Allow me to present a hypothetical situations. Let's say that my property is considered to be 10 acres by me. Let's imagine that 5 of those acres are woodlot which is presently being allowed to grow so as to be used in a silviculture nature for wood home heating in the future.
If someone comes along and clears an acre of the land and builds a cabin on it would it now be excepted to belong to them or would the use of force be required to settle the matter?
Would you have altered/enhanced/improved the land being used for silviculture in any way?
For this example, no. No action taken on one's part... only intention.
My feeling is that instead of ownership an approach of stewardship may be better suited for a voluntariest's society so as to avoid force by violence. Some common agreement of good stewardship among the majority consensus of ones community may lead to less conflict because of the concept of ownership.
Ownership, in terms of one's person, makes total sense to me though.
The vaguely defined idea of stewardship potentiates violent conflict. That is the problem. We require, as individuals, scarce resources for survival and our wants and needs. With no universalizable, concrete reality based norm for how a man may acquire property, arbitrary, non-universalizable and violent conflict potentiating beliefs (such as the “divine right” or the “authority” of a badge) take over.
It seems to me that Stewardship is pretty straight forward if it is considered only to be that which will not harm (and ideally benefit) the area of Earth (the property) to which one is referring.
Normally conflict is more likely to arise when considerations are being made to somehow alter the terrain; thereby putting up some inaginaey boundary markers; by an action which may or may not be benificial to the marked out terrain and therefore would be an example of poor stewardship in the eyes of a culture raised to put The Mother first.
Perhaps the concept of ownership begets the violence?
Under the stewardship model you are advocating now, just so I can get a better picture of what you mean, would a house that I built myself be mine? What if I plant an apple tree next to it? Is that mine, as well?