Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 77, Date, p. 6-7
Social Conflict over Property Rights,
edited by Harvey M. Jacobs.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
The bulk of this volume consists of a selection of papers first written for the “Who Owns America?” national conference in 1995. At that conference, nearly 300 scholars, researchers, government officials, and community activists from across North America gathered to help shape the direction of the new North American Program (NAP) at the Land Tenure Center (LTC).
LTC’s original focus over 35 years ago was on Latin America. Its research and training activities have since spread to over 75 countries and nearly every developing region of the world, including recent programs in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
Until recently, however, North America was not an area of focus. As Harvey Jacobs puts it in his preface, NAP was created in the early 1990s “to bring the lessons of three decades home.”
Issues in North America, such as black farmer land loss, conflicts over land and natural resource tenure rights between Native Americans and their neighbors and state governments, the management of heavily polluted lands in America’s cities that no one wants, the rise of the private property rights movement to challenge environmentalists’ calls for increased regulation of privately owned land, and the increasing social and cultural conflicts over forests, urban-fringe agricultural land, and unique ecological lands—all these, writes Jacobs, “mirror the types of issues that prompted LTC involvement in country after country.”
The book’s introduction, by Louise Fortmann, addresses the idea of applying such lessons from international experience to domestic land tenure research and activism. Contributions from Dan Bromley, Jacobs, Don Last, and Richard Castelnuovo in part one fall under the title of “Private Property Rights and the Public Interest.” These chapters examine issues related to public regulation of private land, focusing on the emergence of the “wise use movement” and its calls for greater individual freedom in private land use decision-making. All four authors write from the perspective that private property rights are not static, but are socially created to fulfill society’s goals for land and natural resource management.
In part two, “Private Interests in Public Lands,” authors Keith Wiebe, Abebayehu Tegene, and Betsey Kuhn look at claims about private property rights in the context of the evolution of federal land policy. Arthur McEvoy highlights the conflict in the legal system, especially the courts, over the ethic that should prevail in the management of public lands. Jess Gilbert and Alice O’Connor examine two public experiments in land reform in the United States to provide secure land tenure to poor rural residents. Charles Geisler and Barbara Bedford look at a new concept in federal public land management: ecosystem management.
In part three, “Land, Culture and Place,” authors of the chapters demonstrate culture’s impact on land use and land management. Sonya Salamon discusses culture’s role in land use and land transfer decisions of farm families. Lynne Heasley and Ray Guries look at the same issue but focus on forest land use decisions in southwestern Wisconsin. Ron Trosper takes up the matter as it impacts the land use decisions in Indian country. John Gaventa revisits and updates his pathbreaking study, Who Owns Appalachia? (published in 1983). All of the authors stress the complexity of land and how its noneconomic characteristics are often the source of social conflict.
In the final chapter, Jacobs asks the central question for the volume: Who does own America? As he writes, “Unfortunately, it is not an easy question to answer. Most often we do not have the right kind of data to answer the question in a meaningful and specific way. What we do know is that land use and land tenure is the source of substantial social, cultural, and political conflicts. Just because the United States is a developed country does not mean that land use conflicts here are less significant. Land is both a basic physical resource and a unique social and economic commodity. Land use and nonuse are pivotal to the economic and social health of rural areas, cities, regions, the nation, and the ability of individuals to acquire and maintain homes in stable yet vibrant rural and urban places.”
Reviewers of the book have already recognized its value in covering topical issues in North America today:
“I can hardly think of a topic in land use policy, or indeed in environmental policy in general, more timely and important than the one addressed in this book.”—Robert G. Healy, professor of environmental policy, Duke University.
“Wisconsin, which gave us John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Jacob Beuscher, and Just v. Marinette County, is the heart of environmentalism in the United States. This volume ... is an important new contribution to that legacy.”—Rutherford H. Platt, professor of geography and planning law, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
October 1998
288 pp., 8 maps, 6 x 9
ISBN 0-299-15990-6, Cloth $50.00S
ISBN 0-299-15994-9, Paper $19.95S
Copyright © 1999 by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.
Ordering Information for Who Owns America?
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