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American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
- clvx 1y agoI wish Flying D could do the same or part of it. They let people in at Spanish Creek but there’s so much land and forest roads to explore.
- lclc 1y agoSo before nobody had access and it wasn't used, so left to nature. Now everyone can go there. Is that really better?
- proee 1y agoYes. People can now go for walks, mountain bike, and enjoy the outdoors next to their neighborhood.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- munificent 1y agoYes, it is. This land is only preserved from development because people are willing to pay taxes for the government to monitor and fence the land, and pay higher property values because there's less land for development. If you want people to be OK with those costs, it really helps for them to be able to actually go and see the beautiful land that they are preserving. It's not reasonable to expect people to care about nature of you don't let them experience it.
- legitster 1y agoIn this case it sounds like the land was used for cattle grazing, so it wasn't really a preserve. Really we should designate more areas as wilderness. i.e. no machinery. Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s.
- anthomtb 1y ago> Humans can still enjoy the land without roaring across them in 4x4s. To clarify: In your view, someone using a vehicle to access a remote area is not "enjoying the land"? Perhaps you mean that the presence of a motorized vehicle reduces your own enjoyment. (Personal bias: I am an avid mountain biker, occasional dirt bike rider, and feel the wilderness designation is harsh and used excessively).
- legitster 1y agoUnder the Wilderness Act in the US, it breaks federal law to bring a motor into a designated wilderness. The idea is on protecting places where nature can actually be wild. Us humans getting to use them on foot ( or perhaps bike - though it's hard to maintain a bike trail without powered equipment) is a secondary benefit.
- mothballed 1y agoProperty rights as conceived by Adam smith, John Locke, and even the most ruthless anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard does not acknowledge the right of ownership of land from merely seeing it and declaring everyone else is blocked from accessing the next place. In all such systems, ownership is first derived from developing or homesteading the land. People that own undeveloped land purely for the reason of blocking someone else do not have any place in the capitalist system. It is nice someone is working on undoing that, through the mechanisms they have available.
- whatever1 1y agoIf you did not fight for it you don’t have ownership rights. The state owns the land. The rest of us are mere users of it. For the many downvoters do this thought experiment: the neighbor country attacks and takes over your country. What is your ownership title worth? Exactly 0. Hence it was not yours to begin with.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoFor the N years between now and the neighbor country conquering, the title is worth the value I can get from the legal rights it gives me within the legal system of my country. That's more than zero, even if it doesn't last forever.
- whatever1 1y agoYou can bet on a price but it’s not yours. Unless the state defends it and agrees that the piece of paper you call title is binding. To the conqueror your paper means nothing.
- BenjiWiebe 1y agoDoesn't that imply that ownership doesn't and can't exist? What do you own that cannot be taken by force in some way or another? Some non-physical stuff like happiness or sadness, maybe, except that if you were killed you wouldn't have those either.
- idiotsecant 1y agoFantastic. I am a native of Montana and in my lifetime there has been a huge move toward locking the public out of their own lands by closing off access, violating a century of norms between ranchers and farmers and the public. As the state becomes more popular from really dumb TV shows a larger and larger number of people who don't understand the land culture of Montana are slicing the state up for private monied interests and making public land their private playground. Refreshing to see it move the other way a little bit.
- pixelpoet 1y ago> one of the only That reminds me, I still have to put up the explanation at oneoftheonly.com for why this phrase doesn't make sense and is the new "could care less".
- jjtheblunt 1y agodoesn't make sense because it's a contraction of "one of the one-ly" ?
- idreyn 1y agoI would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.
- QuercusMax 1y ago"few" is one of the meanings of "only". "One of the few" is a perfectly normal thing to say as well.
- pixelpoet 1y agoThat's exactly the difference: "one of the few" necessarily implies scarcity, whereas you could say e.g. "one of the only grains of sand at the beach" while clearly there are many.
- huhkerrf 1y ago> The group bought the land from two billionaire Texas brothers who’d kept the public locked out of one of the only western access roads into adjacent public land, There's something uniquely evil about locking the public out of public lands. I'm looking at you, too, Vinod Khosla.
- pike_poker 1y ago[flagged]
- sidewndr46 1y agoI thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?
- kristjansson 1y agoNot if there's no corner to cross. It's totally possible to entirely enclose a piece of public land; it's even easier to own land under access roads, and restrict their use as seems to have been the case here.
- mothballed 1y agoI think the corner crossing basically said that the owners of corner-corner can't claim the 'airspace' exactly at the corner and there is more or less a de facto low-airspace easement at the corner. I'm not sure that it created any sort of ground easement. It basically allows you to 'hop' from one quadrant to the cross quadrant without touching the other two quadrants of the corner. The guy in that case used a ladder to do that IIRC so he only violated their 'airspace' up until that ruling.
- sidewndr46 1y agoI still don't really understand this. If I own 2/4 grid squares in a checkerboard, can't I go in and put some tall fences on the "corners" of my property. Maybe the two fences are physically joined. But my fences are 16 ft tall, how are you going to put a ladder over that?
- darth_avocado 1y agoAmerica needs more land that’s under stewardship of people who want to conserve it for the future. We’ve lost so much native biodiversity, but there’s still pockets that can revive it if managed appropriately.
- hopelite 1y agoThere is a guy in Alabama that is working to preserve and restore native habitats and plants including prairies, through things like prescribed burning and felling invasive species. https://youtube.com/@nativehabitatproject https://youtube.com/@nativehabitatproject
- darth_avocado 1y agoI follow this channel. He’s the reason I’ve got engaged with land conservation efforts.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoFind people who will donate their land to conservation trusts, whether out of the goodness of their heart or a tax donation. As an owner, you can even keep the land with a conservation easement if you prefer (this is ideal if you're not near end of life, where you might want to continue to enjoy the land versus transfer it to a conservation steward org); you get the tax deduction and continue to own the land, but you cannot develop it. Buying it, imho, is a last resort, because of the legwork to put the funds together. This buy was $35M, for example (or rather, this announcement indicates that was the listing price; the transaction price might be lower, would have to look at property records to confirm). (i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
- BeetleB 1y agoIn the early 80's, Congress passed some laws that allow people to buy undeveloped land, and declare it to be undeveloped for perpetuity (no one can develop on it even if sold). The owner gets some tax benefits from doing so. It became a niche segment in the real estate. The idea is you find land that is cheap, but you have a feeling it has mineral wealth. You buy it cheap, get the survey done, and show that it was really worth a lot more. But instead of building a mine/oil well, you declare the land undeveloped for perpetuity. The tax benefit you receive is commensurate to the (now highly increased) value of the land. You make a profit this way, and the environment benefits. It's a very risky part of real estate. There are lots of environmental groups who closely monitor the land, and will file a lawsuit if they suspect you are developing on the land. Fighting lawsuits is part of the risk. Anyway, the person who did the presentation showed some interesting statistics. Supposedly, for every 10 acres of land that is developed in a given year, roughly 9 acres are declared undevelopable for perpetuity. That's really significant (if true).
- geye1234 1y agoThe UK has a much more intelligent (though far from perfect) approach to land use. It has public rights of way (if on foot, horse or bicycle) crossing the whole country. You can walk from one end of Britain to the other without trespassing, and without using roads (much). Many of these paths are very, very old, in a few cases Roman or pre-Roman, although more are medieval. Until recently, they were based on common law rights, although they're now in statute. The situation is a happy hangover of the medieval approach to property rights, which is based on custom and usage and negotiation instead of strict statute. The American eighteenth-century enlightenment approach is an attempt to make everything tidy: it's based on the rationalist idea that a thing is its definition and nothing more. So private property is private, that means nobody else can use it: case closed. The medievals also held in theory (not always in practice, hahaha) that one had a moral duty to use wealth for the public benefit, and that not doing so was theft. So buying up land and kicking everybody off was not only frowned upon, but could also get you into legal trouble, and possibly into trouble with the Church. EDIT: A few points since I didn't mean this to be a controversial comment but it seems to have started an argument: - I should have mentioned the vast public lands in the western US, since they provide a counterpoint. - The liability issue in the US obviously affects access to land, but could be ameliorated in principle (I would think). - My comment is not a general defense of British land usage approach. There are huge problems, including but not limited to the tiny number of big landowners. I should have prefaced my first paragraph with "in some respects". Similarly, it is not a general defense of the medieval approach, and certainly not of serfdom. - The UK's problem with vast landowners got worse in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, with the Dissolution, the enclosure acts and clearances. Land becomes far more concentrated at this time, and the social distance between landlord and tenant much greater. Older lords' houses tend to be built very near roads where anyone can talk to them (whether to beg or to threaten), whereas the eighteenth century ones, as well as being much bigger, are far from the road in huge parks, guarded by layers of servants. The historian E.P. Thompson talks about the "triumph of law over custom" -- in other words, "what you and your ancestors have agreed with us and our ancestors up until this time doesn't matter, we've managed to get this law written down that gets you off the land, now get lost".
- secondcoming 1y ago
- _1tem 1y agoOwners of land that blocks access to significant amounts of other public land should be required to maintain public access roads or lose ownership (of a path of the states choosing).
- pimlottc 1y agoSeems like a good thing but I was definitely a bit wary from the title. I was worried it would be a MAGA-aligned organization pushing to “unlock” public lands for commercial exploitation (e.g. drilling).
- rstat1 1y agoHad the same thought. Was glad to see I was wrong.
- HardCodedBias 1y ago500/acre, am I reading that correctly? IDK anything about Montana, but that feels inexpensive.
- HardCodedBias 1y agoAh it looks like only 22k acres was deeded. ~1500/acre is very normal for Montana farm/pasture land. It is undisclosed how much American Prairie paid, it will be interesting to see if that ever gets disclosed.
- jcmontx 1y agoAmerican Prairie, brought to you by your friendly Russian embassy!
- stuff4ben 1y agoWhat are you insinuating?
- renewiltord 1y agoWe should not exempt non-profits from property tax. For these conservation projects, it will be a defacto ad valorem tax and it's a good thing. Americans will lock themselves out of prosperity and then blame The Rich, The Politicians, Foreigners and so on rather than allow for the development of the vast acres of land that America has. Conservation is fine. But perpetual free locking away of land is total bullshit. The highly performative yelling of "we are IN A CRISIS!" while actively promoting said crisis is getting old. I've had enough of it.
- edm0nd 1y agowait. I can form a non-profit to buy acres of land through and it wont have to pay annual property tax on it?
- renewiltord 1y agoYep. You're not going to be able to live on it or anything though. And you can't exactly give it to yourself later to do something with. Not legally, but people find ways.
- jmward01 1y agoI have a friend that grew up near this and he has told me repeatedly that many of the locals are very against it since they believe it takes ranching (their jobs and the local economy) away from the area. It is interesting when this much land, or this much of any resource, is involved how many and how big the secondary consequences can be. That being said, we have to have this kind of thing, but it should be more of a national or at least state wide effort to help make those impacted whole. The US national parks system has proven to be one of the best investments the US ever made. It is too bad that as a country we barely recognize the value to the point that private efforts like this one become needed.
- aussieguy1234 1y ago"The state refuses to classify bison as wildlife instead of livestock, meaning they must be fenced" I find it quite amusing how many conservatives ignore basic reality.
- stockresearcher 1y agoClassification of wildlife vs livestock is a complicated issue. You should read about the history of Yellowstone and its creation :) You'll end up with an opinion that probably matches your current opinion, but at least you'll understand where it all comes from.
- almog 1y agoPerhaps it is a good place to mention that _today_ is the last day to submit comments on the potential effects of rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16581/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation-national-forest-system-lands https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16...