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Inherit the Earth
Why the Wealthy Are Buying Land They'll Never See, and What It Means for the Rest of Us
by Dana Kowalski
Chapter 1: 1. What Land Used to Mean
In 1925, a South African farmer named Jacob de Villiers stood on his property in the Karoo and owned something that his family had worked for three generations. The land was not particularly valuable by the standards of commodity markets or real estate speculation. It was semi-arid, unsuitable for most crops, adequate for sheep and goats if you worked it carefully and knew its seasonal rhythms. De Villiers knew those rhythms. His grandfather had learned them from Khoi herders who had occupied the same landscape centuries before. The land was mapped in his body—the location of every reliable spring, the grazing patterns that prevented overuse, the soil composition that determined which crops could survive drought years.
When de Villiers looked at his land, he did not see a financial asset awaiting appreciation. He saw a place where his children would work and where his grandchildren might do the same. He saw continuity. He saw the possibility of modest sufficiency—not wealth, but the absence of destitution. He saw identity. The land was not separate from who he was; it was a fundamental part of his answer to the question: who am I? To lose the land would have been to lose something closer to a body part than to a possession.
This way of relating to land—as livelihood, as home, as the ground of identity and community—was not unique to de Villiers or to South Africa. It was, for nearly all of human