America needs more land that’s under stewardship of people who want to conserve it for the future. We’ve lost so much native biodiversity, but there’s still pockets that can revive it if managed appropriately.
BeetleB · 2h ago
In the early 80's, Congress passed some laws that allow people to buy undeveloped land, and declare it to be undeveloped for perpetuity (no one can develop on it even if sold). The owner gets some tax benefits from doing so.
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).
burkaman · 1h ago
This segment is not as niche as it used to be and is frequently abused for enormous tax benefits now. There doesn't need to be any real economic or environmental value to the land, you can just pay someone to do a fake survey/appraisal and assign an astronomical value, and then not pay any taxes because you're now forgoing all that fake value with your conservation easement.
> One example: the former Millstone Golf Course outside of Greenville, South Carolina. Closed back in 2006, it sat vacant for a decade. Abandoned irrigation equipment sat on the driving range. Overgrowth shrouded rusting food and beverage kiosks. The land’s proximity to a trailer park depressed its value. In 2015, the owner put the property up for sale, asking $5.8 million. When there were no takers, he cut the price to $5.4 million in 2016.
> Later in 2016, however, a pair of promoters appeared. They gathered investors who purchased the same parcel at the market price and, with the help of a private appraiser, declared it to be worth $41 million, nearly eight times its purchase price. Why? Because with that new valuation and a bit of paperwork, the investors were suddenly able to claim a tax deduction of $4 for each $1 they invested.
O you think the IRS exists to prosecute rich people for creating money out of thin air? No they are focused on withholding from the underpaid “unskilled” workers who messed up their taxes thanks to TCJA.
bix6 · 1h ago
I go back and forth on this. I love the idea of preserving land but this also seems to be a way for the wealthy to insulate their home eg buy 10 acres next to your house and declare it undeveloped. Now you get an amazing property in a pristine zone that nobody can touch all while getting a tax break you don’t need and boxing out the next generation.
DennisP · 37m ago
"Boxing out the next generation" is exactly what the law is for. I guess we have to decide whether we want more natural wilderness or more luxury homes with nice views.
The only way I can think of to preserve the wilderness without any isolated homes for the wealthy is for the government to buy up the land. I'd probably support that, if we could get it done, but it does mean that if the money for it comes out of the general fund, then you probably have average people paying for more of it, instead of mostly the wealthy.
qball · 20m ago
Boxing out the next generation with environmentalism as the excuse.
This is also a massive problem in BC; the ALR exists to do exactly this. There's lots of land available, it's just illegal to build anything other than a farm on it, and the real estate market is as a consequence as usurious as you'd expect it to be.
Of course, none of this is new. Enclosure predates the Romans.
bix6 · 34m ago
See I’m more happy with the gov doing it and making it a park but when someone rich gets to carve out a special little haven for themselves it doesn’t seem as fair. If we increase the tax rate on HNWI then they will still mostly pay for it.
mothballed · 1h ago
It reminds me of all the desert shithole land I looked at that had covenants created by a dead boomer back in the 80s that require something ridiculous like "we will only allow a mansion to be built next to our pigfarm."
In theory it's possible to reverse but in practice it requires something like standing on one foot, holding your breath, and reciting the entire bible.
People desperately need housing and even in bum fuck nowhere where I live they are desperate to build a little homestead just so they can have something, and then you have this insanity with people creating covenants that basically have dead people in their graves reaching out to smite living people.
bix6 · 32m ago
Yep this is my concern. They get the (desirable) land / homes and nobody else ever gets to live there.
silversmith · 52m ago
All the while foxes, deer and birds can still develop their dwellings there. Blatant disregard of the law, I say.
bix6 · 32m ago
Yeah come on it only takes a year and a little donation to get permits! Just stand in line little fox.
lawlessone · 1h ago
> 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.
Unless you intend to develop the land the risk seems pretty acceptable.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
The problem is, what Congress can do, Congress and the Supreme Court can undo - and now you have a trove of pristine but already-surveyed land that can be exploited almost without risk.
It used to be unthinkable that the US government would outright cancel such things... with the current administration, legislation and justice system, it's not just not unthinkable but expected.
No comments yet
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Find people who will donate their land to conservation trusts, whether out of the goodness of their heart or a tax donation. As an owner, you can even keep the land with a conservation easement if you prefer (this is ideal if you're not near end of life, where you might want to continue to enjoy the land versus transfer it to a conservation steward org); you get the tax deduction and continue to own the land, but you cannot develop it. Buying it, imho, is a last resort, because of the legwork to put the funds together. This buy was $35M, for example (or rather, this announcement indicates that was the listing price; the transaction price might be lower, would have to look at property records to confirm).
(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
seabass-labrax · 2h ago
Alongside the environmental disasters that the USA and the rest of the world face, there is some good news to celebrate now and then. Like this HN story, but also things like the new 'wildlife bridge'[1] over Route 101.
There is a guy in Alabama that is working to preserve and restore native habitats and plants including prairies, through things like prescribed burning and felling invasive species.
I follow this channel. He’s the reason I’ve got engaged with land conservation efforts.
geye1234 · 2h ago
The UK has a much more intelligent (though far from perfect) approach to land use.
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".
rafram · 2h ago
Two very, very different situations.
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.
placardloop · 1h ago
The public land situation in the western US is vastly, vastly different from the situation in the east. Just like you’re saying comparing the US to the UK are two different situations, you also have to treat parts of the US separately.
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.
That's not quite true. There are huge in number, small in overall size, amounts of public land east of the Mississippi. They're mostly all state forests, nature preserves, etc, etc and 99.9% of them are wholly unremarkable and barely utilized because you can only hike in so many identical forests or walk to the top of comparable hills before you get bored.
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.
aftbit · 2h ago
I'm gonna roll to doubt this. I live in a planned suburb with lots of cul-de-sacs which leads to long car-centric paths without sidewalks to walk through. Most of my neighbors (and myself) are very comfortable with people cutting through or around their yards to bypass this. I've gotten explicit permission to cut through when I'm walking my dog from the neighbors that own the most valuable shortcuts, but I wish there were a custom or law that covered this instead of needing to rely on the kindness of strangers.
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.
conductr · 44m ago
The majority of new-ish master planned suburban communities I’ve seen do have walking paths, bikeways, and parks baked in. Usually with some large HOA maintained pool, theater, I’ve even seen man made beaches (100s of miles from a coast). Although, they still usually have fenced yards and cutting through someone’s fenced yard without explicit permission is highly frowned upon, I would actually say dangerous when combined with gun situation being what it is.
rafram · 2h ago
> I've gotten explicit permission to cut through when I'm walking my dog from the neighbors that own the most valuable shortcuts, but I wish there were a custom or law that covered this instead of needing to rely on the kindness of strangers.
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
rascul · 1h ago
> Or maybe we could build suburbs with these sorts of walking-paths baked in from the beginning.
We can. They exist. I've been in some of them.
polairscience · 2h ago
This is so false I can't even begin to describe it. And I say this as someone who nearly daily wanders around National Forest near his house.
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?
rafram · 2h ago
I don't think we really disagree. We should have better laws preventing landowners from restricting access to public land, and we should have laws explicitly allowing things like corner-crossing. But these are mostly issues in areas of public land that border developed areas. Since the vast majority of public land in this country is freely accessible to everyone via public roads that can't be blocked by private landowners, there's never really been enough political will to do large-scale land access reform like they did in the UK.
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.
legitster · 2h ago
Another way to view the medieval approach to land is that it was tied to the people living on it. You bought political boundaries, and the people on the land were bound to it. In one sense you now "owned" the people as serfs, and as another you now had responsibility towards those people.
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.
dessimus · 2h ago
>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.
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.?
hangonhn · 2h ago
IANL. Under American law, if the owner doesn't enforce exclusion the land can become public through implied dedication if the public continues to use it over time.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
>IANL. Under American law,
Good thing you IANL'd that because this is very much a state by state thing, not an "american" thing.
gamblor956 · 1h ago
Implied dedication doesn't make the land public, it simply creates a public easement allowing the public to continue using the land in the manner it was being used that created the implied dedication.
For example, if people openly hike through part of a private property for 5 years (in CA), and the owner knows this and does nothing, then after 5 years there will be a public easement for the public to continue using that part of the land as a hiking trail and the owner can no longer prevent that. OTOH, if he puts up signs on the 12th month of the 4th year, saying "Hiking permitted by owner", then no public easement is created, and the owner can subsequently close off public access at any point.
wood_spirit · 2h ago
Crikey, I”d hardly sell the UK as good with land access! The UK is pretty awful in comparison to the nearby Nordics. Sweden, for example, has a right to roam in nature which makes the constant antagonism between footpath walkers and landowners that are a mainstay of the English countryside seem so petty.
ericmay · 2h ago
I'll tell you what, the Nordics themselves are pretty awful when compared with the Outback or American southwest. You can just roam wherever you want, no questions asked!
yencabulator · 4m ago
Nordics let you roam on private property.
bdamm · 1h ago
Try roaming through Area 51. Or White Sands.
ericmay · 1h ago
I've heard it's great this time of year. Lots of cool stuff to look at.
Romario77 · 2h ago
in UK a huge amount of land belongs to a small percentage of people, crown and former nobility. 50% of the land belongs to 1% of the people.
US has similar laws that you talk about where you have to give easement or right of way.
georgeburdell · 2h ago
In the U.S., you as a landowner can be sued if someone gets injured on your property while trespassing. Understandably, people close off their land.
secondcoming · 2h ago
During the Highland Clearances in Scotland _many_ people were kicked off land.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
And what happened when that doctrine was ported to America was that they used that doctrine to incrementally take the natives land and started a war in only the span of one generation.
throwawaysleep · 2h ago
Americans happily signed treaties with the natives and reneged. The law didn't matter as the law was ignored.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
I'm talking about King Phillip's war a century and a half before most of the treaty violation stuff started happening in earnest.
dyauspitr · 1h ago
I don’t know if I want random people walking through or camping on my land.
uybguygkjhgjk · 2h ago
... the last time the UK had large herds of wild grazing animals was several thousand years ago. There's absolutely no way any herd of wild bison could exist in the UK's current "much more intelligent approach".
seabass-labrax · 2h ago
It's been a long time coming, but wild bison are being reintroduced to Britain right now:
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!
mgilroy · 2h ago
Visit Scotland. We've plenty of wild deer. There are even herds in Glasgow. Highlands are covered in them. We have road signs to warn drivers.
Razengan · 2h ago
Why do people create new accounts for posting contrary opinions?
mgilroy · 2h ago
I created an account because I didn't have one. I just thought I'd correct a comment which was ignoring what actually happens in the UK. We have wild herds. In the Highlands they can be massive herds. I've known a few people to be involved in serious accidents as a result of hitting deer.
nickff · 2h ago
Probably because of how aggressive the down-voting of unpopular opinions has become. Joke comments get upvotes, and thoughtful objections get flagged these days.
kjkjadksj · 2h ago
Not only can you kick people off in the US. You are allowed to kill them in some places. Castle doctrine.
rafram · 2h ago
Castle doctrine doesn't apply outside your home and its immediate surroundings (like your fenced-in yard), and it's not clear how it's relevant here.
stickfigure · 2h ago
Nonsense. The castle doctrine only lets you kill trespassers if they are threatening your life.
SJC_Hacker · 48m ago
> Nonsense. The castle doctrine only lets you kill trespassers if they are threatening your life.
Owners of land that blocks access to significant amounts of other public land should be required to maintain public access roads or lose ownership (of a path of the states choosing).
huhkerrf · 2h ago
> The group bought the land from two billionaire Texas brothers who’d kept the public locked out of one of the only western access roads into adjacent public land,
There's something uniquely evil about locking the public out of public lands.
I'm looking at you, too, Vinod Khosla.
sidewndr46 · 2h ago
I thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?
dogman144 · 2h ago
Still going, and we can call the guy keeping it going by his public records name - Fred Eshelman, pharma wealthy North Carolinian owns the notoriously checkerboarded Elk Mountain in Wy, which if you ever drive I80 past Laramie Wy it’s the big mountain on the south side going west.
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.
kjkjadksj · 2h ago
Sometimes the checkerboarding is the result of indian reservation agreements. For example, Palm Springs is technically like this.
dogman144 · 1h ago
Well, often in the west the big square in an undesirable desert is the reservation, and the checkerboard is the 1800’s railroad.
mothballed · 2h ago
I think the corner crossing basically said that the owners of corner-corner can't claim the 'airspace' exactly at the corner and there is more or less a de facto low-airspace easement at the corner.
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.
kristjansson · 2h ago
Not if there's no corner to cross. It's totally possible to entirely enclose a piece of public land; it's even easier to own land under access roads, and restrict their use as seems to have been the case here.
k33n · 2h ago
There's so much biased journalism that you really have to read things twice before using words like "evil".
> 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)
daemonologist · 1h ago
As far as I can tell from CalTopo, land north of the Missouri, east of Birch Creek, and west of Cow Creek was previously only accessible either via this private land or by approaching from the east and fording Cow Creek here: https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=47.95479,-109.04672&z=18&b=i...
Anyways, yes, only locked out of the road, not the land.
em-bee · 2h ago
not completely locked out of access to the area, but locked out of using one of the only available road to that area.
k33n · 1h ago
So not locked out of the area by any stretch of the imagination and no evil was done.
mulmen · 1h ago
Yeah just drive around West Texas and come in the other side.
pimlottc · 2h ago
Seems like a good thing but I was definitely a bit wary from the title. I was worried it would be a MAGA-aligned organization pushing to “unlock” public lands for commercial exploitation (e.g. drilling).
rstat1 · 16m ago
Had the same thought. Was glad to see I was wrong.
clvx · 2h ago
I wish Flying D could do the same or part of it. They let people in at Spanish Creek but there’s so much land and forest roads to explore.
idiotsecant · 2h ago
Fantastic. I am a native of Montana and in my lifetime there has been a huge move toward locking the public out of their own lands by closing off access, violating a century of norms between ranchers and farmers and the public. As the state becomes more popular from really dumb TV shows a larger and larger number of people who don't understand the land culture of Montana are slicing the state up for private monied interests and making public land their private playground. Refreshing to see it move the other way a little bit.
HardCodedBias · 2h ago
500/acre, am I reading that correctly?
IDK anything about Montana, but that feels inexpensive.
HardCodedBias · 1h ago
Ah it looks like only 22k acres was deeded.
~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.
mothballed · 2h ago
Property rights as conceived by Adam smith, John Locke, and even the most ruthless anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard does not acknowledge the right of ownership of land from merely seeing it and declaring everyone else is blocked from accessing the next place. In all such systems, ownership is first derived from developing or homesteading the land.
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.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
Roger Williams and his buddies would (and did) vehemently disagree with this doctrine.
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.
mothballed · 2h ago
I believe what you're referencing in the second paragraph more closely describes adverse possession, than the initial creation of the property right from mixing land with labor.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
We call it adverse possession now but they had some different old timey term for it (the name escapes me) and the laws that they inherited from the english were far, far, more favorable to the possessor than what we have now because it was all built around the reality that the peasants who would be the ones working the land might have some rights but never really owned shit at the end of the day and that if some peasant who had the right to use some spot wasn't using it then the next guy was free to use it productively because at the end of the day the lord/church/crown/village whatever would extract their cut regardless, more productivity, more cut for whoever. Papering over "but you said I could graze my animals there" vs "yeah but you weren't using it" type disputes makes sense in that context.
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.
And TBH I think legally things would have gone that way anyway. The sort of adverse possession laws that make sense in a country of mostly landless peasants who have rights and permissions but don't actually have final say because they don't own the land are going to be very different than the sort of adverse possession laws in an agrarian society where most people own the land they work (i.e. the US 1700-1870ish).
legitster · 1h ago
People make Adam Smith to be some sort of blowhard absolutist, but his actual work is very observational and astute.
> “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.
whatever1 · 2h ago
If you did not fight for it you don’t have ownership rights. The state owns the land. The rest of us are mere users of 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.
BenjiWiebe · 53m ago
Doesn't that imply that ownership doesn't and can't exist?
What do you own that cannot be taken by force in some way or another?
Some non-physical stuff like happiness or sadness, maybe, except that if you were killed you wouldn't have those either.
AnimalMuppet · 2h ago
For the N years between now and the neighbor country conquering, the title is worth the value I can get from the legal rights it gives me within the legal system of my country. That's more than zero, even if it doesn't last forever.
whatever1 · 1h ago
You can bet on a price but it’s not yours. Unless the state defends it and agrees that the piece of paper you call title is binding.
To the conqueror your paper means nothing.
lclc · 2h ago
So before nobody had access and it wasn't used, so left to nature. Now everyone can go there. Is that really better?
legitster · 2h ago
In this case it sounds like the land was used for cattle grazing, so it wasn't really a preserve.
Really we should designate more areas as wilderness. i.e. no machinery. Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s.
proee · 2h ago
Yes. People can now go for walks, mountain bike, and enjoy the outdoors next to their neighborhood.
No comments yet
munificent · 2h ago
Yes, it is.
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.
jcmontx · 34m ago
American Prairie, brought to you by your friendly Russian embassy!
stuff4ben · 28m ago
What are you insinuating?
pixelpoet · 2h ago
> one of the only
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".
QuercusMax · 2h ago
Words don't just have a single meaning.
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.
Yes and I'm sure Webster will also say[1] that literally is a synonym for figuratively, because of how people also like to destroy the meaning of that word, and descriptivists will forcefully (and ironically) prescribe indifference to that.
Words change. Meanings change. This has always happened an always will. If enough people are ironically using literally, even if unknowingly, then yeah, the meaning will change and we need things like dictionaries to describe this new meaning.
skylurk · 1h ago
You're not wrong, but IIRC "only" has meant "one-like" since old english.
skylurk · 1h ago
This article claims the idiom predates Merriam-Webster.
I'm likewise aware that using literally to mean figuratively isn't particularly new, but the phrase's existence or age isn't the issue.
skylurk · 57m ago
I respect your commitment to influence the evolution of the language :)
pixelpoet · 32m ago
Heh, I just write too much too readily about unimportant opinions, and a lot of people read sentences longer than a few words as incontrovertible proof of being triggered :D
Also it's difficult not to call out the hypocrisy of descriptivists simultaneously saying that basically anything goes, but my preferred use of language in particular is wrong and I need to listen to what they prescribe :P
idreyn · 2h ago
I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.
pixelpoet · 2h ago
That's exactly the difference: "one of the few" necessarily implies scarcity, whereas you could say e.g. "one of the only grains of sand at the beach" while clearly there are many.
pests · 2h ago
I wouldn’t use that phase for sand grains exactly because there are so many. If you added a qualification like “… that is colored blue” then it sounds fine again to me.
jacobolus · 2h ago
edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment
pixelpoet · 2h ago
It's not that I don't understand what they want to express and how they use the phrase. I'm arguing that it's a poor phrase for the job, when "one of the few" exactly and necessarily implies that, while "one of the few" doesn't necessarily.
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?
[Edit: this paragraph added to respond to post below saying I'm not going to win, which was edited out and I couldn't respond to for some reason.] 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 :)
shayway · 47m ago
You can't respond to fresh comments in a back-and-forth on HN, there's a delay of a few minutes before the reply button shows up when many comments are being posted in quick succession. (or maybe it has to do with depth? unsure)
shayway · 1h ago
Is your objection to the use of 'only' to refer to multiple things, or specifically the phrase "one of the only"? Would you consider "I am only five minutes late" to be valid?
(edit - for the record, this was in response to the first paragraph only, as the others were edited in afterwards)
pixelpoet · 1h ago
My objection is in direct analogy to "could care less": it fails to rule out the very thing that is to be ruled out.
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, and while obviously we know what was actually intended (as with "could care less"), that doesn't really make it any better.
shayway · 1h ago
I'm trying to understand but struggling -- so it is specifically the phrase "one of the only" that bothers you, but the example of "only five minutes late" is acceptable? And the issue is that "only" in that context doesn't mean a singular item, but rather a group of ambiguous size?
pixelpoet · 23m ago
It doesn't really bother me, I just think it's not fit for purpose the exact same way as could care less to communicate not caring.
edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment
shayway · 57m ago
If the subject matter weren't somewhat baffling in the first place the edits and deletions certainly didn't help.
FYI for anyone reading this (not directed at you specifically): the 'delay' option in profile setting adds a delay before your comments appear publicly, giving you a buffer for edits and deletions before it goes out to the world.
Personally it helps a lot with ensuring I'm happy with the comments I make, and it helps avoid situations like this where multiple layers of retroactive changes make the conversation hard to follow.
pixelpoet · 1h ago
I like how you edited your comment which simply said what I wrote is "completely incoherent" :) So you figured out the meaning now, very good.
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QuercusMax · 2h ago
"few" is one of the meanings of "only". "One of the few" is a perfectly normal thing to say as well.
em-bee · 2h ago
as a nonnative fluent speaker, to me "one of the few" and "one of the only" mean the same thing, with "of the only" possibly being even less than "of the few"
shayway · 2h ago
It makes sense both grammatically and logically; I think this might just be a parsing issue.
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.
dfxm12 · 2h ago
From the perspective that "only" can mean only one, sole, etc., this is still the correct usage of the idiom "one of the only". Idioms don't match the literal meanings of the words that make them up. Even if unsure, the context makes it clear.
This is in contrast to people mistaking one word for another.
stonemetal12 · 1h ago
What is wrong with "could care less"? It is perfectly reasonable sarcasm.
madmads · 2h ago
What would be an alternative that conveys the same thing, in your opinion?
sidewndr46 · 2h ago
irregardless, I think we understand what the author meant
jjtheblunt · 2h ago
doesn't make sense because it's a contraction of "one of the one-ly" ?
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).
> One example: the former Millstone Golf Course outside of Greenville, South Carolina. Closed back in 2006, it sat vacant for a decade. Abandoned irrigation equipment sat on the driving range. Overgrowth shrouded rusting food and beverage kiosks. The land’s proximity to a trailer park depressed its value. In 2015, the owner put the property up for sale, asking $5.8 million. When there were no takers, he cut the price to $5.4 million in 2016.
> Later in 2016, however, a pair of promoters appeared. They gathered investors who purchased the same parcel at the market price and, with the help of a private appraiser, declared it to be worth $41 million, nearly eight times its purchase price. Why? Because with that new valuation and a bit of paperwork, the investors were suddenly able to claim a tax deduction of $4 for each $1 they invested.
- https://www.propublica.org/article/conservation-easements-th...
I think the law is still a good idea, but like many things it has been ruined by the rich and will need to be reformed or eliminated.
They just bought the land for $5.4 million, that was clearly the actual value.
The only way I can think of to preserve the wilderness without any isolated homes for the wealthy is for the government to buy up the land. I'd probably support that, if we could get it done, but it does mean that if the money for it comes out of the general fund, then you probably have average people paying for more of it, instead of mostly the wealthy.
This is also a massive problem in BC; the ALR exists to do exactly this. There's lots of land available, it's just illegal to build anything other than a farm on it, and the real estate market is as a consequence as usurious as you'd expect it to be.
Of course, none of this is new. Enclosure predates the Romans.
In theory it's possible to reverse but in practice it requires something like standing on one foot, holding your breath, and reciting the entire bible.
People desperately need housing and even in bum fuck nowhere where I live they are desperate to build a little homestead just so they can have something, and then you have this insanity with people creating covenants that basically have dead people in their graves reaching out to smite living people.
Unless you intend to develop the land the risk seems pretty acceptable.
It used to be unthinkable that the US government would outright cancel such things... with the current administration, legislation and justice system, it's not just not unthinkable but expected.
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(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
https://www.thedrive.com/news/worlds-largest-wildlife-bridge...
https://youtube.com/@nativehabitatproject
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.?
Good thing you IANL'd that because this is very much a state by state thing, not an "american" thing.
For example, if people openly hike through part of a private property for 5 years (in CA), and the owner knows this and does nothing, then after 5 years there will be a public easement for the public to continue using that part of the land as a hiking trail and the owner can no longer prevent that. OTOH, if he puts up signs on the 12th month of the 4th year, saying "Hiking permitted by owner", then no public easement is created, and the owner can subsequently close off public access at any point.
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!
Depends on the state. In Texas using deadly force is permissible to stop crimes like robbery. https://legalclarity.org/in-texas-can-you-shoot-someone-on-y...
And there was a case where it wasn't even the homeowner, it was the neighbor who shot the burgulars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Horn_shooting_controversy
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)
Anyways, yes, only locked out of the road, not the land.
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.
And TBH I think legally things would have gone that way anyway. The sort of adverse possession laws that make sense in a country of mostly landless peasants who have rights and permissions but don't actually have final say because they don't own the land are going to be very different than the sort of adverse possession laws in an agrarian society where most people own the land they work (i.e. the US 1700-1870ish).
> “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.
What do you own that cannot be taken by force in some way or another?
Some non-physical stuff like happiness or sadness, maybe, except that if you were killed you wouldn't have those either.
To the conqueror your paper means nothing.
Really we should designate more areas as wilderness. i.e. no machinery. Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s.
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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.
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.
1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/only
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/12/one-of-the-only.html
Also it's difficult not to call out the hypocrisy of descriptivists simultaneously saying that basically anything goes, but my preferred use of language in particular is wrong and I need to listen to what they prescribe :P
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?
[Edit: this paragraph added to respond to post below saying I'm not going to win, which was edited out and I couldn't respond to for some reason.] 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, and while obviously we know what was actually intended (as with "could care less"), that doesn't really make it any better.
BTW thanks for the hot tip regarding the posting delay feature! Lord knows I need it, nothing induces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier like hitting that reply button :"D
FYI for anyone reading this (not directed at you specifically): the 'delay' option in profile setting adds a delay before your comments appear publicly, giving you a buffer for edits and deletions before it goes out to the world.
Personally it helps a lot with ensuring I'm happy with the comments I make, and it helps avoid situations like this where multiple layers of retroactive changes make the conversation hard to follow.
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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.