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- Info
A battle over land use
| Author: |
Harris, Martin |
| Date: |
1991 |
| Periodical: |
Journal of Forestry |
| Abstract: |
In its most summary form, the problem is this: the paid professional environmentalists, driven by a predominantly urban constituency anxious about the environment, have been systematically rewriting definitions to expand their control over private-sector land use decisions, predominantly in the farmland and wetland categories. Within a few short years, they've been remarkably successful in expanding both the range and degree of regulatory control over rural land, thereby significantly reducing ownership options and/or raising ownership costs. The reason there's a problem here lies not in the well-intentioned efforts of the regulators to protect significant chunks of the rural environment from inappropriate urbanization or, indeed, from any urbanization at all. Nor is there a problem, I suggest, in the probable hidden agenda of these efforts: development prevention or "no-growth." Most long term rural folk, as well as their newcomer neighbors, are well aware of this dimension of the regulatory movement and are either overtly or covertly sympathetic to it, at least as long as they haven't become dependent on speculative land value in lieu of commodity production value for personal income. The real reason there's a problem, I would suggest, is that both the regulators and their mostly urban supporters see no need to consider the economic fallout of their land-use desires. With no ties to the land, with personal incomes quite independent of land use or capability, with little interest in or sympathy for those whose personal incomes and future security are closely tied to the land, it's been remarkably easy for them to build (and then to systematically enlarge) a set of seemingly logical environmental regulations ostensibly aimed at such reasonable goals as preserving wetlands, woodlands, and ag-lands. It's not they who have to live with the economic implications of withdrawing the basic resource of other people's livelihoods from the marketplace. |
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