It became a niche segment in the real estate. The idea is you find land that is cheap, but you have a feeling it has mineral wealth. You buy it cheap, get the survey done, and show that it was really worth a lot more. But instead of building a mine/oil well, you declare the land undeveloped for perpetuity. The tax benefit you receive is commensurate to the (now highly increased) value of the land.
You make a profit this way, and the environment benefits.
It's a very risky part of real estate. There are lots of environmental groups who closely monitor the land, and will file a lawsuit if they suspect you are developing on the land. Fighting lawsuits is part of the risk.
Anyway, the person who did the presentation showed some interesting statistics. Supposedly, for every 10 acres of land that is developed in a given year, roughly 9 acres are declared undevelopable for perpetuity. That's really significant (if true).
(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
https://www.thedrive.com/news/worlds-largest-wildlife-bridge...
It has public rights of way (if on foot, horse or bicycle) crossing the whole country. You can walk from one end of Britain to the other without trespassing, and without using roads (much). Many of these paths are very, very old, in a few cases Roman or pre-Roman, although more are medieval. Until recently, they were based on common law rights, although they're now in statute. The situation is a happy hangover of the medieval approach to property rights, which is based on custom and usage and negotiation instead of strict statute. The American eighteenth-century enlightenment approach is an attempt to make everything tidy: it's based on the rationalist idea that a thing is its definition and nothing more. So private property is private, that means nobody else can use it: case closed.
The medievals also held in theory (not always in practice, hahaha) that one had a moral duty to use wealth for the public benefit, and that not doing so was theft. So buying up land and kicking everybody off was not only frowned upon, but could also get you into legal trouble, and possibly into trouble with the Church.
EDIT:
A few points since I didn't mean this to be a controversial comment but it seems to have started an argument:
- I should have mentioned the vast public lands in the western US, since they provide a counterpoint.
- The liability issue in the US obviously affects access to land, but could be ameliorated in principle (I would think).
- My comment is not a general defense of British land usage approach. There are huge problems, including but not limited to the tiny number of big landowners. I should have prefaced my first paragraph with "in some respects". Similarly, it is not a general defense of the medieval approach, and certainly not of serfdom.
- The UK's problem with vast landowners got worse in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, with the Dissolution, the enclosure acts and clearances. Land becomes far more concentrated at this time, and the social distance between landlord and tenant much greater. Older lords' houses tend to be built very near roads where anyone can talk to them (whether to beg or to threaten), whereas the eighteenth century ones, as well as being much bigger, are far from the road in huge parks, guarded by layers of servants. The historian E.P. Thompson talks about the "triumph of law over custom" -- in other words, "what you and your ancestors have agreed with us and our ancestors up until this time doesn't matter, we've managed to get this law written down that gets you off the land, now get lost".
The UK is a small, densely populated country without large areas of true wilderness. Over 90% of the country's land is private. The one area of the UK where there are large expanses of land without many inhabitants is Scotland (due to the Clearances), but the land there is still mostly owned by large land barons, and so Scotland has a more permissive law that allows non-destructive access to almost all private land (Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003).
The US is almost half public land, it's absolutely gigantic, and it has numerous areas where you can be hundreds of miles away from the closest real settlement. We don't need traditional paths and easements and whatever when we have millions of acres of National Forest and BLM land that you can access freely. There are land barons in the US, but by absolute area, they did a fairly poor job of buying up the country's land before the federal government could protect it.
Almost all of the US’s public lands are west of the Rockies. If you live in Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington then you can basically throw a rock and hit some public lands. East of the Rockies, you can go your entire life without ever even seeing public lands.
https://www.backpacker.com/stories/issues/environment/americ...
50+yr ago they were far more utilized (per capita) because they weren't closed to motorized recreation and hunting and fishing hadn't yet been regulated with intent to discourage participation.
But yes, the vast BLM lands out west have no analogue in the east.
Or maybe we could build suburbs with these sorts of walking-paths baked in from the beginning. Mine was laid down in the 70s, so too late for that now...
Don't get me wrong - I love my neighbors, and I find that most people are amenable to reasonable requests, without needing the law to lean on them, but it would be nice to codify this a bit.
If enough people cross their land over a long enough period of time (varies by jurisdiction) without permission, that creates a "prescriptive easement," which is essentially what you're asking for. Some decent info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement#By_prescription
We can. They exist. I've been in some of them.
First, why would it hurt to codify land access in a clearer way. And second. There are continuous battles with private landowners of where and how to access the public lands that you claim mean we don't need traditional paths or easements. See the recent Wyoming corning crossing case.
There are some public lands within a 5 minute walk of my house that I cannot access because rich landowners have intentionally cordoned them off. They're beautiful areas that should remain public. Why should you be able to effectively buy public land by restricting access to it maliciously? Why shouldn't Americans take seriously access to our shared land resources?
Again, over 90% of UK land is private, and large land barons control the vast majority of that. We just don't have a similarly widespread issue with land access in the US.
It's also worth noting how integral Monasteries were to society and provided many of the essential services (from medicine, education, diplomacy etc down to beer and bread). So the "getting in trouble with the church" was actually a stronger mechanism than you would think as they had a large presence and were prescient to common life.
You may be unaware, but the American legal system allows for property owners to be held civilly responsible for the actions of uninvited individuals, including criminals with intent beyond simple trepass, that harm themselves on said private property, unless the owner has taken many somewhat onerous steps to post No Trespassing signs often with requirements of details on the signs and posted in short intervals.
So why would a property owner want to allow random individuals to cross their land if it may mean someone can sue them for damages because they tripped and broke an arm, etc.?
US has similar laws that you talk about where you have to give easement or right of way.
https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/projects/wilder-blean
https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/why-rewild/reintroductio...
This is mirrored by reintroduction schemes of red kites and beavers in the UK, as well as similar projects with bison, wolves and other species on the European mainland.
That's not to mention deer, which are both wild and doing really well - partly because of the lack of wolves, ironically!
Really we should designate more areas as wilderness. i.e. no machinery. Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s.
This land is only preserved from development because people are willing to pay taxes for the government to monitor and fence the land, and pay higher property values because there's less land for development.
If you want people to be OK with those costs, it really helps for them to be able to actually go and see the beautiful land that they are preserving. It's not reasonable to expect people to care about nature of you don't let them experience it.
There's something uniquely evil about locking the public out of public lands.
I'm looking at you, too, Vinod Khosla.
owns 6000 acres of checkerboard land that’s effectively 20,000 acres with a notorious ranch manager.
Lost his case in Fed courts in Wyoming and on appeal, trying to do Supreme Court now.
Wyofile has consistently good coverage on this.
I'm not sure that it created any sort of ground easement.
It basically allows you to 'hop' from one quadrant to the cross quadrant without touching the other two quadrants of the corner. The guy in that case used a ladder to do that IIRC so he only violated their 'airspace' up until that ruling.
> locked out of ONE OF THE ONLY western access roads
So not locked out. And accessible from all 4 orientations.
(edit: lol, break the rules and downvote all you want. this site loves dishonest journalism if it confirms their wrong biases)
IDK anything about Montana, but that feels inexpensive.
~1500/acre is very normal for Montana farm/pasture land.
It is undisclosed how much American Prairie paid, it will be interesting to see if that ever gets disclosed.
People that own undeveloped land purely for the reason of blocking someone else do not have any place in the capitalist system. It is nice someone is working on undoing that, through the mechanisms they have available.
I think you need to remember that Lock and Smith were writing in a century when "they're not using it (by our definition), so we can just go take it" was the legal underpinning by which the english colonies mostly justified forcing the natives off their land and that sort of interpretive creativity had been used for hundreds of years by the various parties in England seeking to get one over on each other.
Now, there's a lot to be said for "default" public access to/through un-posted, unimproved land and there's an even stronger argument in favor of landowners (public included) being required to have some legal access to land they own but the american system where the land owner has fairly unlimited right to kick other people off his property (of course the .gov excepts themselves) arises out of the disputes that the historical english doctrine (there's a word for it but escapes me) causes.
I think people buying up land strategically to block access to other land is obviously bad and the whole corner crossing thing should have been a joke, but this is a very thorny and complex problem.
What happened in parts of New England was people were expanding into native territory, the natives would show up appeal to these people's governments "hey, one of your assholes built a farm where I hunt, tell that guy to GTFO" and sometimes they'd win but usually the .gov would say basically "you weren't using it in any way we recognize, piss off", basically using the historical doctrine they got from England (which you can't really fault them for in the absence of other doctrine, though clearly their strategic vision was lacking), until eventually, farm by farm and pasture by pasture so much had been taken that the natives were so squeezed a lot of them cast their lot in with King Phillip. And after that the various lawmaking bodies started saying things like "hey maybe that weird Roger guy was onto something with his whole 'they're using it their own way, we oughta pay em for it' schtick" and writing protections for dis-used property into law and restricting what we now call adverse possession so as to reduce/prevent such disputes from reaching a boiling point going forward.
> “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”
Adam Smith inferred that strict property rights were overall good for law and order and developing society, but that in the long run they would lead to inequality (which in his views was an acceptable tradeoff if the overall lot of the poor was improved).
More to your point, Adam Smith was skeptical of commons. The experience in England at the time was that commonly owned land was abused and neglected.
> “It is in the interest of every proprietor to cultivate that, which belongs to himself, and to neglect that, which belongs to all.”
There's really nothing about "capitalism" as a system that is mutually exclusive with also preserving nature. It just needs to be tied into an ownership structure (private or public) that is incentivized to preserve it.
For the many downvoters do this thought experiment: the neighbor country attacks and takes over your country. What is your ownership title worth? Exactly 0. Hence it was not yours to begin with.
To the conqueror your paper means nothing.
That reminds me, I still have to put up the explanation at oneoftheonly.com for why this phrase doesn't make sense and is the new "could care less".
Definition 3 from Merriam-Webster[1] of "only": FEW
I can say "one of the few", or "one of the only", and they both make perfect sense (and have the same meaning). You're being blindly prescriptive without even doing the legwork.
In fact it's even more vacuous ("nothingburger") because sometimes it's not even clear which way the person means it; if I say "I'm one of the only people to do a handstand on a Thursday morning", do I imagine that I'm in a large group or a small one?
I'm not trying to "win" any more than I would try to tell people that literally isn't a synonym for figuratively; I know that ship has sailed. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to say it doesn't make sense, and I'm very aware that people get extremely angry about it for some reason, as if it's a personal affront. Not everyone has to buy into the cargo cult of descriptivism (particularly in the face of absurdity), differences of opinion are still allowed :)
(edit - for the record, this was in response to the first paragraph only, as the others were edited in afterwards)
The grains of sand example should make it clear: it is not true that this grain is one of few at the beach, but it is true that it's one of the only. This makes it a poor expression for scarcity.
For example: Alaska and Hawaii are the only non-contiguous U.S. states. Alaska is one of the only non-contiguous states.
The 'only' is part of the group definition, implying the individual 'one' is part of a small subset of some sort.
This is in contrast to people mistaking one word for another.