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Chapter 12 Old Commons Meets the New For almost two centuries before JNF management, the highland woodlands in southwestern Virginia had functioned as a de facto commons. The early development of land speculators and absentee ownership of large tracts certainly fostered such informal use of the forested slopes, for the numerous landless tenants could not have survived otherwise. They used these highlands for livestock foraging (particularly swine), firewood gathering, ginseng digging, game hunting, and foraging for nuts, berries, and medicinal plants.1 But outside of the southern Appalachians, concepts of the commons was prominent in the South and even in early New England.2 During the colonial and early republic periods, fencing was prohibitively expensive in labor and materials all over the eastern seaboard. It remained so in the South even after the Civil War. Farmers found it was more practical to fence animals out of comparatively small vegetable gardens rather than inside expansive pastures. Thus the open range persisted and acquired deep customary roots.3 As one western North Carolina woman put it during the 1970s, “The way I see [it], the good Lord put this land here for all of us to use and ain’t nobody got the right to fence it off and try to tell people they can’t pull galax” or other commons usage.4 In some ways, the development of the commons itself runs counter to the Lockean advocacy that Americans once regularly took to heart. As a seventeenth-century philosopher, John Locke championed democracy and property rights in his native England, and his conceptions of property influenced Americans more than any other Enlightenment or preEnlightenment philosopher.5 He wrote the Carolina Constitution, strongly inspired both English and American Whigs, and profoundly influenced the Founding Fathers. Locke’s original phrase, “Life, Liberty, and Property,”6 is included in our constitutional rights and earlier manifested itself as our selfperceived rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” that Jefferson wrote in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.7 For Locke, people and their property ownership preceded the creation of government. In fact, it was the property-owning people who decided to create government in order to recognize and enforce their “God-given” property rights.8 No government had a right to violate these rights. These ideas held great appeal along the 176 j Old Commons Meets the New nineteenth-century frontier and persisted in many parts of the twentiethcentury American West, South, the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas, as well as the southern highlands. As illustrated earlier, the government soon asserted its authority otherwise, perhaps most strikingly in its Fifth Amendment eminent domain rights. Between hydropower impoundments and recreational land acquisitions, the southern highlands became among the more widespread regions to feel this power. Lockean ideas of unregulated land use have clearly worn thin in many cases, even if they live on (sometimes fiercely) in libertarian sentiment. Libertarian concepts of unfettered property rights meshes fairly naturally with the deep tradition of independence that so many scholars and writers have associated with the southern highlands. But now southern mountaineers have seen the environmental and economic ravages that can accompany unregulated industrial exploitation of natural resources. Highlanders previously averse to zoning regulations might consider their possible benefits when contemplating the continuing trend in second home development. In this scenario the JNF and other public lands become something of a “mediator for the commons.” By the late nineteenth century, the main problem with the de facto commons of southwestern Virginia became one of an enlarged and growing population . A commons may function quite well with a low population base; too much human pressure and competition for resources tends to create conflict, environmental degradation, and poverty. In the midst of this deteriorating situation came the JNF as a new, albeit radically different, sort of commons. The population pressure has only increased since that time, and thus the JNF stands at the nexus of a modern and more complex commons conflict. Postwar discussion about the commons began with Garrett Hardin’s seminal 1968 article, “Tragedy of the Commons.”9 Early-twentieth-century southwestern Virginia might have served as an example of Hardin’s initial thesis, which held that individual self-interest would inevitably override the common good. Hardin later modified his thesis and said his title should have been “Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”10 But, in a way, this revision merely emphasized his original claim that government regulation was one of only two solutions to the...

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