American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

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.

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.

>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.?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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)

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

[flagged]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

irregardless, I think we understand what the author meant

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