The comments of Rep. Jonathan Fritz about the sanctity of private property in last week’s River Reporter [click here to read that article] have the ring of someone who is absolutely certain of the rightness of his position. But it doesn’t take much to punch some holes in the logic of what he is saying.

On a strictly practical level, the idea that what you do on your property is strictly your business might make sense if that activity stayed 100 percent on your property. But fracking doesn’t work that way. Because it busts through and contaminates the water table that runs under everyone’s property, when you frack on your property it absolutely is a matter that concerns the rest of us.

But there’s a bigger issue at stake. For the entire length of human history, we have relied on the abundance of nature, the aggregate product and activities of all living things, for our survival and our thriving. We now find ourselves in a situation in which nature is rapidly declining. For the millions of years that Earth has been developing as a livable planet, all of these living plants and animals have enjoyed a freedom, a wildness to pursue their own agendas. Even though that has entailed competition between species, the overall effect has been to create the most beneficial environment for all to thrive.

The latest iteration of human economic culture over the last couple hundred years, of the exaltation of private property, is based on a slave-owning mentality. If I own it I can do whatever I want with it. That logic has allowed certain individuals to turn the natural wealth of the land, which benefits all of us, into the abstract wealth of money in the bank, which benefits only them. That’s why we see the forests disappearing, the water growing more polluted, the air filling with carbon and rapidly heating the planet.

At this late date for the survival of the human race, we can’t afford to have leaders in positions of power who fare this poorly on points of logic. And we have to rethink the ideas around the stewardship of land, which may have been presented to us as truth, but are rapidly leading to our destruction.

Doug Rogers lives in Long Eddy, NY.