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.
American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
11–20 of 199 posts
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#12> 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".
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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#13> 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".
What would be an alternative that conveys the same thing, in your opinion?
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#14> 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".
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.
"few" is one of the meanings of "only". "One of the few" is a perfectly normal thing to say as well.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#15I 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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#16> 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.
I thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?
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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#17Property 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 bloc…
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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#18> 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.
I thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?
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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#19> 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".
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.
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.
Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
#20The 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".