We are of the land but we cannot be its owners

What is it to know and love the land? Colonists come with their worldview and culture and make themselves at home. They raze the landscape and release foreign plants and animals which thrive and challenge the natural fauna. They take several generations to appreciate and love what had been. Robert Frost wrote of America: "The land was ours before we were the land's. So it has been here."

We consider ownership of water. It applies equally to land, air, wind and sunshine. We don't own such things.

We love the land in our own way, and people who came before or after us, love it too. Some came hundreds of years ago and made changes, cleared bush and released new species.

Then others came and are still coming and doing it. As we loved what we came from, we all settle down and love what truly unites us. As we admit new people, we are obliged to receive them as they are and give them time to be like us.

So we are increasingly enriched (and challenged) by immigration. We are not just Maori and British as we used to be. Still more will come from Europe and Asia and Africa for education or safety or opportunity - as our ancestors did. We enjoy the curry and pasta and sushi. We need to receive them as fellow citizens, and acknowledge this land belongs as much to them as to us.

So what's the point? It's not realistic or true for us who were here first or earlier to claim the elements; they all belong to the land. Even the Government doesn't own them, but protects and manages them for the good of all.

It goes further. We may buy and sell land and say it's ours, but at best we have the right to occupy it for a time. At the root of the law, perhaps that's the difference between real and personal property.

We may put up a fence, make a gate, breed a horse, or buy a bike and say we own them; but we can't make land or increase it, and it's not ours to destroy or even perhaps to modify.

We are of the land, but we no more own it than we can capture the landscape or the sky or those very elements.

To quote Kennedy Warne: "It seems the country is awakening everywhere to the elusive quality of belonging, to the possibility that we might all become tangata whenua, people of the land".

John Tripe is principal with the Wanganui legal firm of Jack Riddet Tripe.