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American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

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Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#61

Post by dessimus »

geye1234 wrote: post #20

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 la…

>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.?

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#62

Post by AnimalMuppet »

whatever1 wrote: post #10
mothballed wrote: post #2

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 bloc…

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.

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.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#63

Post by aftbit »

rafram wrote: post #49
geye1234 wrote: post #20

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 la…

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-destructiv…

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.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#64

Post by legitster »

geye1234 wrote: post #20

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 la…

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.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#65

Post by em-bee »

k33n wrote: post #30
huhkerrf wrote: post #6

> 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.

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)

not completely locked out of access to the area, but locked out of using one of the only available road to that area.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#67

Post by stickfigure »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #37
geye1234 wrote: post #20

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 la…

Not only can you kick people off in the US. You are allowed to kill them in some places. Castle doctrine.

Nonsense. The castle doctrine only lets you kill trespassers if they are threatening your life.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#68

Post by rafram »

polairscience wrote: post #60
rafram wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-destructiv…

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 crossin…

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.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#69

Post by legitster »

lclc wrote: post #29

So before nobody had access and it wasn't used, so left to nature. Now everyone can go there. Is that really better?

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.

Re: American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

#70

Post by pixelpoet »

jacobolus wrote: post #56
pixelpoet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

edit: this conversation is a waste of time. retracting my comment

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 :)

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