Triumph over Tragedy - PUBLIC PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE AMERICAN COMMONS

By Ron Moody

     Most people of this country own private property in some form. Few American citizens 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 which 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.” This 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 wild-life, wild-waters and wild-land 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’ -- 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 less often told than that of the ‘Tragedy 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.

     Tragedy is a persuasive parable when you meet it in the context of our national obsession, spanning two centuries, to seize, occupy and exploit the North American continent. Manifest Destiny has been our brightest cultural light from pilgrim days to the present, and expanding private property rights always was a hallmark of the national idea of Manifest Destiny.

     A key difference from the Old World Order that our American forefathers made in their time was to assert that all people, even the most ordinary, have rights of private ownership that can’t be legally taken away without just compensation. 

     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.’

     As long as there was more public property available than there were Americans to exploit it nobody paid much attention to preserving some of the public resource for the future. About the time that we realized that we had seized, occupied and were in the process of exploiting everything from sea-to-sea, a few people began to speak out for holding back parts of the continent from private ownership in order to preserve it unspoiled for future generations. And that is just what ‘We The People’ did. Every time you set foot on a national park or forest, or wildlife refuge, state management area or any of several other public trust properties you are receiving the gift of foresight from citizens who came before you – we are the ‘future generation’ they saved for.

     From this 19^th Century public outcry came the National Parks, National Forests, National Monuments, Wildlife Refuges, BLM lands, state lands and other elements of the public estate that we continue to own in common today as a nation of people equal before our laws.

     One important part of our American Conservation Movement has lagged behind, however. And the lagging of that part leaves the door open to actual tragedy on the American commons. 

     That ‘part’ is the education of the American people to the fact that they are responsible as owners of public property - even though its held in common under direct supervision of hired help we call a trustee. Yes, it’s true, in addition to being the owners of their personal private property; American citizens have to participate in the management of their public estate. 

     One thing that private property and public property have in common is that: "if you want to keep it you had better keep your eye on it." Pickpockets are everywhere.

     Preserving the value of our public property demands the same diligence as does preserving the value of private property. Just because the people have created a ‘trustee’ in the form of laws and government agencies to administer the laws does not mean the people don’t have to constantly keep a sharp eye out for those who would take unjust value from us - including the occasional wayward trustee. 

     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 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.