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I began this study with the ambition of bridging two areas of inquiry, one national in scope and public attention, the other decidedly local (and locally idiosyncratic). I planned to examine the historical roots of modern property debates in the United States. The prism of property has become a powerful lens in the American political consciousness. It has fundamentally shaped national policies on agriculture and the environment . I wanted to explore how these debates intersected with processes of rural transformation in the twentieth century. In what ways did rural change and emerging ideologies of property influence each other? At what levels in American society did they intersect—primarily nationally, with the consequences trickling down to local places? Or locally as well, with national institutions responding to the grassroots? But beyond property as an idea, or a debate, I wanted to look more closely at land ownership . It was important, I believed, to reexamine dichotomies that we assume apply to real people in real places—the environmental steward (homo environmentalist) and the environmental exploiter (homo economicus )—or alternatively, the ecologically educated, civic-minded environmentalist and the leave-me-alone-on-my-own-land libertarian property rights enthusiast. Underneath the dichotomies lie assumptions about who makes a good or bad land manager. Yet I wondered, given my own family history in the rural Midwest, where motivations are complex to say the least and even schizophrenic at times, would these assumptions hold up if you tracked environmental outcomes rather than environmental sensibilities ? What would patterns of environmental change in local landscapes tell us about different kinds of land management? About different kinds of landowners? 3 Introduction Bridging the national and the local (the larger idea and the individual action) was conceptually simple and practically very difficult. To my mind, the land itself was the ideal bridge. Though passionately debated, competing philosophies of property rarely come down to earth. They can only partially address questions of environmental outcomes because they don’t demonstrate those outcomes in actual places. Property rights debates, for example, are bound up in a still deeper tension in American agrarian history . This tension centers on the interplay between individual interests and what a community (or society) defines at the time as the common good. The fault line runs along the question of whether deference is given to the prerogatives of the individual landowner over any given parcel of land or whether some larger, negotiated vision prevails for a whole landscape and its uses. My plan was to trace this tension on some small area of land over several decades. I hoped to render different ideas of property visible in the changing fields and forests of rural landscapes. As a corollary, I decided to trace the emergence of cultural narratives about property in the histories of local communities who occupied the land. This would address one of my primary concerns about national discourse today: the tendency to reduce people’s ideas and motives to ahistorical sound bytes, such as “property rights versus the environment.” (Even academics can fall into this trap by taking proclamations at face value, or by assuming that a person’s position on a subject is more static than contextual.) Rather than focusing primarily on what people say in the present, it seemed just as important to probe when they started saying it, to whom, why, and in what context. As I began the research for this book, it became clear how oblivious many of us are to the full shape our system of property has taken in rural communities and landscapes. Rather than clarifying matters, the way we talk about environmental debates acts like a veil. In one moment a reporter describes the latest controversy over a development proposal that threatens an endangered nesting bird. In another moment a family conversation around the kitchen table turns to a neighbor forced to remove the trash piling up in her yard. In both cases we are focused on an individual and on a clearly demarcated piece of property. In both cases we are weighing our sympathy for the landowner or lack thereof on a very specialized scale: whether we believe the particular situation warrants some economic cost to the owner or some imposition on her personal freedom. No matter where the scale in our mind’s eye falls, we have a vision of property that is extraordinarily isolated. We see a single landowner facing down 4 Introduction a few disgruntled neighbors or an...

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