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Book Review
| Land, Property, and the Environment. Edited by John F. Richards. Oakland, Calif.: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 2002. xii + 433 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $36.95.
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| Property rights, those running debates about who is allowed to do what to the land and for how long, clearly affect our environment. |
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John Richards and thirteen other writers take a broad look at this in essays going from Tanzanian tribal chiefs imposing land use rules to control wildlife and tsetse flies, to U.S. federalization of land and water rights both to save and develop the American West. While almost all the authors are professors, their writing is easily accessible. |
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Richards sees property rights in land becoming more uniform globally as diffuse local rights are replaced by control at the state (national) level. Property rights are becoming more clearly measured and documented, but regulations and systems for challenging these rights are increasing. |
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Meena Bhargava and John Richards (Chapter 8) offer a particularly interesting examination of growing state power during British colonization of India. Complex local land tenures were simplified. Owners were pushed to intensify land use and pay more taxes, leading to rapid clearing of forests. The British then reacted by reserving large forest tracts which passed to the Government of India in 1878. |
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Ronald Herring examines the mixed results of state control in Chapter 9. He admits the necessity of removing land from the push and pull of markets, but shows that there can still be misuse and perverse results. For example, protection of tigers in Indian forest reserves led to conflicts with locals as tigers killed people. Grazing by domestic water buffalos had maintained wetlands used by waterfowl. State regulations against this led to lost wetlands and more conflicts. |
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Eric Freyfogle (Chapter 13) surveys American property rights in land from the nineteenth century to the present, observing the early rise of landowner's rights to use land intensively and the recent counterreactions resulting in landowner rights now being more dependent on surrounding social and natural contexts. Rights are becoming vaguer and more subject to negotiation. |
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The sense of the book is that there is no one system of property rights that best protects the environment and that property rights never have been and never will be unchanging absolutes. There is a shifting balance of power between property holders, states, markets, various interests, and communities. If the market-based self-interest of individual owners dominates, community concerns start to pull the other way; if state controls become too powerful, local interests begin to reassert their needs. |
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The book is an accurate and interesting portrayal of the real world of property. |
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Lester DeCoster has participated in the most recent forty-five years of the running debate about property: as a forest landowner and forester with a wooded backyard in Virginia and two large tracts in Maine, as a state and national bureaucrat, and most recently as a public relations consultant. He has written more than five hundred articles, books, and publications on forest issues. |
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