The "Key" to Locke

You can thank Professor Baldwin for the pun. In this excerpt from the Property chapter of his Two Treatises on Civil Government, Locke spends most of his time conjuring up a history of the use of nature as property for humans, quoting the Bible several times as a bastion of credibility. In the same vein as his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Locke has a somewhat suspicious view of nature in its unperturbed state. While Hobbes famously described human life in the “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in The Leviathan, Locke sees nature as something that must be molded and shaped by humans in order for it to be of any use to them. Essentially, nature in its unaltered state has no intrinsic value to us.
The key, then, is to accomplish that molding and shaping with one’s own physical labor. By tilling the ground, planting seeds, and cultivating the crops (I may have left out a few steps), a man gives worth through his own labor to a piece of land that was previously worthless. Because of that labor, Locke asserts that that very piece of land is now the property of the man who gave it its worth. Under this system, everyone starts off on a level playing field. Nature in its totality (i.e., the Earth) has been given to mankind by God, so anyone can tromp out into the wilderness and lay claim to Nature by laboring it into submission. Although he doesn’t say it outright, Locke makes the implication that nature must not just be labored upon, but conquered and forced, much like a slave by his master, to perform a specific purpose which it would never be interested in performing on its own. The difference is that Locke has a problem with human slavery, but advocates the conquest of nature with biblical authority.
Therefore, since everyone started off on that level playing field, a man has a duty to use those natural resources as efficiently as possible, not out of any respect for nature, but out of respect for his fellow man. If he uses nature wastefully, he ought to be punished for “invad[ing] his neighbor’s share” of nature itself. While Locke acknowledges that the amount of natural resources on Earth are pretty much boundless and unable to be depleted (that is, in his time), he still advocates prudence in their exploitation. Locke, as a political theorist, is far more interested in nature’s functions as the property of mankind than any exercise in examining nature in itself. Nature is property, property is power, and power is precisely that with which political scientists are concerned. I think we can call that having nature on-Locke.