Private Land Made (Too) Simple

Abstract:     
To an unhealthy degree, law and economics writing about private land ownership has become detached from the natural world, in all its complexity and mystery, and from real people and the way they relate to land and to one another. Intentionally or otherwise, it has largely retreated into a theoretical world that includes only those features and elements about nature and people that scholars find useful. Economic models used to study this world are highly value laden: they display an individualistic if not libertarian political perspective; they largely ignore and hence devalue ecological connections; and they embrace a presentist, anthropocentric moral scheme that rejects, ab initio, the ethical claims of future generations and nonhuman life. Accentuating these political and cultural biases is the profound disconnection between most law-and-economics writing and the vast writing on land by students from other perspectives, including writing in the biological sciences, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. To move from the realm of simple economic models into the world of real land and real people is to see land degradation as a complex cultural phenomenon. The land declines because of the ways people use it, and people use as it they do for many nuanced, intertwined reasons. Some of these reasons are usefully portrayed with economic models, but others have more to do with perceptions, values, social relations, and institutional structures. In its inattentiveness to these considerations economic scholarship often embraces, and thus lends credence to, perceptions and value schemes that historians have catalogued as significant causes of land degradation. Rather than using simple hypotheticals about polluting smokestacks and wandering rabbits, economists should employ more complex conservation examples - such as the dying of the mussels in Illinois waterways, where lands are all privately owned, the market rules, and landowners are free to negotiate. To probe such problems, drawing upon the full range of relevant, noneconomic scholarship, is to see private lands and the challenge of landscape-scale conservation in a far different light.

Accepted Paper Series