PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

            I don't know about you, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation surrounding wildfires and was especially surprised and interested yesterday that it turned to questioning public ownership of land.

             Several of your responses called out the management difference between private ownership and government ownership.  Certainly privately owned land is susceptible to fire too, but we're talking about relative degrees of vulnerability. 

             The tragedy of the commons is all about individual exploitation of non-personally owned land.  The reverse tragedy of the commons is elimination of stewardship on non-personally owned land.  Many today believe indigenous peoples, whether Native Americans, Aborigines (Australia), or Maori (New Zealand) had a shared environmental stewardship ethic that consistently improved their ecosystem.

             Having been to Australia 16 times and to New Zealand half a dozen and working with Indian reservations multiple times, I can assure you that different people groups had different land ethics.  Here in North America, the Hudson Bay Company tried to get a managed, rotationally sustainable harvest for beavers among Native American tribes.  The initiative never went anywhere because the tribes that signed on to the program couldn't stop other tribes from poaching on their rested areas between harvests.  I've certainly not studied all the communally-owned nuances around the world and can only speak to the ones with which I'm familiar.

             In general, my completely unscientific observation of these indigenous people groups and their land ethic hinges on whether they were nomadic.  The more nomadic they were, the better their stewardship ethic.  It was when they began settling down in permanent villages that their stewardship ethic diminished.  Perhaps this was due to long periods away from an area.  Kind of like when we don't see nieces and nephews for a couple of years they change a lot.  When you visit an area only occasionally, changes are more dramatic and therefore you're more aware of what you did or didn't do.  Daily exposure can yield a kind of numbing effect.

             Interestingly, today the overriding conservative Western thought is that unless you have private ownership, you don't have stewardship.  That is certainly the paradigm in which I grew up.  But it's certainly not axiomatic either.  How else do you explain farm and ranch soil erosion?  Timber company monoculture plantations that encourage beetles and disease susceptibility? 

             I've come to believe that stewardship isn't nomadic, Communist, capitalist or any political or economic system.  It's more akin to religion, where you either embrace a belief or you don't.  It has cultural implications, but it springs from an individual heart.  In my travels, conversations, and reading, I do not find one people group or belief group that naturally creates a stewardship ethic.  As a Christian, I find great extremes among the religious right between exploitation (Conquistadors) and creation care (Blessed Earth's Matthew Sleeth and others like him). 

             This complicates the public vs. private debate because neither yields a consistent stewardship ethic.  We don't like fuzzy recipes.  We want formulas:  "this policy yields X."   What I do believe is that public ownership yields fairly consistent mismanagement while private sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.  The mountain farmers removed by the Shenandoah National Park certainly did not mismanage to the extent that the Park is today.  Ditto Yellowstone.  When Teresa and I visited there a couple of months ago all I saw was wasteland.  The sulfur springs were interesting, but why couldn't a private entity own and run that like the many private caverns operate here in the Shenandoah Valley?

             Why couldn't private groups purchase and steward large tracts for parks?  I doubt the stewardship would be worse than the current bureaucrats. Such a change would incentivize creativity and customer service; indeed these folks would rise and fall with the economy instead of being insulated from it.

             Does the idea of privatizing (including non-profits) public lands scare you?