But one day, the goose-keeper for Alphenberg, Richard Raven, who was the 17th goose-keeper in Alphenberg history, carelessly set fire to the cottage in which he lived. Both the goose-keeper and the goose perished in the blaze.
Alphenberg never recovered. While Bravenburg enjoyed several more centuries of goose-riches — all the way up to the present day — the people of Alphenberg had to go back to the hard work of earning a living the old-fashioned way. The name of Richard Raven went down in Alphenberg history as the most cursed name of all.
The Moral of the Story
No one lives forever, which means that all pieces of property inevitably pass from one keeper’s hands to another. Yet, as soon as a piece of property falls into the care of a truly careless keeper, its value can be destroyed or dramatically diminished for all time. The generations to come after the careless keeper never receive the benefit of a golden egg from that piece of property again. And, just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the survival of the value of a piece of property is ultimately determined by its worst caretaker.
In 1500, a careless keeper couldn’t do much damage to land. Even when there has been a forest fire, a piece of land can recover within a couple of generations.
But thanks to modern technology, that’s not the case anymore. A single careless property owner can now contaminate a piece of property so completely that the property will be unusable in a thousand years. A single careless company can contaminate an entire region’s water supply. A landfill — asbestos and all — may remain toxic indefinitely. Who knows how long the site of a nuclear accident may take to become inhabitable.
Even worse, when the power to make rapid, permanent, dramatic landscape alterations — even seemingly harmless ones, such as paving new roads and building new houses — has become commonplace, millions of acres of land are being permanently committed to a single destiny each year. These acres are permanently “denaturalized,” such that the folks who live on this earth 100 years from now will never have the choice to keep that land in its natural state.
It Is Over
Los Angeles, for instance, is essentially now a single piece of concrete that covers dozens of square miles. It will never be — and could never be — returned to its natural state. All the golden eggs — the fruits, the wildlife, the stunning views — are gone. They never will be back. A once-beautiful paradise of land in a perfect climate fell into the hands of its 20th-century keepers. They, like Richard Raven, eliminated the possibility that any future generation might get to enjoy this land in any state other than that of being a monolithic concrete slab.
Yes, there are still some “golden geese” in the world, but far fewer than there were even 100 years ago. With each passing year, each passing parking lot, each passing condominium complex, we foreclose the possibility of future generations making a different choice.
Part 3 of the trilogy will run next week.
S.E. Harrison is the author of “Plutonomics: A Unified Theory of Wealth” (http://plutonomics, wordpress.com.)
