American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

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.

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.

> 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".

doesn't make sense because it's a contraction of "one of the one-ly" ?

> 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 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.

I thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?

irregardless, I think we understand what the author meant

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.

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.

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.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/only

What would be an alternative that conveys the same thing, in your opinion?

"few" is one of the meanings of "only". "One of the few" is a perfectly normal thing to say as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

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.

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.

https://youtube.com/@nativehabitatproject

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)

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.

... 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".

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.

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

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)

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.

Yes. People can now go for walks, mountain bike, and enjoy the outdoors next to their neighborhood.

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.

Why do people create new accounts for posting contrary opinions?

Probably because of how aggressive the down-voting of unpopular opinions has become. Joke comments get upvotes, and thoughtful objections get flagged these days.

It's been a long time coming, but wild bison are being reintroduced to Britain right now:

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!

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

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"

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.

Americans happily signed treaties with the natives and reneged. The law didn't matter as the law was ignored.

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).

Sometimes the checkerboarding is the result of indian reservation agreements. For example, Palm Springs is technically like this.

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).

I follow this channel. He’s the reason I’ve got engaged with land conservation efforts.

During the Highland Clearances in Scotland _many_ people were kicked off land.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/worlds-largest-wildlife-bridge...

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

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.

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!

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.

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?

>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.?

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

500/acre, am I reading that correctly?

IDK anything about Montana, but that feels inexpensive.

> 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

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)

So not locked out of the area by any stretch of the imagination and no evil was done.

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.

Well, often in the west the big square in an undesirable desert is the reservation, and the checkerboard is the 1800’s railroad.

I'm talking about King Phillip's war a century and a half before most of the treaty violation stuff started happening in earnest.

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.

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.

https://www.backpacker.com/stories/issues/environment/americ...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah just drive around West Texas and come in the other side.

Try roaming through Area 51. Or White Sands.

I don’t know if I want random people walking through or camping on my land.

>IANL. Under American law,

Good thing you IANL'd that because this is very much a state by state thing, not an "american" thing.

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.

I've heard it's great this time of year. Lots of cool stuff to look at.

This article claims the idiom predates Merriam-Webster.

https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/12/one-of-the-only.html

What is wrong with "could care less"? It is perfectly reasonable sarcasm.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

You're not wrong, but IIRC "only" has meant "one-like" since old english.

> 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.

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.

Wouldn't that just be straight up fraud?

They just bought the land for $5.4 million, that was clearly the actual value.

I respect your commitment to influence the evolution of the language :)

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.

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.

All the while foxes, deer and birds can still develop their dwellings there. Blatant disregard of the law, I say.

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

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

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)

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.

Probably, and the IRS does prosecute sometimes (https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/two-ta...), but they've already been understaffed for years and it's obviously gotten a lot worse this year.

"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.

American Prairie, brought to you by your friendly Russian embassy!

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.

Yep this is my concern. They get the (desirable) land / homes and nobody else ever gets to live there.

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

Yeah come on it only takes a year and a little donation to get permits! Just stand in line little fox.

What are you insinuating?

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.

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.

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

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.

Had the same thought. Was glad to see I was wrong.

Nordics let you roam on private property.

Well, this may explain why the presenter said it is one of the most litigious parts of Real Estate :-)

Yes, I do know about the potential for fraud. Ultimately, this sounds more like a problem with the government not doing their due diligence as opposed to a problem with the idea itself.

And yes, this is fundamentally something only rich people can make use of. The average Joe doesn't have over $100K sitting around to buy a piece of land only to intentionally lower its value!

The example of the golf course they give is weird. You're not allowed to do it to a property that has a structure on it (at least not one with utility connections). Nor can it have paved roads. What kind of golf course was this?

Still, thanks for the article. It provides a more down to earth context.

Try $50k and 1-3yr. More if you're doing something other than residential. You can thank the EPA for that. Can't do get approval without a plan for the stormwater. Can't do that without engineers. Engineers won't draw and stamp without surveys and the like.

Mega-corps building cookie cutter subdivisions or commercial space obviously pay less because they're vertically integrated and highly streamlined.

Some small scale 1-4 unit stuff (single structure here and there) is exempted, unless it's too close to water of course.

Yeah same thing happens around here. A dude here bought some land which surrounded an old popular access road to Cleveland national forest (socal), and promptly put a gate up... For a while it was the only convenient way to drive into the mountains from riverside county. Alternative routes were either closed from fires, closed to vehicles, or located on the other side of the mountain range. Lots of Facebook drama between this guy and people in the area trying to access the national forest. He has a camera pointed at the gate and regularly posts altercations and threatens to shoot people.

There are herds of wild deer a half hour outside NYC. Deer seem to be able to thrive anywhere as long as there aren't many predators.

The continental US (i.e. excluding alaska) has some 20+ mil wild deer, 200k bison, 1 mil bears, 3-4 mil coyotes, 13,000 wolves, 5 mil alligators, 10k+ mountain lions, etc, etc. Yes, most are in the vast western states. But deer and bears are common even in areas a just a couple hour drive outside of NYC. Thankfully no gators near NYC (except in the sewers, of course :-)

I’m fairly contrarian so I’m not surprised to get banned on occasion but I’ve noticed in the past few months completely innocuous statements are triggering the “you’re posting too fast ban”

Your linked source omits state and local managed land.

For example compare their map of Massachusetts with this map from the state: https://www.mass.gov/how-to/masswildlife-lands-viewer

Liability and access rules in the US vary by State. For example, Maine allows open access to private land by default (owners have to post to prohibit access) and protects owners from liability (as long as they don't actively create hazards). Some coastal states have public-right-of-ways along the shore... there's a lot variation, as always.

Fun to read about the other systems and considerations in this thread.

Yeah, but the government would have to prove it in court, which is hard and takes a long time. As long as there are a bunch of other people doing it chances are you will die of old age before law enforcement does anything about it. Lots of rich people crime works this way. Make it hard enough to prosecute and you can get away with it, especially when you can afford to hire good lawyers.

So many problems with real estate come down to "got mine, fuck you" ordinances.

Same in the UK - it is called the Occupiers Liability Act. It's not black and white but the liability is on the Occupier. I know this because I own an area of ancient semi-natural woodland which I'm restoring back to the natural NVC type (basically, oak standards and hazel coppice). As part of my duty I have to go and survey all the boundary trees once every "reasonable period" and after storms or significant weather events. There's some nuance to in the liability I've got when considering the harm to trespassers, but staying on top of duties and having your auditing ducks in a row helps.

> without large areas of true wilderness

Depends on your definition of large. You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.

Don't get me wrong, just about every farmable piece of land is growing food. However, you might be shocked at the presence of forests and camping grounds still to this day.

Either way, the right to roam in the UK is something I wish we had in the US. There are more than a few lakes, for example, that can no longer be accessed because they've been encircled by private land owners turning the lakes effectively private. Cutting off access to waterways and forests to turn them into playgrounds for the rich is gross.

    Well, as I was walking, I saw a sign there
    And on the sign it said "No Trespassing"
    But on the other side it didn't say nothing
    That side was made for you and me!

Only if you assume those 'environmental groups' are true to their cause and not running a shakedown operation (like e.g. the SPLC does in another politically contentious area) where they'll start accusing you of developing on your land if you don't pay them some contribution/fee/bribe.

> Yeah, but the government would have to prove it in court, which is hard and takes a long time.

Isn't this "undeveloped in perpetuity" status an application, so that you have to request an agreement to your valuation and the government has to approve it, meaning that the burden of proof goes the other way from your comment? At least, for my personal residence where I have the opposite incentive, it's not that I can go to the local government with a valuation of $3.50 for my house and they have to prove it's not; I can object to their valuation and try to prove my case, but the burden is on me, not on them.

You might be more willing if you see it as a kind of reciprocity, your part in a scheme which allows you to hike or otherwise relax on land other than your own.

And even if you never set foot on other's people property, I think it's fair of the government, which ultimately enforces land owners' property rights, to say that they won't support you excluding other people from natural land.

Our national park system in the US is larger than the entire country of Sweden and Denmark and Iceland (or close enough) - depending on how it's defined maybe throw Norway in there too. I don't need to walk through someone's private property to see all this great stuff.

Maybe the Nordics should set aside more public land and catch up to the United States?

State and local managed land is also quite a bit more restrictive than the Federal Public Land you find out West in the US.

We should not exempt non-profits from property tax. For these conservation projects, it will be a defacto ad valorem tax and it's a good thing. Americans will lock themselves out of prosperity and then blame The Rich, The Politicians, Foreigners and so on rather than allow for the development of the vast acres of land that America has.

Conservation is fine. But perpetual free locking away of land is total bullshit. The highly performative yelling of "we are IN A CRISIS!" while actively promoting said crisis is getting old. I've had enough of it.

The appropriate countermeasure is to allow upgrading land that is sufficiently near an urban area if it will be used to build above a certain density, e.g. 2000 homes per square kilometer. That's already denser than most urban areas in the US, so it wouldn't create sprawl in the sense that we're used to seeing it.

Roaming on either of these will lead to you being arrested.

I don't want to roam in Yosemite. I want to roam starting from my house.

I love how we are trying to make decisions for our descendants. Just like historical buildings.

I have a friend that grew up near this and he has told me repeatedly that many of the locals are very against it since they believe it takes ranching (their jobs and the local economy) away from the area. It is interesting when this much land, or this much of any resource, is involved how many and how big the secondary consequences can be. That being said, we have to have this kind of thing, but it should be more of a national or at least state wide effort to help make those impacted whole. The US national parks system has proven to be one of the best investments the US ever made. It is too bad that as a country we barely recognize the value to the point that private efforts like this one become needed.

I don't want people roaming through my yard and stepping on my plants and stuff or god forbid they bring their stinky dogs and their urine and feces so I have a fence put up to keep them out.

You can just avoid those areas and roam on not government property. There's tons of it out there and nobody cares.

Outside of cities, land is already zoned like this. R5, R10, Ag20, Ag100, etc.

You don't even have to be particularly rich, you just have to be willing to live in the country.

These are often designed by people that don't ever walk anywhere.

wait. I can form a non-profit to buy acres of land through and it wont have to pay annual property tax on it?

It’s not a universal or god-given right. It’s a privilege granted to us by the state we reside in. People sacrificed their lives so that we could enjoy this benefit.

Therefore, when I encounter individuals in my generation who haven’t participated in any wars and assert that they own their land, not the state, I can’t help but believe they require a reality check.

The decline of hunting has little to do with recreation. Plenty of deer in the east. Also post COVID there was a wave of people heading out there.

Yep. You're not going to be able to live on it or anything though. And you can't exactly give it to yourself later to do something with. Not legally, but people find ways.

> You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.

You're right. I was shocked at just how little there is. If one's definition of large is more than a few square km, there's virtually none, for any sensible definition of wilderness, at least south of the Cairngorns.

Isn't this (covenants that basically have dead people in their graves reaching out to smite living people) exactly what the dead hand rule was created to prevent? This was a major part of the "defeudalization" that took place between the 17th-19th centuries in most of western Europe, as before then the nobility would entail their estates so as to keep them whole in the senior male line. It does allow for limited postmortem control, but practically not more than one human lifespan thereafter.

C.f. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

Honestly in the US it has never been a problem since there is so much land. The laws are also unambiguous here. If I’m on someone’s property I can get shot but on public land we can shoot each other :)

There’s a development in the works near me that is I think more along the lines of what the OP is thinking. A developer assembled around 1000 acres of farmland and proposes to build housing with half the land being open space. There are no amenities planned, however the houses will be grouped into “dense” clusters with paths through and around them. The paths will count as open space and are going to be owned by our county forest preserve agency, who will be building and maintaining that part.

The interesting part is that the agreement is that the county will be buying about 400 contiguous acres and then the housing clusters will be placed in 500 of the remaining 600 acres, with the 100 acres weaving in and out donated once they do the platting. They’re pretty far along in the process, with zoning and approvals in place. There are still a few unresolved technical issues that could derail the whole thing, yet we are less than one month away from signing the agreement that will irrevocably force them to sell the 400 acres. I’m excited to reach that milestone and after that won’t care at all if the project falls through (the remaining land revert to agriculture zoning and a future developer has to start over from the very beginning).

I have to admit that Americans seem to have a different perspective on land use, with the sheer scale of the country and a willingness to drive for hours to get places. If someone told me that I have to travel from Prague to Germany to go hiking or even just let my kids play in a forest, I'd be pretty mad.

I live in a suburban American neighborhood, built in the mid 2010's, which has ample walking paths and wide sidewalks. In fact, I cannot think of any newer neighborhood in this area which lacks walking infrastructure. Good sidewalks are a minimum. Usually there are dedicated walk and bike paths.

What is lacking is places you would actually walk to. There are numerous parks and a pool. But that's it. Don't get me wrong, it's great if you have a dog or enjoy running or walking. But I still have to drive everywhere.

Not always. See Tulsa OK.

In texas it is merely your property not the building, and tresspassing is a valid reason.

> Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s.

To clarify: In your view, someone using a vehicle to access a remote area is not "enjoying the land"?

Perhaps you mean that the presence of a motorized vehicle reduces your own enjoyment.

(Personal bias: I am an avid mountain biker, occasional dirt bike rider, and feel the wilderness designation is harsh and used excessively).

Depends of course upon which UK legal system we are discussing... The right to roam provided in Scotland under Scots law is often cited as one of the best examples of the concept. The UK is more than just England etc.

Depends where. The Adirondack Preserve, for example, is more permissive than a lot of federal land.

Or just use one of the other still accessible western roads.

Ironically this makes the lands in the east more wild, because nobody goes into them, because they're so boring. There's also some quite large areas of Eastern state land that're really far from most people, and they're not tourists destinations, so they only get a few locals.

But the comparison between West and East gets crazier. In the West, people'll drive for an entire day just to get to one specific remote area. Whereas in the East, some untouched forest could be an hour and a half away and "that's too far." You could walk through a forest which is actually 3 different forests in a half hour, whereas out West it's just miles and miles of the same desert or mountain.

We don't really know how to appreciate nature unless it's a majestic overlook.

I was watching a video of someone walking through rural england, and he kept talking about the "great forest" up ahead that was a unique and massive landmark. When he eventually got to it, it was the sort of bog-standard woods that everybody on the US east coast visits to walk their dog.

Another way of looking at it is that we're preserving things for our descendants.

I'm not an expert, but from the article:

> To be eligible for a deduction, land needs to meet at least one of four broadly defined “conservation purposes.” These include protecting “relatively natural” habitats; historic sites or buildings; land for public recreation or education; and open space (including farms, ranches and forests).

My guess is that since the golf course was primarily for public recreation (or could be), and was mostly "natural" open space (grass), they argued it qualified. Probably not hard it claim it as historic as well.

The U.K. does not have a right to roam. It's a sore point for ramblers et al.. The legal situation differs between England and Wales, and Scotland; and campaigners would like the Scottish right to be also available in England and Wales, which largely only has what is tantamount to a codification of what the common law situation used to be back in the 20th century.

And indeed in Northern Ireland, which has the most restrictive laws in the U.K. in this respect, even more restrictive than the current situation in England and Wales.

I mean, this is the entire intent. It lowers your resale value quite a lot too though, since it's not open for development.

I was moderately interested in a property in the middle of nowhere that had about 8 acres buildable (with two structures on it already) and about 220 acres of forest and a lake under a very strict conservation easement. It would have been the only property of that size and type I could even dream of affording. It was still expensive, but less than a million dollars where if that 230 acres had not been under conservation easement in the same area it'd have sold for over 10.

And it's not like indefinite means forever forever. If the next generation 4 generations from now decides these easements are not in their best interest they will be repealed. It's just a piece of paper in the end.

Just own it and steamroll with it. No need to try to appease anyone. F HN and dang etc for knowing about downvote abuse and being OK with it.

Sweden has the right to roam on privately owned nature property but it is trumped by exceptions for crops and the right to privacy at home. So it’s not ok - and not done - to walk in peoples yards etc. The rules are well taught at schools and well explained for tourists and it just works nicely.

Under the Wilderness Act in the US, it breaks federal law to bring a motor into a designated wilderness. The idea is on protecting places where nature can actually be wild. Us humans getting to use them on foot ( or perhaps bike - though it's hard to maintain a bike trail without powered equipment) is a secondary benefit.

"The state refuses to classify bison as wildlife instead of livestock, meaning they must be fenced"

I find it quite amusing how many conservatives ignore basic reality.

If you want to see the actual mechanisms and debate, Boulder, Colorado did this with a belt of “open space” in the 1980s. One consequence was that it brought natural parts of that land close, which includes wildfire.

The reason sane property owners maintain those roads is for firefighters.

Every state I’ve lived in has landowner indemnification for trails. In Colorado, the landowner must put up signs for hazards, though a local group always exists to help with this. In my experience, the rationale for such a trail to be closed always comes down to a single person ruining it for everyone else.

The second you charge money (for hunting, usually), all that protection goes away.

check my post history, I don't think I hold back. I will back dang and the HN moderation on the point that I have not been perma-banned, so they are not complete authoritarian moderators like most social media sites. And if I am being entirely honest some of my temp bans were deserved.

I just wanted to point out that it seems that the sensitivity for what is ban-able has been turned up

Wasn’t King Philip’s War about a treaty that insisted natives be disarmed?

The pattern around me is that the kind of people who ignore trespassing signs also ignore fire bans.

Perhaps it is a good place to mention that _today_ is the last day to submit comments on the potential effects of rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16...

In the United States at least we don't really have privately owned nature property like you might in Sweden. I live in Ohio for example, there's nothing to go see or look at. We have no need for the right to roam. What are you going to do, roam through a cornfield? A parking lot? The woods? The mall? Well you can already do that. We have state parks, local parks, national parks, etc. to get your nature fix and it works very well here, there are no complaints about this whatsoever.

Sometimes Europeans are so convinced that their way of life is better or their policies are the best they forget that sometimes their policies solve problems that don't exist in other countries. There's no need to have a right to roam in America. There's nowhere to roam to, and the places that you would roam to are already owned by the public where you have... the right to roam! Though we are much more strict about natural preservation in those parks which sometimes conflicts with the desires of some to go "off trail", but that's a separate issue.

The UK might be a little different, granted, but the no-true-scotsman approach to someone suggesting they enjoy the UK's right to roam but they can't because the Nordic countries are so much better in this regard is annoying, to say the least.

There are exceptions but most state land is more restrictive. It's tedious to always put the "besides some rare exceptions" caveat on every statement.

Classification of wildlife vs livestock is a complicated issue.

You should read about the history of Yellowstone and its creation :) You'll end up with an opinion that probably matches your current opinion, but at least you'll understand where it all comes from.

I don't get why people do those sorts of things. If you own land your #1 enemy is the government. In that situation it behooves you to do things to endear yourself to the community, your neighbors, etc.

The article is literally about how privately owned landed blocked roaming public lands. You came across very American, for sure.

Yea but the discussion happening in this thread was about something else. If you don't want to participate that's fine but please don't derail ongoing discussions.

You come across very Italian, for sure. I guess? :)

I still don't really understand this. If I own 2/4 grid squares in a checkerboard, can't I go in and put some tall fences on the "corners" of my property. Maybe the two fences are physically joined. But my fences are 16 ft tall, how are you going to put a ladder over that?

It's been awhile since I read the case; I'm not sure that it contemplated that.

If I recall correctly it was either basically just a low hanging chain or low fence, but it's awhile since I read it.

Judges are normally loathe to consider much more than the narrowest reading required, so I would be shocked if they considered the possibility of touching the fence or a fence high enough to make a ladder impractical.

In rural areas many Americans can go on a hike or play in the forest in their backyard.

Or locking them out of options. Why not let them do it? It’s their world. We all like to complain about boomer control of society but whose to say in 50 years we get looked down upon for this stuff.

You the survivor are the only witness however. I suppose Trayvon Martin is old news at this point.

Most Americans live in urban areas, though.

I have to say that according to this PDF I found [1], a lot more US families do own forested land, but it's still a minority.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250420022718/http://www.family...