Social Liberty
Land Trusts and Liberty
Land is a little bit everyone's, and it still doesn't have to belong to the state.
Social Liberty Foundation ·
A test collection on land, stewardship, and the voluntary institutions that can hold land for the long term. It begins with what property in land is and who may use it, follows the record of public stewardship in forests, wildlife corridors, parks, and old trees, and ends with land trusts for nature and for housing, and the private accreditation that lets people trust them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Rights and PropertyLocke says property is the origin of liberty. Proudhon says property is theft. Georgists say land is always a little bit everyone's. How can all three be right.
Chapter 2
Usufruct Legal FrameworksUsufruct, in Roman-based legal systems, the temporary right to the use and enjoyment of the property of another,…
Chapter 3
AccessA hunter's boot never touched the ground on either side of the property line — and a federal appeals court still had to decide who owns the point in the air where two exclusions meet.
Chapter 4
The Myth of the Public StewardThe elephant, the cod, and the tomato patch all tell the same story — an owner who has to live with what happens next takes better care of the land than an agency that doesn't.
Chapter 5
Fire Policy -- An Ecosystem Designed For the Safety of Sacred CowsA century of "put it out by 10 a.m." didn't make the forest safer. It just moved the bill to a future large enough that nobody in charge today has to be the one who pays it.
- The 10 a.m. policy and the century it built
- The dogma outlives the evidence, on schedule
- Hermits Peak, and the mechanism that keeps the gap open
- The bulldozer fills the vacuum the drip torch left behind
- Good fire, criminalized, then rediscovered on a twenty-year lag
- Who actually benefits from the century-long freeze
- The tell, applied to itself
Chapter 6
Freedom PathwaysA pronghorn's route from the Green River Basin to Grand Teton crosses land nobody who owns it can unilaterally protect — the first case in a series asking what social liberty owes the living world that isn't human and can't hold title.
Chapter 7
The Social Liberty Implications of a Municipal Biodiversity InitiativePalo Alto's Parks & Recreation Commission recently stood up a small ad hoc committee to strengthen biodiversity and…
Chapter 8
Five Centuries Under One CrownA live oak that germinated in 1526 is still standing. The tree has outlived every institution that might vote to remove it — until now.
Chapter 9
Held in TrustLand matters too much to leave to the highest bidder and too much to hand to the state. Land trusts offer a third way: private, voluntary, bound to a purpose, and flexible enough to care for a marsh or a neighborhood.
Chapter 10
Pro-Housing, Not Pro-DevelopmentThe two get used as if they were the same thing. Housing is a social goal, measured by whether people can live where their lives are. Development is an ideology, measured by how much gets built. A free society can want the first without the second.
Chapter 11
Accreditation and LibertyA free society needs ways to know whom to trust without asking the state for permission. Private accreditation is one of the most important, and the best kind doesn't ask whether an institution conforms. It asks whether it practices what it promotes.