorite two part question for you and it actually is the same question, so you've got to listen carefully. Are you ready?

Mike Albertus: I'm ready.

Quinn: Okay. The first part is, why do you have to do this job? Of everyone in the world, why you be the land guy? And two, Why do you have to do this work? So of all the ways that you could have answered the call, why this work in particular, does that make sense?

Mike Albertus: That makes sense. Yeah, and a great question. So why do I in particular do this work? Why do I feel like I'm uniquely situated to do some of this work [00:03:00] and yeah, and what makes me tick on it. I study how countries allocate opportunity and well being among their citizens and the consequences that has for society.

And that involves understanding things like how government works across both democracy and dictatorship, the inequality and redistribution connection and what supports long run economic and political development. And I took a very unusual route to get here. I started as an undergraduate studying mathematics and electrical engineering. And it gave me a very systematic way of thinking about the world and a rigorous way for thinking about the world.

I then became fascinated by things that were going on more broadly internationally. In the Middle East and in the invasion of Iraq, and I got hooked on politics. And, when I went to graduate school, I was interested in learning about everywhere in the world.

And I started doing field work [00:04:00] to learn more about why it is that democracies are oftentimes not as, don't live up to our expectations when it comes to delivering policy quickly And I was traveling in Latin America and everywhere you see, or everywhere at the time I was seeing, pretty significant poverty and glaring inequality.

And I was trying to figure out how that could coexist with democracy for such a long period of time. And as I was trying to get into all of that, I was thinking about how we would get a sense of the policies that a government is delivering, how are they trying to address inequalities, and I was traveling in part into some rural areas. And I was seeing that the state and governments oftentimes don't reach these areas. They have a very limited grasp on what's going on in some of these places. They don't often know their citizens or they neglect them. And people many times didn't have a voice. And repeatedly, when I started to delve into that more and return to the [00:05:00] field, oftentimes I remember, for example, when I went to La Paz in Bolivia and I was working with a land reform agency there, and there was a big group of peasants who were basically banging on the front desk trying to get access to their papers and, the bureaucrats sitting there trying to ignore people, and then they let me into the archives where I could look at everybody's papers, and so my training, my math, my engineering, it led me to be able to systematize data and think about data and the allocation of things like land, which is what my new book, Land Power, is about, in kind of unique ways, I think, for someone who comes at the world from a political angle.

And, and that's something I think that is reflected in my work and provides a little bit of a unique background.

Quinn: I love that. That's amazing perspective. It's always just so fascinating. I'm so lucky again, I've done about 200 of these, sometimes it's not the hero's journey, the catalyst, or my wife's or screenwriter, the inciting incident. Sometimes it's [00:06:00] not applicable at all. And sometimes there's such a direct through line to why someone does what they do.

Mine is much more indirect but either way, as a college friend put it recently, I signed up to write a term paper every week for the rest of my life, which in retrospect feels not great.

So I really appreciate that. It's always great, whatever the route, to find someone who has clearly like a festering wound about something in particular that is so applicable to everything. It's land. Thank you. So let's get a big picture with this. So besides. obvious finite scarcity, we live in a world that's 70 percent water. Why in your view, has land remained such a potent source of influence across all these vastly different cultures and historical periods? You start with Mesopotamia right up to Los Angeles after the fires and commercial real estate after COVID, what's the through line there.

Mike Albertus: Yeah, I mean the through line really [00:07:00] is that land is power. That people and societies are rooted in the land and always have been. The relationships with land have changed a lot over the course of human history. Relationships used to be much more sort of diffuse territorial relationships.

People used to move often times with the movements of herds of animals, for example, or seasonally. but you know, in more recent centuries, as populations have grown, land has become comparatively more scarce. Ever since the rise of agriculture, the appropriation of surplus from land has been key to power and the generation of power, the use of power, the projection of power, as well as power dynamics within society so certainly as of several centuries ago, land became deeply interwoven with economic, social, and political power.

And because land is power, those who own it come to dominate these forms of social, political, and economic power. Whereas those who don't become dominated. And [00:08:00] again, that's something that repeats itself again and again in human societies.

Quinn: I appreciated your idea of the original sins of land seizure, like consuming indigenous lands and how they continue, after all this time, to shape racial hierarchies, wealth gaps, political power and especially now when we see that obviously in the U.S., oh, it turns out, so much wealth has been generated through land. Talk to me about the particular through lines in a place like the U.S. versus Europe versus Asia.

Mike Albertus: Yeah. So, it's hard to overstate how concentrated land was in, you know, much of Europe, Latin America, East Asia, as of a few centuries ago, a very small number of landowners own the vast majority of the land, and other people owed their livelihoods in most cases to those people who were toiling on that land. Whether we're talking about feudalism in Europe, or whether we're talking about kind of landlord tenant relationships in East [00:09:00] Asia, or the Hacienda system, or something like that in Latin America, and, you know, then what I talk about in the book, as the Great Reshuffle that's period of the enormous upheaval in the ownership of land that came with driving factors like, you know, population growth and state making and social conflict.

Those factors all drove an increasing demand for land and an increasing ability of the state to reallocate and reassign that land. And though that then drove, a reshuffling in land in just about every society on earth and it happened in different ways. In East Asia, for example it would range everything from let's say land collectivization after China's civil war to, you know, the granting of land to tenants, after World War II in places like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. And we can see the extremely divergent consequences between say China and you know, Taiwan and South Korea and Japan over the course of [00:10:00] many decades, right, very much deeply related to how they dealt with land. In Europe there were a number of efforts to reallocate land, everything from the French Revolution to post war Italy and you know, pressures on land and places like Spain and Portugal. And in the United States, reshuffling took a bit of a different trajectory than it did in, let's say Europe or East Asia. In the U.S. it looked more like colonialism, right? In the sense you know, people came from Europe and settled on the eastern seaboard and, you know, displaced indigenous peoples as they moved west. But then how land was allocated among settlers generated very different trajectories within America. So in New England, you had relatively equal land holding and a radical experiment in democracy. In the South, you had the creation of the plantation system, that was based on slavery and, that ultimately led to Jim Crow and, later the Civil Rights era. And in the American West, had,the large scale appropriation of [00:11:00] indigenous land and the creation of the reservation system and the like.

So, you know, these initial patterns of landholding concentration then were broken up in different ways. And that had really important consequences for how societies came to be structured.

Quinn: I love it. It's funny. I've been talking to my 12 year old a lot recently about, he's gradually wants to understand what sort of the next level of great, meaningful movies are right to go from Star Wars and Marvel to other things. It basically started and I wrote about this. He wants to watch Jaws and I was like, that's great. But just so you know, you can't unsee Jaws. It's not like stormtroopers getting blown up, whatever. Like you're a kid who loves the ocean.

And the other example I use with him and again, he hasn't seen it, is I'm like, I love that you're learning about World War II, but we can watch Saving Private Ryan when you're ready, but those first 20 minutes, were intended to completely revisit that in a way that you can't forget. Obviously trying to explain [00:12:00] now, it's been so long, but how impactful World War II was. And so that I was so interested in, like you mentioned Japan's post war Land to the Tila reforms. Crazy high speed development, I guess up until the nineties or so versus how in the Soviet Union, the collective farms, not so much famine, coercion, and, at least we got great TV series, the Americans out of it. But talk to me about how those contrast, like, where do they diverge? What are the decisions that were made that really made them diverge so much in their impact?

Mike Albertus: So a lot of it had to do with how land was reallocated. In both cases, whether you're talking about Japan or Russia, we had extreme land holding concentration, let's say, well through the late 1800s into the early 1900s. And in Russia, you know, we had the Bolshevik revolution.

We had large land holdings that were seized en masse. Those were distributed across the country. And then when Stalin came [00:13:00] along, he decided to push people into collectives and forge collective agriculture. And so that involved uprooting people from their specific plots of land and pushing them into collective farming, and that was very useful for the Soviet Union because it enabled the Soviet Union to reach deep into those collectives to extract surplus and to use it to fuel investment in industry and the like.

And that very much advanced in some ways, certain aspects of development in the Soviet Union at the same time as it caused enormous problems in agriculture. You still had quite a substantial population living in rural areas. So it generated all these distortions, all these problems, it fueled, while it fueled industrialization, it also fueled agricultural under productivity, and environmental problems, ultimately, because as agricultural collectives were underproducing, there was an incentive to try and increase that by putting under, farming more land and throwing fertilizer on the land and all that kind of stuff and it [00:14:00] fueled authoritarianism, it really fueled the project of the Soviet Union to extend its power in different places across the world.

And, you know, that's very different from what happened in post war Japan, where the US as an occupying authority encountered this system that was, you know, similar in many ways to feudalism in which we were a very small number of very influential large landowners, politically powerful large landowners that were economically dominant in the Japanese economy, and it became clear that had to change in order to lay the groundwork for democracy, and for a more egalitarian inclusive form of development.

And so Japan instituted these very Draconian limits to the amount of land that individuals could own. Max was just a few acres of land. And as a result all of a sudden everyone who was you know paying extremely high rates as a tenant working the land that was owned by some large landowner.

They now became owners of their own right [00:15:00] of that land, and they could afford to send their kids not to the farms, but rather to schools and within a generation, it started, that started to have enormous payoffs in terms of transforming the Japanese economy towards one of greater industrialization, greater urbanization, much greater productivity in such a way that land became actually less important over time.

Consequently. So it was a very different, that allocation to families and empowering people in Japan was so different than what happened in terms of the efforts at domination and extraction in Russia from people who worked on those farms and that had these huge consequences.

Quinn: It's amazing how little we learn the lessons of time yet in some ways we do, in some ways we don't, and then you look at, the United States biggest voting bloc, what is their greatest concern and obviously the geography and political systems, which change in each country over time, obviously, in so many ways influence so much of this but, it does seem like, and we'll get to this, there may be some best practices [00:16:00] that we've picked up on that, that are, I don't want to say lowest common denominator, but hopefully applicable in more places. I want to focus on the U.S. a little bit here. I'm sure you've had so much time with young children and writing this book, but two of my favorite books of the past 10 years are by an author named Isabel Wilkerson.

She wrote Cast and she wrote The Warmth of Other Suns, which really expanded on the Great Migration, the story of African Americans in the United States moving from Virginia here, but mostly the Deep South, the Jim Crow south to the west and the north. You wrote about the Great Reshuffle, right? Talk to me a little bit about, because again, everybody hears about redlining. Everybody hears about systematic marginalization from AI or machine learning in mortgage applications and insurance. Like we make it so complicated, but it's fairly simple. It's the deprivation of land.

Talk to me about how those two have intersected to really give us context for at least, obviously it goes back further, but the past 70 years.

Mike Albertus: Sure. I mean, maybe I'll even go back a little bit further to set the stage. So as I mentioned [00:17:00] previously, you know, the Deep South was characterized by the plantation system for quite a long period of time prior to the civil war and at the end of the civil war, with the emancipation of Blacks, there was initially an attempt by the government to grant people 40 acres and a mule, right?

To grant formerly enslaved people land and animals to help work it. And that plan moved forward very, very briefly in a select part of the South. And then it was quickly abandoned. And as a result, that promise was never met, and many formerly enslaved Blacks ended up back as sharecroppers, many times for the same plantation owners.

And so that failure to reconcile with that deep inequality and access to the fundamental engine of economic mobility and social mobility, which was land, had enormous consequences that then helped to drive the Great Migration due to the lack of opportunity in the suffocating political [00:18:00] atmosphere, environment of the Jim Crow era, right?

And then, you know as people move to northern cities there was an effort to keep them out, right? And that was also an effort that was rooted in land and that was through things like, you mentioned, redlining. It was also through other sorts of zoning restrictions and what could be built in different areas in order to marginalize certain communities, right? And we see that today. We see the same patterns of segregation that are persisting today in our cities that map onto forms of discriminatory policing, that map onto forms of unequal access to financial instruments and that sort of thing. So in many ways we are still living the consequences of our failure to grapple with the reallocation, the reshuffling of land in the wake of the Civil War.

Quinn: Yeah, I mean it's astonishing how much of what this country is still dealing with. I guess, like, deciding not to deal with on a pretty frequent basis, traces back to giving up on [00:19:00] reconstruction. I've got a bunch of books I can put in the show notes about it, but that is really just such an essential talk about, it's not the original sin, but one of them and, we really did bail on that.

It's amazing. I had a year or two ago, time means nothing anymore. I had on a gentleman who, similar to you, but even nerdier and deeper here, but the Great American Transit Disaster, wrote really the manifesto on why we abandoned public transportation and how so much of it was because of race, even with the systems that still remain in Boston, Chicago, New York, why Atlanta doesn't have what it has and all this other stuff. So of all these different systems and processes does it seem like there's any point at which these land grabs fade away. Or do you see them, a lot of what I write about is we are who we are.

We make a lot of the same decisions over and over again. Are they permanently embedded in our institutions and social structures? Are there any examples of starting to reconcile [00:20:00] with the decisions we made before?

Mike Albertus: I mean I think that in many ways, we can see the shadows of these past land grabs for very long periods of time, right? It's clear that they don't go away within a generation or two and that they continue to fester. They oftentimes are reshaped, are refashioned in different ways, as we talked about with the Great Migration, right?

And what happened in Northern cities as a reflection of what happened in the South or failed to happen in the South after the civil war. So in many ways, we still live with that. But there are also, of course, efforts to grapple with the past and to reconcile with it and trying to address it in different ways. Oftentimes the solutions that are available down the line have to reflect not only what initially happened, but also all of the reality that transpired in the intervening period, right? So, as people, let's say, were spread out across the land, as cities have been built, as property has transferred hands, etc.

If you think about, let's say, in the American context again, [00:21:00] how the government is dealing with relationships with Native American tribes, right? So, that is something, that history of dispossession and displacement, happened a long time ago, but it's still very much relevant to the day to day lives of people who are members of these tribal nations, right?

And as a result, in some cases, the government has, the federal government has come to work with tribes to co manage public lands, or national monuments, like Bear Ears National Monument, for example, defined in part by a co stewardship arrangement with a series of Native American tribes, right, that have ancestral claims over that land. And so there are, modern day, you know, I hate to say solutions per se, because these aren't fix all sorts of things, but reconciliation, right? Or an attempt at recognizing and addressing in certain ways, aspects of the past.

Quinn: I appreciate your focus on how the word solution [00:22:00] doesn't quite get it done. And I think about that all of the time when everyone asks me about climate solutions. And I'm like, ah, it's, there's so much we can do. I'm not sure. It's like The Princess Bride. I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. And I know you've written a lot about potential things we can do. You wrote about, I believe you wrote quite frequently about, we could use, what is it? A tenth of a percent of public land in the West to help with housing and things like that. But look the land grabs, again I'm in Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown's down the street. Just over the bridge.

We're in the thick of it and we're wrestling with it and it's really complicated. I spent 15 years in Los Angeles and two things really come to mind before I move on to the next big glaring piece of this.

And one is I'm sure you heard about, there was a piece of land that was owned by a Black family for a very long time, like on the water just south of L.A. that was taken from them. And the surrounding real estate became [00:23:00] wildly profitable for lack of a better word in a thousand different ways and the family and many different groups over the years have fought to get that land back to them. And then they got it back a few years ago. It was incredible. It was given back to them. Just unreal real estate. And then I guess on the surface, it's surprising, but when you think about it, it isn't. They then decided to sell it back. What had transpired over time as families grow and they become, you know, more diverse and numerous and it becomes really complicated and it turns out one of the best things, what was really denied from them was not the land. It was the wealth that you could build from it and they could gain a little of that not back, but in the moment by selling it and distributing it among the family, but it really brings to mind, we had quite a few friends lose houses in the past couple of months in the LA fires and the neighborhood of Altadena, this just beautiful semi affordable part of the city [00:24:00] where there were so many generational Black homes and those are gone.

And a lot of schools are gone, things like that. And it's not just those particular homes. It's that those opportunities, really do not exist anymore, even with everything we've learned because of how systemic these issues still are in some ways.

Mike Albertus: Sure. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I could give you, easily a dozen examples of other places that I've studied where we see similar kinds of dynamics where society simply changed between the time of dispossession and the time of repossession if it happens, right?

So another place that I did field work for the book was South Africa. And, set of communities in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa, and, you know, they had been forcibly displaced under apartheid in 1954, and the government came with a bunch of trucks and carted them off the land and gave it to white settlers, land changed hands a couple of times.

It ended up in the hands of an agribusiness that started growing sugarcane at a commercial scale. And, circa [00:25:00] 2008, when this land was handed back to communities, people didn't have training in commercial sugarcane. It didn't exist at the time they were displaced in that area. And many people had moved to other places.

And so the communities decided to take the land back and lease it back to the company and, you know, gain revenue from that leasing arrangement. And there are a number of other dynamics tied into it, but it's a common story, whether it's in South Africa or in many other places that, again, the society that you start with at the time of land displacement removal is different from the one later on and interests are different as well.

And so when people come back to that land or that ownership, then it might mean something very different in this new context, right?

Quinn: Yeah.

And look, the land back movements are incredible and complicated and simple and complicated. And we are obligated to not just execute on the surface level land back, but also to say, sorry, there's four empty malls on it. You should [00:26:00] not be obligated now that you're the steward of this land again to deal with that shit like that was our failed use of it. And by the way, the land is also different over time. God knows like what we've done to some of this stuff. So there's a big glaring point I want to get to here. Which is, you only have to watch so many BBC shows to realize and remember that, especially, and in the U.S. too, land was basically just handed out to white guys. What is it about us that makes it so difficult still to incorporate women's rights specifically across the world in these small scale or large scale land transitions? And are there any especially effective solutions, fixes, for empowering women through property rights that you've run into?

Mike Albertus: So the you know, the political, the social, the economic power of land means that it cuts these deep ruts in society along major identity markers like race and also like gender, right? And so we see, [00:27:00] time and again, whether it's in the United States, Canada, South Africa and other places, Australia and other places, when we see the large scale appropriation and reallocation of land to settlers, the overwhelming bulk of recipients are white men in these cases right through the course of kind of the colonial era.

In some cases that was a relic of who was out there settling the land. But in other cases, that was even deepened by explicit state policies banning women from getting access to land. And that's what happened, let's say, in Canada, right? So Canada, like in the US, had a Homestead Act in the 1870s and over the subsequent 75 years doled out hundreds of millions of acres of land, but they expressly forbid women from homesteading, single women from homesteading.

And so as a result, all the, basically almost all this land went to men. You see that decades later in social economic [00:28:00] statistics about the welfare gap between men and women. Right? But there are now, there are countries who are trying to address that issue in serious and significant ways, right?

So let me give you a different example. With Bolivia, right? So Bolivia is a country where there was a revolution in 1952. They had this legacy of very unequal land holding from the Spanish colonial era that persisted all the way to the 1950s. That land was then taken from people who had kind of colonial roots.

It was granted to people, but people didn't get titles over that land, and it was basically granted to men,

When Ivo Morales, the first indigenous leader, in Bolivia's independence era, came into power in the 2000s. He came into power in part with support from social movements that were empowering women and women said, Hey, we also want access to land and land is this asset that can empower us economically and both within the household, as well as outside of it.

And as a result, the government [00:29:00] undertook this enormous land titling effort to formalize all this land in the countryside, and they started jointly titling property to men and women. So all of a sudden, women become huge property owners in Bolivia. And, you know, other countries are doing that as well.

So one very simple, at least theoretically, right? Is to incorporate women in land titles, right? In property titles, in house titles, in car titles, you name it, writing people onto the deed of a property has implications for gender relationships and gender mobility within society. And so that's a very simple thing.

Quinn: Compared to everything else. It really is. And again, that can extend for, for quite a while. It's all relative. Like we have to take the low hanging fruit where we can get it. Cause we have to start somewhere. And we have to start doing these things that are again, not lowest common denominator, but are broadly applicable and repeatable in a lot of different places. I want to get to more about restitution and reparation of land to people, but I'm also, as we work towards solutions [00:30:00] and answering, what can we do? I'm curious where have you seen land related policies genuinely boost environmental resilience versus continuing to degrade it in so many places.

The potpourri, the variety of ways we have degraded it is almost endless, but, I'm curious, like we need and my friend, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has done a lot of work on this with urban and coastal stuff, but solutions that help with biodiversity loss and resource depletion, and obviously sea level rise and drought and things like that. So how would you fix it?

Mike Albertus: Yeah. Yeah, that's a softball right there. You know, this is one of these things where solutions, I think, elude us in the sense of complete fixes, right? So you think about the United States and the loss of the prairies, basically almost the entire prairies and the biodiversity that the prairie supported was almost completely lost in the settlement of the West United States, right?

There's no [00:31:00] way in which you can recuperate that really at an ecosystem level in the ways that would look anything like it did previously. And so as a result, the sort of policies that are available to us are, in some sense, policies that aren't complete fixes, right? And so we have this history of the past that we have to grapple with.

That being said, there are many policy ideas that are out there that are being enacted in ways that are helpful. So let me give you an example. One example is from Chile, where I did field work for the book as well in Patagonia National Park. So in 2014, about 6 percent of Chile's land mass and coastal ecosystems were protected under congressional designations.

But there had been an effort at preservation, land preservation, ecosystem conservation in Chile. And that had been pushed in part by a pair of American philanthropists, Chris and Doug [00:32:00] Tompkins, you know, the founder of North Face and the first CEO of Patagonia. They had started, in the nineties, you know, buying up large tracts of land in the Patagonia region, principally in Chile for the purposes of conservation there.

And, you know, over the course of 20 years or more, they ultimately came to a deal with the Chilean government to grant that land over to the government in exchange for the government promising to both protect that land, conserve it, put it in park as a parkland designation, as well as to protect more land beyond that.

And as part of that deal, the government created this thing called the Route of Parks, which is now, parks that span over 1500 kilometers north to south across Patagonia. That's come to preserve over 30 percent now of the country's land and conserve the ecosystems that are in there and not only do that, but that also, where there has been land degradation like [00:33:00] Patagonia National Park, which was previously a ranch, basically a sheep ranch at a large scale that it led to a lot of degradation of the of local ecosystems and loss in biodiversity to rewild those areas right to open them back up to species and to, you know, to tear down fencing and reintroduce species and that has been really quite successful.

And so now, you know, people are coming to visit these areas, and enjoy them and experience them and then leave them and try and leave no trace as they visit, right? So that's a model, I should say that other countries are starting to look towards like China, Canada, Norway, all have in the works major national park systems that are coming up in the next 10 or 15 years that in part look to this example, right?

So that's not possible everywhere where land is now under private ownership at an extremely large scale and it's fractionated like in the U. S. that's much more difficult. So in the U. S. when it comes to preserving biodiversity and the like, we have to think more along the lines of land trusts and conservation [00:34:00] easements and that sort of thing.

And so the tools that you're going to use in any particular context are going to vary, but there are many policy ideas that are out there.

Quinn: I love that example, that is some place I have always wanted to go.

Mike Albertus: It's stunning. Get there. It’s amazing.

Quinn: It sounds incredible. I also recently read this is mostly off topic. The Wager. Did you read about that? Shipwreck book.

Mike Albertus: Oh, Yes, yes.

Quinn: Off the coast of Patagonia. Not great. Doesn't, no thank you. That's a no for me. I want to go there. Not like that. No, thank you. That's great. Again it's really exciting to hear about rewilding and it's happening in Scotland and Chile and all these different things. But like you said, there's a lot of places. I don't want to say, are too far gone, though I think that obviously applies in a lot of ways. That may take well beyond our lifetimes, which is okay.

As long as we get started. Or again, like you said, in the US we've made land so complicated between private ownership and commercial and industry and things like that, that it's going to take arrangements. So let's talk about answering what we call the most important question, which is, [00:35:00] what can I do?

What can we do? And so we typically try to align with how our app which is what can I do dot earth, how it works, which is along these specific verbs, as we call them, imagine it's Mad Libs, which is to be heard which is talking to your representatives at every level about really specific, measurable policies. Donating to places that are, again, reputable and often doing work on the front lines by people who are on the front lines and are of them, volunteering and organizing, getting educated, which is a great first step. Talk to me about in a world where people can either or feel overwhelmed or impotent about things like this, what are the most practical ways our listeners can push for more equitable land use policies?

Let's start in their own communities.

Mike Albertus: Yeah, I love that question. So, you know, land in many ways can feel like this abstract concept. It can feel like something big and distant in the ways we've been talking about it. But it's important to keep in mind that everybody is rooted in the [00:36:00] land, everybody lives in a space right that is tied to land and that in many ways identity is formed around and that land has a history too. And that land has been changing in many ways since its settlement.

And so there are many things that people can do you know with their own property or in their own community in order to try and address some of the issues that we've been talking about here. So it could be everything like Hey, put your partner on the, on the house title, right? On the house deed to, hey, planting a garden in your yard or, reconsider that grass, plant a pollinator friendly space to, what are you eating in your home?

Right. How do we think about consumption and food and land use? About 30% of all land in the United States is used for either grazing or raising cattle, you know, mainly for beef consumption. And so cutting down on, eating one less serving a beef a week actually has a big impact on land use.

Also, [00:37:00] thinking about, you know, the history of the land that you are on, right? Find out who lived there, what indigenous community lived there, read a little bit about how they were displaced, and think about donating to a tribal council or tribal initiatives, that are many times still active in those same places, right?

You can support climate action by donating to organizations like the World Wildlife Fund or Tompkins Conservation, which is critical in the creation of that Patagonia National Park, or, you know, broader campaigns like Stand For Her Land campaign, which is a campaign to empower women's access to property in societies around the globe.

So there are many things that you can do even from your own home in order to impact these issues.

Quinn: I love that. What about at sort of, without getting too far into it, the federal level's a little bit of a shitshow at the moment. We really like trying to operate as much as we can at the state level. Pros and cons of federalism here.

But obviously that's as much as we look for not cookie cutter, but repeatable [00:38:00] policies and principles that can be operated in as many different states as possible.

Obviously they're all very different. What have you found at the state level, which is that in between people can be effective? What should they be talking to their representatives about?

Mike Albertus: It depends on the land issues that you're most passionate about and land related issues that you're most passionate about. So let's say, if you're passionate about restitution and dealing with dispossession of indigenous communities, you can look to places like the state of California and how they have incorporated indigenous communities into, again, the stewardship and management of public lands, right?

And that's a state level decision, and state representatives are making decisions about that that are consequential decisions for the involvement of these communities in places that they've been displaced from, right? And what that looks like in terms of, is it simply is there some sort of management, that goes on over those lands, or maybe there's revenue streams that help to reconstitute community life that has declined as a [00:39:00] result of land settlement in those places, or you could think back to the environmental questions, a place like Minnesota, for example, is quite active in trying to create conservation easements so property owners can strike deals with the Department of Natural Resources on how to deal with their own property in terms of preserving let's say, wetlands or watersheds that are on their property.

You can think about how to support local farmers in practices like regenerative agriculture. So not just local and organic, but also ways to actually try and regenerate soils, and watersheds that have been depleted over the course of many decades through settlement.

So again, it depends on what you're passionate about, but there's really plenty out there.

Quinn: Yeah, there's lots to do.

I wonder, public records wise, how many states are really aware of, just surface level, and what kind of research can they conduct about what percentage of private land is [00:40:00] owned by men still, just awareness wise. I wonder what kind of study can be done there to just get somebody to go through it and say like, Hey, look it's 90%, is just white men.

I'm curious, and again, like that might seem like a waste of time to some folks, but it is amazing how far awareness on its own can go.

Mike Albertus: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, you can see some of this stuff. There's obviously, you know, county level property registers that people can go sift through and look at these sorts of things. You can expand that beyond any given county. There are many ancestral records too that are online, census based records that can help to shed light on some of these questions as well.

And so as people are looking at their own family histories, they might consider some of these questions in their own family histories and family trees.

Quinn: I love it. Just the fact that my wife lets me stay in our house is shocking to me every day. So this is the least I can do is try to pay it back in some way. Truly I wake up every day and I'm like, why are you still here?

There's so many crocs everywhere in our house. So Mike, we have a few [00:41:00] questions we ask everybody that aren't directly related or a little more related to you and doing this work and finding your way in and then we're gonna get you out of here. When was the first time in your life when you really realized you had called the power of change or the power to do something meaningful outside yourself could have been running for office in fifth grade or anything like that when you realized oh look what I can do or with a team of people look what we can do?

Mike Albertus: One really impactful one for me or one that I remember very concretely came through sort of a chance meeting in many ways through someone who I met in the Highlands of Peru about an hour and a half outside of Cusco. And I was doing field work at a former hacienda, former large property, that was expropriated by the government there in the early 1970s and turned over to people who were basically forcibly working that land.

And I met a woman who was in her early seventies who told me about her life growing up on [00:42:00] that property basically having to work without pay six days a week for this landowner, as she put it, working her like a donkey, in the fields, day after day. And it was such a powerful experience because she was standing in the former ruins of this hacienda and a place where she had, grown up in almost slave like sort of conditions under this portrait of the dictator who was the one who actually reallocated that land and she was telling me her story and I asked her hey, can I use this material and that material ended up in my first book and it ended up a photo of her at the gate of this former hacienda is the image on the cover of my first book, and it's this powerful image of how the tide can turn on the land and how change can be so, for her this change in the land and the ownership of the land was her life.

It was everything to her and I've had many people ask me about that cover since [00:43:00] and I have had people read that book and say, Hey, that has impacted how I've done work. And so it made me realize the power of the ability to tell a story of somebody who doesn't have, you know, a prominent voice and who, throughout the course of her life, was someone who owed much of her life to someone who was more powerful.

So that to me felt like a big transformation and a big moment of change, both, you know, in her life, in that society and in the very little way of me being able to kind of highlight that.

Quinn: I love that. Amazing how one story can go so, so far. And again, go even beyond you, however much intentionally it impacts folks. That's awesome. Again, with all the time you have, what is a book you've read in the past year or so that has either opened your mind to a topic you hadn't considered before or changed your thinking in some way, or could just be like me, fiction about dragons that turns your brain off at night.

And we've got a whole list up on Bookshop.

Mike Albertus: I find it [00:44:00] so difficult to read with, with really little kids in the house and trying to get things done. But one book that I read, that was a couple of years ago, but was really a fascinating book. And I found made me think in a lot of, in a lot of interesting ways, was Barbarian Days Surfing Life by William Finnegan.

Quinn: Yeah, yeah. I've heard of it. I haven't read it. Yeah.

Mike Albertus: It's a fantastic book. The writing is just enthralling in many different ways. I'm not a surfer, although I'm a person who loves the outdoors and I found that a lens into that world to be so evocative in ways that I had never anticipated. But the thing that made me really love the book is the fact that it's such an intellectually engaged path through a physical world, right? It's so engaged with the different places that he's at and he was a long time journalist who studied you know pretty deeply and covered the areas that he ultimately ended up going to to surf as [00:45:00] well. And so it was this, it's this fascinating combination of things but again to me it paints this really vivid picture of life from a different angle that I hadn't previously considered and that for me is, motivating and in many ways for thinking about how to engage in the broader world.

Quinn: I love that. It's incredible how many different perspectives there are if we just think about it without even going whatever they call it, woke as you need to be. I was thinking recently, my uncle is an extremely small minority owner of a low level British soccer team, and finances are very tight. But the one thing like is non-negotiable is the field, it's the pitch, as they call it. And I remember him describing to me no one knows more about grass than these groundkeepers who don't have billions in Saudi money to replace it every year. And you're like, yeah, this person, their experience of this land is so beyond mine, and what other [00:46:00] versions of that are there out there right?

Folks like that, it's incredible.

Mike Albertus: So many versions. That's what makes the world great.

Quinn: I love it. I'm sure you've stumbled on this cause it's so much bigger than it was then, audio books when you have small children, I poo poo’d them like so many morons and then a buddy who had older kids than mine was like, try listening to them and no one can ask you questions. And it was amazing.

Audiobooks are great.

Mike Albertus: Yeah. Yes, totally. I'm into that podcast all the time, where I can it.

Quinn: It's truly like wherever you can get it.

We just actually launched our second ever podcast. It's called, it's a parenting podcast and it's basically parenting in these specific times. It's our way of broadening the funnel of people we're reaching and then radicalizing them towards taking action. But we're calling it not right now because that's what you end up saying to your children 470 times a day. But it's also like what you say to the notifications on your phone when you're actually trying to be a parent is no, no, no, no, I don't need democracy tweets right now, please.

Mike Albertus: It's such a [00:47:00] strange time to be a parent.

Quinn: It's very strange.

And now they're old enough to ask questions and that's just exhausting.

Mike Albertus: Yeah. Yeah, right around the corner for me.

Quinn: Good luck. Good luck with that. I don't have answers for you, man. My children will definitely tell you I don't have answers. This has all been fantastic.

I really appreciate it. Is there anything I missed? Anything you want to leave us with?

Mike Albertus: I think that's most of it. I guess I would say, everybody's got a history. You don't have to dig very deep to find it. You can learn so much about it. I mean, it's been fun actually in my own family history. My dad has been nerding out on family ancestry for the last 15 years or so since he retired and even a little bit before that. And most recently, he traced his family basically back to serfdom basically under Russian occupation of Poland. And so this stuff is fascinating. Recently dug up land records on that, in the last year not very long ago, a few, a couple of generations.

Couple generations. And there's a story, there's a through line directly from there to where we're at, in my family. And so I [00:48:00] found that to be really insightful and fascinating. So I would encourage people to think along similar lines in their own lives.

Quinn: I love that. Thank you for all this. Where can your book is on sale, right? And it's on sale in the UK now as well. Right?

Mike Albertus: Yep. It's in the US, it's in the UK. It's an audio book, ebook, hard cover, you name it. I'd love to hear anybody else feedback as well. Feel free to reach out.

Quinn: Yeah. And we'll put up all the links to it. We usually use a Bookshop and things like that to try to, not support the monsters.

Anywhere else online do you do any other work people can follow? I know you Substack and some things like that.

Mike Albertus: Yep. Yeah, I got a Substack, The Good Society. I'm on Twitter and Bluesky, got a website and all that good stuff. So yeah, the Substack is kind of devoted to the more here and now, a bit more US focused on current policy debates, and how they relate to the land, but more broadly to our political environment, which, hey, as you know, plenty going on.

Quinn: It's just a delight. Thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome. It is really one of those things I have to be very careful I don't start [00:49:00] pulling the string on. Cause I'll just disappear like right down land use forever.

Mike Albertus: I get, I get it. Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. It was a fascinating conversation.