Who Owns the Land?

Crimes Against Nature

Karl Jacoby, 2001

The first section of this book, on the Adirondack State Park (within which I was born), was most interesting to me.  Jacoby highlighted what he called the “hidden history of American Conservation, by which he meant the consolidation of state power, the systematic denigration of rural land use (Jacoby called this “Degradation Discourse”), and the elimination of local customs regarding commons with top-down state and national laws designating “Wilderness” areas. Jacoby suggested this wilderness was “not some primeval character of nature but rather an artifact of modernity.” (198) Jacoby also agreed with William Cronon’s suggestion (in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 1996) that the idea of wilderness conservationists “tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others,” and betrays “the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth.”

Jacoby introduced his subject with a reference to E.P. Thompson. He said he wanted to provide a “moral ecology...a vision of nature ‘from the bottom up’.” Jacoby suggested rural commoners had a different response to their environments than the “appreciation of wilderness” Roderick Nash found in the “minds of sophisticated Americans living in the more civilized East” (quoting Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” 1977). But their response was not primitive or rapacious, as portrayed by George Perkins Marsh at the beginning of the conservation movement and historians like Marsh ever after. In many cases, Jacoby said, local resistance faced by conservationists was due to the fact that “for many rural communities, the most notable feature of conservation was the transformation of previously acceptable practices into illegal acts.” Reading this, I was reminded of the “hares and rabbits” controversy in England. Jacoby got to this point, I found -- but not directly and not as strongly as I might have liked.

The Adirondacks are the source of the Hudson river and are nearly worthless as farmland. These are both important points, as is the forest’s location, close to Albany.  Marsh’s book Man and Nature attracted attention in New York, and I should take a closer look at this and the other contemporary writing Jacoby mentioned when I do my historiographical reading for my White Pine project. For me, the most interesting feature of the Adirondack story was the proliferation of “private parks,” which seemed to me very much like the enclosed, aristocratic hunting lands of Britain. “By 1893,” Jacoby said, “there were some sixty parks in the Adirondacks, containing more than 940,000 acres of private lands, including many of the region’s best hunting and fishing grounds, at a time when the state-owned Forest Preserve contained only 730,000 acres.” Jacoby quoted extensively from Forest and Stream, which observed in 1894 that “Private parks in the Adirondacks today occupy a considerably larger area than the State of Rhode Island.” By 1899, the New York legislature was debating the monopolization of land and exclusion of poor local people from hunting. References were made to British aristocratic land enclosure and the prosecution of “poachers.”  In 1903, locals murdered Orrando Dexter, a private park owner who had prosecuted several trespassers.

I think there’s a lot more to this story. Jacoby was more interested in the evolution of conservation and tended to see these conflicts as being between conservationists and their opponents. I see them more as a conflict between locals and outsiders. The Albany conservationists had more in common with robber-baron (and some politician) park owners than with any of the locals. It’s no coincidence that they tended to overlook tree theft by the timber industry and illegal (or obscenely excessive legal) hunting by the park owners while prosecuting locals for “squatting” on ancestral lands, taking deer or fish out of season to feed their families, and cutting non-commercial hardwood species for firewood. Jacoby seemed to see this from the authorities’ point of view; I think this could be treated differently. I’m really curious, for example, about the locations of those sixty parks. How much of the very best land did they take? How many towns did they hem in, or restrict rights of way to? How much of that land is still privately owned? According to Wikipedia, in 1900, the park’s area was 2.8 million acres, of which 1.2 million was state owned. In 2000, the park had grown to 6 million acres, of which 2.4 million is state owned. After deducting for the area of towns, lakes, and small lots, that leaves about 3 million acres in private ownership. That's about the size of Connecticut. Hmm... Has anybody ever really looked at the distribution of land in America? How it was distributed initially? Who owns it now?