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291 points mooreds | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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geye1234 ◴[] No.45291627[source]
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".

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rafram ◴[] No.45291908[source]
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.

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placardloop ◴[] No.45292242[source]
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...

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1. jt2190 ◴[] No.45293879[source]
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

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2. rtkwe ◴[] No.45294319[source]
State and local managed land is also quite a bit more restrictive than the Federal Public Land you find out West in the US.
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3. rafram ◴[] No.45296345[source]
Depends where. The Adirondack Preserve, for example, is more permissive than a lot of federal land.
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4. rtkwe ◴[] No.45301640{3}[source]
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.