Agrarianism and the Good Society: Land, Culture, Conflict, and Hope

5. Good-bye to the Public-Private Divide

To live well on land has long been a challenge and a hope for people everywhere. It is the “oldest task in human history,” Aldo Leopold claimed, and he was in a position to know as a careful student of the land and of the ways various peoples had misused it.1 In America today, we are having trouble at that task, according to many conservationists. A major cause of our troubles has been the institution of private property rights in land. Too many landowners use their lands in ways that undercut the collective good, and their property rights shield them from accountability. Particularly in the American West, we hear another complaint about landownership, having to do with the massive federal land holdings. Federally owned lands are also being misused, many allege . Some say too many public lands are off-limits to the kinds of extractive land uses that produce jobs. Others contend that publicly owned lands should serve public purposes alone, and that the public’s prime needs are to promote wild species and ecological processes while supplying places for recreation. I want to address this subject of landownership, with particular regard for the division between private and public lands. Given how lands are mingled, private with public, it is difficult to talk about one form of ownership except in relation to the other. So after exploring the institution of ownership generally, I propose to set these forms of ownership side by side to see how different they really are, asking why the two forms exist and whether the future GOOD-BYE TO THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DIVIDE 5  84 Agrarianism and the Good Society of one form of ownership might depend closely upon the future of the other. Is it possible that the problems with one ownership form are linked to the problems with the other? Indeed, is it possible that the simple division of lands between private and public is itself a problem? The answers to these questions have relevance to all lands everywhere. The place to begin is with the private form of ownership. We need to pry open the institution of private rights in land and look at its inner workings. If we can do that, probing why private property exists and what it is supposed to accomplish, we can gain a sense of how property has changed over time and where it is heading today. Armed with that understanding, we can then turn to public ownership , to figure out how public land differs and why it too exists. To start, let us set aside essentially everything that we know about landownership and begin simply with the land itself, a natural scene. Imagine a valley somewhere, vast in extent and empty of people. Insert a river, meandering through the scene, along with a few hills or mountains, some patches of trees, some wildlife. It is a good place to live, with reasonably fertile soil, maybe a fair amount of rain, some timber and rock for building. Nature is at work, with its cycles of wind and water, of birth and death, of nutrients coursing through the system, and of plants and animals that, in their ceaseless competition, have formed a resilient biotic community. Now let us add people to the picture, perhaps perched on a hillside, looking out over the plain. These people have arrived from afar and plan to stay, settling in and making their homes. To do that, they obviously have to use the land. Perhaps they will not have many troubles as they go about their work, if the land is abundant and reasonably uniform in its attractiveness. But these assumptions are not realistic, so let us modify them. Let us assume the land is expansive but differs widely in its natural features. Some places are far better than others to build homes. Some places are rich in wildlife, or have more fertile soil or bountiful grasses. Some lands are next to the river and have good water, while others are higher and drier. These arriving people face a question. How are they to orga- 85 Good-bye to the Public-Private Divide nize themselves so as to use the landscape successfully? If person A takes over one tract of land, making exclusive use of it, then other people will be unable to use the tract. That is, if we let A claim ownership over a particular piece of land...