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LAND is the unbeatable source of public revenue because it is both ready-made and bound to gain value as the population grows. That, Henry George reminded us, means people don't have to part with earnings to finance governance.

Yet those who understand this truth have always had trouble over what to call the revenue. George called it a tax, but "tax" normally means earnings that people DO have to part with to finance governance. Using "rent" never really caught on, since "rent" already means payment to land-owners. So people who believe in paying for social costs through collecting the increase in land's value settled for Land (or Site) Value Taxation.

Because the real nature of the revenue from land has not been understood as stemming from land's limited supply, which has nothing to do with taxation, land revenue has appeared incidental to revenue from limited resources, rather than the major instance of it. With wisely apportioning limited resources now a top priority worldwide, we need a closer, more demanding look at land revenue's ecological relevance. It is not what a number of land-revenuers and eco-politicians say it is.

IF CLARITY in language requires keeping the ordinary meaning of words, then "tax" is a ruler's or government's take from earnings or production, and "rent" is payable to the landlord. With unnecessary, conflicting implications of ownership thus removed, land can be deemed simply to belong to the natural domain along with broadcasting frequencies and fish in the rivers, not in the man-made domain where rights of ownership can be asserted. In the natural domain, the given limits of natural resources require licensing that apportions limited use, a privilege normally granted to the highest bidders.

Even where there is a set price, as for fishing or driver's licenses, there is always some use limitation in view of the limits of the physical world, and that limitation is set first before the determination of price. Taxing sets the price only. However, where the number of licenses issued must be limited to stay within given bounds, greater demand will make the price go up in any case, as the price of land does.

Recognizing that the charge for using land is not a tax or rent but a license to use the land means recognizing responsibilities and limitations that would go with acquiring the license because they would go with the land itself, whether urban or rural. The amount of land, though limited, can't be exhausted, but its quality easily can, and therefore, restrictive covenants (for example on mining and logging) would be a natural consequence of licensing land use. Because appreciation in the value of land produces more revenue, motivation to protect the environment would be powerful, the more so the more control is exercised by the community of people that lives in that locality. Controlling land use would be its means of making sure above all that the resource base of revenue endures. In a word, licensing land-use would be a direct means of making land-use sustainable.

LAND-REVENUERSand eco-politicians looking for a source of revenue for a basic income want to combine forces for this worthwhile purpose, but are having a hard time combining the land tax and the pollution tax (eco-tax) which they respectively have separately promoted. Some eco-land-taxers imply that being good or bad is sufficient reason for determining whether to tax or not (see their Green Tax-Shift page [http://www. progress, org/] where they exhort us to "tax the bad" -- land speculators, polluters -- and "not the good" -- wages, and housing).

However, even an amoeba-like capacity to surround and ingest any object cannot, for true land revenuers, make digestible a tax that lacks the Georgist stamp: no one parts with his earnings, either from capital or labour, to pay the tax. By e-mail I did question the digestibility of the pollution tax. Some amazing denials of any problem promptly appeared on my screen, mostly from fellow Americans. Two examples:

• Eco-taxes do not fall on the labour and capital of appropriating either land (with a fence around one's land) or clean air (with the polluter's smokestacks).
• Because some labour and capital produce low pollution, like electric cars, and because pollution taxes wouldn't exceed harm done by polluters (however that is calculated), taxing pollution "doesn't deserve to be called taxing labour and capital".

Neither example can get around what pollution is: an inescapable product of consuming energy, which takes labour and capital. Taxing pollution taxes labour and capital as surely as the consumption VAT and sales tax do. Does calling the tax at the gas pump a pollution tax instead of a sales tax change anything? We know we're not taxing only the oil in the ground that nature alone created.

A tax-the-bad policy by itself has severe difficulties. Noting that governments love to tax rather than to regulate, the Green Tax-Shift page concludes: "Within five years, the Green Tax Shift will be the major focus of all environmental activism". Let us hope not, because if we tax the bad, we make revenue dependent upon environmental abuse. This dependence is justified only if the revenue is then committed to helping this eco-tax to end the abuse, that is, to end itself. Only in a Wonderland world could a Cheshire Cat of a tax bent on disappearing bring about a tax-shift. ("One needs new bad things to tax", said the Red Queen to Alice). Then again, the Cat might linger because revenue-hungry politicians want the damage to continue. Would we really want to shift from income or sales taxes to the eco-tax? In a state unpredictably between disappearing and lingering, taxing environmental damage can't possibly provide the dependable revenue that licensing land-use would, certainly not for financing basic income.

Justice would require distributing resource-use licenses, or the proceeds therefrom, equally to every person affected, which may be what Edward Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist, meant by "Of course eco-licenses are more equitable [than eco-taxes]", when I asked him what he thought of both. But any system can be abused, including licensing.

The World Bank, promoter of fossil fuels development, plans to broker the sale of cheap carbon licenses from third world countries to companies of the North who want more licensing for their own greenhouse emissions. This destructive policy is typical of the global economy, whose development projects Goldsmith rightly considers the environmental problem. What makes the problem devastating is that governments no longer control corporations; corporations now control governments, a point Goldsmith emphasized. Common sense tells us that in this situation eco-taxing well-heeled corporate wrong-doing, perhaps indistinguishable from politicians' accepting a buy-off from corporations, is at best a feel-good substitute ("cop out" in American slang) for the real antidote, revenue-producing licensing with conditions to be met for using land at all. Those conditions, drawn up by an indignant public, wouldn't just have teeth in them, they'd have fangs.

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Whole-system oriented, Mary Lehmann believes in and works for "resource-use licensing yielding basic income trade exchange collateral" ("the rulybitec" to insiders).