I will state upfront that I think Zuckerberg is an asshole for doing this. But the reality is that there are a lot of problems with the way native land gets str

I will state upfront that I think Zuckerberg is an asshole for doing this. But the reality is that there are a lot of problems with the way native land gets structured legally. Customary land accounts for 97% of land in Papua New Guinea. This is basically tribal land. There are more than 800 languages spoken there and about 40% of residents still support themselves in a traditional subsistence tribal lifestyle. In some sense, it is a success in terms of protecting native traditions. It also means only 3% of the land can be developed. You cannot get a mortgage if a bank cannot take possession of the land. This barrier to accessing funds is a huge obstacle to real estate development on most tribal lands in any country. Papua New Guinea has terrible intractable poverty and some of the worst domestic violence in the world. The violence there is so bad it is comparable to violence typically only seen in war zones. Violence and poverty tend to fuel one another. People trapped in poverty commit violence because they are frustrated and angry. Violence both destroys resources and makes it unsafe and unwise to try to invest money in development. Historically, agrarian cultures and more modern cultures tend to displace hunter gatherer societies. Hunter gatherer cultures support only very low population levels. It takes a lot of land to feed each individual under this model. In order to return to a hunter gatherer model for the world, billions of people would need to die. Modern agriculture is what makes modern life and population levels at all feasible. Holding the land as a group sounds like a nice ideal, but it has a really poor track record for actually fostering some kind of high quality of (modern) life. I don't know what the answer is. I am some small part Cherokee. I have kind of a romantic attachment to the idea of preserving native culture and practices. But this particular real estate practice seems to do more harm than good. I wish I had a brilliant answer for how to preserve native land and also foster development. But those two things seem to be diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible. Someone who knows a good answer, pretty please step forward and tell me otherwise. I would love to learn that I am wrong.