Public property rights and the triumph of the commons

Most people of this country own private property in some form. Few Americans realize, however, that they also are equal co-shareholders in a vast, complex and immensely valuable public property estate.

The parcels of this estate are called by a number of names: National park, national forest, national wildlife refuge, state wildlife management area, monuments, etc. The largest single public landholding is that administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), some 276 million acres by this one federal agency alone.

Parcels of the public estate are managed for the citizen-owners by every level of government, national, state and local.

Sadly, because people don’t know about their public property portfolio, they don’t realize that the value of their national public estate is in great and continuous jeopardy from private interests who would profit at public expense.

Everyone is familiar with the old parable titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” That story tells a tale of a village public pasture that is owned in common by everybody in the community. The pasture is overgrazed — the story goes — into a desert waste because nobody has a reason to conserve the resource because nobody has an ownership motivation.

American history does indeed record stories of just such tragedies. The whole Industrial Revolution is punctuated with them. Certainly, the early years of cattle grazing on the northern plains, before land management laws were enacted, is one such tale.

Another parable — one that is actual USA history — is seldom or never told. That parable is of the “Triumph of the Commons.” The tale is the actual history of the invention of conservation and its development and leadership by the American people. This triumph of the national will has produced the wildlife, wild-waters and wildland miracle that anybody can go out and see around us today.

The American triumph of the commons was an act of deliberate, intelligent, forceful citizenship exercised across a half-dozen generations and always against continuing, powerful political opposition. Yet, too many Americans today think it just happened by chance and those wild critters have just always been there.

We call this democratically inspired miracle “conservation.” It’s a new word invented for the English language because the North American resource-management system it represents had no precedent in human history and thus no label that could be extended to our new way of governing resource use, or, “wise use.”

We Americans are champion problem-solvers. When confronted with the “Tragedy of the Commons” on the American frontier, we solved the problem by inventing the “public trustee” to take authority over the people’s property and manage it wisely so that we can use it and conserve it at the same time. The “trustee” appointed by the people for the management task is our government — local, state and federal.

Indeed, what loss of value of our public resources that does occur typically comes via the influence and effect of converting our state and national public properties into private hands — “unwise use.”

A major reason the parable of the “Triumph of the Commons” is simply because people who want to take personal profit from our public resources use the negative parable as propaganda to persuade the American people to surrender part or all of their public ownership rights.

In feudal Europe, the king owned everything, and the people were merely tenants. The American Revolution and the establishment of the U.S. Constitution changed all that in the United States. “We the people” became our own sovereign. And we set out at the very beginning to protect our individual rights from any future kings or despots. There is no more strongly held value today among the American people than that of  private property rights.

Turn your back for an instant and the private Takers start telling the public Trustee what to do. The economic interests I call Takers will slice a piece of value such as unsustainable resource extraction off here and block an ownership right such as access by locking you out there. And they will try to persuade you, Jane and John Q. Public, to believe their taking is for your own good so that the alleged “Tragedy of the Commons” doesn’t occur — even as they are leading you directly down the path away from triumph and toward tragedy.

Assertion of public property rights in our national conversation is the effort to wake people up to the value of their public land, water, wildlife, wilderness, air and mineral property birthright — and to act on their responsibility as citizen-owners of the public estate.

Ownership without owner engagement inevitably leads to property (and rights) lost.

The great irony is that resistance to recognition of public-property rights comes entirely from ostensible champions of private-property rights. Proper, lawful enjoyment by the people of their public property rights does not subtract one iota of lawful value from the private property nearby but you would never know that from listening to the incendiary rhetoric of land grabs and socialism thrown at every exercise of public rights.

In reality, the only value the private-property owner stands to lose is any public property value they have previously taken from the public when he or she has encroached, borrowed, diverted, locked off or otherwise claimed until challenged by outraged members of the public. On the other hand, enhancing value of one property in a neighborhood also enhances the value of adjacent properties. Public and private property rights are mutually complimentary where people are intent on being good neighbors rather than becoming value competitors.

The creation of public property and the assertion by the people of their authority to appoint a trustee and control their property is the genesis of our national triumph of the Commons. The people should not surrender their public-property rights with less regret than they would feel for loss for all other personal rights civil and inalienable.

(Ron Moody writes for the Montana Wilderness Federation.)