American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

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".

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.

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!

Nordics let you roam on private property.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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