Columns

Welcome back team. I hope you had a marvelous holiday.
Like a few of you I was stuck in the library, trying desperately to pull together one of these dissertation thingies.

My obligatory blurb you give, when you catch up with or meet someone who was also silly enough to commit to a thesis, is on property rights. These understandings between people, institutions, and the natural world mean everything to the functioning and fairness of a society. And yet it is a little freaky how difficult it is to philosophically ground these seemingly concrete understandings of ownership. 
Conceptions of property rights have been used to bloodily dispossess whole peoples from their land, as in Australia and Carolina. But read John Locke’s influential “Of Property” and you can easily pick holes in the kind of arguments which justified these atrocities.
One of the key natural resources for which we must define the property rights is water. It is an extremely important global issue and crucial to the developing world. 894 million people today don’t have access to safe freshwater. 1 billion children and a further 1.5 billion adults live without basic sanitation. Water is used to produce food, fuel, energy, and more. Water politics are health, environmental, security, and economic issues. And the pressure is on now because of population growth and climate change.
So I’m in the library, writing a chapter on property rights for a dissertation on water which I figure is one of the most valuable contributions to political studies I could make. And in the dusty Leith Street Storage I stumble upon some work by a well-known figure who had already written on pretty much exact same topic twenty years ago. Guess who ... Rodney ‘ACT Party-leading, climate change-denying, perk-buster-who-it-turns-out-abused-perks-as-taxpayers-flew-his-girlfriend-to-Hawaii-to-give-him-orgasms’ Hide. I felt like Harry Potter coming across Voldemort’s diary while the other students were on vacation. The young bad guy I could connect with, before he began looking as evil as his policies are fucked up. Like Netanyahu or Cheney.
What screwed with me was how good the work was. Really clear thinking, a touching preface, and philosophy in the footnotes! Beautiful. Also, it was very well endowed with references. I’m planning on trying to tap into some weird kind of academic version of penis envy and try and out do the 300-odd items in his bibliography. If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.