Commons

Private land is the primary means of holding wealth in the United States; certainly the most stable. So I can understand people's reluctance to allow their land to be accessed by the public. But paranoia about the government, coupled with increasing individualism in our society, is the recipe for ecological disaster. When society no longer has the means of protecting its own health if that means limiting a land owner's absolute authority over his own land, we may be reaching a tipping point. Environmental problems are getting so biblical in scale, that absent timely land-use reform, we won't be able to adjust before some elements of society take away private land-ownership alltogether.

Both situations are lousy - absolute individualism and absolute socialism. But if climate change triggers drastic changes in our economy and ecology, socialist land reform might get shoved down our throuts unless we figure out how to reduce privacy's primacy in our culture first.