Did you know: Conservation groups often mix their labor with the land.

Shopping for a dictator

True perhaps, but I'm still not seeing the philosophical justification would leave open wilderness. Perhaps some kind of compromise? A trail though an area = homesteaded acreage for 25 miles on either side? a tower = homesteaded as far as the eye can see?

I don't see how doing conservation would leave open wilderness ( as a preserve) as the trade off of hands off conservation would be inversely proportional to the strength of the claim under homesteading.

Perhaps there is more to your statement Montius

Well despite what many people seem to think, conservationism isn't about just fencing off wilderness and leaving it be.

Even nature preserves tend to have plenty human labor invested in them. I see no reason why proper title cannot be obtained for nature preserves.

I honestly don't know how I can make this more clear. I value, not just conserved parks, but also wilderness. The definition from the US Federal Law establishing the Wilderness Act is suggestive:

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

Any traces of human activity diminishes wilderness. That's the word as I am using it.

Some conservation efforts are, in fact, about preserving wilderness.

Actually, a lot of it does basically come down to fencing off wilderness and leaving it be. The reason I know this is because my dad used to be involved heavily with the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and I used to go round helping him do bird counts and repairs on stuff. Much of what was done was lobbying the government to prevent development on the natural habitats of rare birds, and also other animals and wildlife. On the preserves we worked on, the only 'homesteading' we did was to put up new fences, mend the old ones, and occasionally maintain tracks. There are obviously other places which require more work - drainage, planting flowers, plants and trees, etc., but many which just require people leaving it alone. Maintaining a track in a forest in no way entitles you to the whole forest, so I don't see how the homestead principle can apply at all here.

Just down the road from where my family lives there are large areas of peatlands which are rather beautiful and have many wildflowers, plants, breeding grounds for birds etc. There is a large peat industry in the area which constantly clashes with the local government about where it can and can not dig for peat. There is virtually no work required to keep much of this peatland a beautiful place and an important habitat, other than keeping the peat companies out. The homestead principle fails with so much of the natural world if you care about conservation.

The Scottish highlands are another place I know of where this drastically fails. Absolutely amazing place, precisely because it is almost complete wilderness. Of course work has to be done there maintaining tracks, bridges etc etc., but does that apply to the whole of the highlands? Most of it is just left as total wilderness. I've seen plenty of plans which would wreck large parts of the highlands - people wanting to smash the place up to make more ski resorts, people wanting to build roads in pragmatic places which would ruin the countryside, people wanting to build houses and ****ty little cafes in areas that would ruin the landscape etc etc. None of these plans affect areas that have been 'homesteaded', they are all simply stopped by government 'violence.'

Just to clarify: You're against people turning complete wilderness into roads, cafes, houses and resorts?

Correct (depending on what wilderness we are talking about). I don't think I could have been clearer tbh.

Well I was using the word conservation how it was originally used i.e. fisheries, wildlife management, water, soil conservation, sustainable forestry, etc. but w/e.

"For man to be a visitor.." pretty much requires some investment in labor into the land. One, even a nature preserve would require some sort of border/demarcation/fence around it. It would also require people to invest their labor patrolling/enforcing it's "purity," etc.

If you think this is some sort of legitimate argument against homesteading or private property rights, it is not.

Well the "use of the land" as it were in this case not only required you to actually invest labor (fences, trails, etc), but it also was being used for the purpose of preservation. You were, in essence, using the land, keeping would be trespassers off, etc for a purpose.

No, it really doesn't. If a private owner of said peatland didn't want companies to dig there, they have every right to exclude them from use of it.

It is precisely this tragedy of the commons that these things even become an issue. It comes down to one side saying "Hai u don't have the right to wreck this wilderness" and the other side saying "Hai you have no right to restrict me access to land that isn't owned by anyone."

What right do you have to keep individuals from doing this?

So we have established that putting a fence around an area entitles someone to a legitimate claim to ownership of that land? I thought people on this forum had argued against this being legitimate in the past?

I'm not sure what it shows. So far I have yet to see a supporter of the homestead principle be able to consistently defend it while not allowing for the destruction of what I would consider very valuable wilderness.

So I build a trail up a Scottish mountain and use force to keep 'trespassers' off it. I now own that mountain? Or have I just homesteaded the tracks I built and not the whole mountain? What entitles me to keep someone from building a lodge right on the summit of this mountain? Or mining the side of it? Or felling all the timber on it?

You haven't established how a private owner can come to own that peatland yet, aside from fencing it off and claiming it as his own.

Well we have to find a consistent, just way of finding out who owns said wilderness before we can talk about any claims of ownership imo.

Maybe I don't have the right, but if you take the stance that no-one has the right to do this, then your claims of consistently supporting the homestead principle and wanting to see important natural sites preserved become incompatible.

No, not in of itself it isn't. Keep in mind that the point of homesteading is to establish intersubjectively ascertainable borders regarding property (which acts as an extension of your body in order to acheive your goals). So essentially a fence doesn't do it by itself, but that doesn't mean you need to homestead of every inch of a plot of land to have said to have homesteaded it.

If you value it so much, then you won't mind homesteading it and using it for such purposes. You won't mind investing labor in preserving it.

Your best bet to keep someone from doing that is to establish title.

And enforcing said boundary, and establishing proper title (best established by courts, imo), etc.

Erm, that is the point of homesteading.

No, because the homestead principle can be used to preserve nature.

It takes an investment of labor to preserve something. You have to demarcate boundaries, keep trespassers out, and so on and so forth.

Courts imply state (coercive) power. Not at all sure how that jibes with ACist distrust of the state.

No.

A wants the case between A and B to be tried in Billy Bob's Private Enterprise Court System; B wants the case between A and B to be tried in Billy Joe's Private Property Court System. Now what?

Both "courts" (imo a loaded word that contains a lot of baggage due to our existing system) hear the case and render a judgment. If they both find the same way, there's no problem. If they disagree they either refer to a third, binding arbiter, or they just negotiate a settlement. This is exactly how many disputes are currently settled (e.g. auto accidents).

By the way, the "courts" need have no enforcement power whatsoever for this to work.

A warning: we've done this a million times and I'm not really interested, nor do I have the time, to go into this in any detail.

To expand briefly, the problem isn't with "courts", the problem is with a monopoly court that arrogates to itself ultimate decision making power. If you have competitive courts, they will bind themselves to each other in a matrix of pre-existing contracts that each specify what they will do in the event of a dispute between policyholders from different companies (hopefully you will agree that disputes between policyholders of the same company are not a problem). Insurance companies do this now. These contracts might specify that two companies that find differently in a dispute will refer to a third binding arbiter that they have agreed to, or they might just specify that they split the costs, or that each pays damages to his own policyholder, or whatever. Any of these options is obviously far less costly that waging war to settle it, which is always the ridiculous boogeyman that is trotted out.

...

Lol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_behavior

Yeah, I know.

Whether or not he was there, his anti-gay creds are looking rather tarnished.

From The Economist:

Waziristan: The last frontier

The court system, just like all actions in ACland appear to be based on rational thought processes using rational people. The human race on the other hand is not rational, and most disputes are between one or more irrational participants.

If the premise for participation in ACland is rationality, what would be the protocol to deal with the inevitable breakout of irrationality in its citizens? This would of course be a biased decision, for one side would need to establish they weren't voluntarily interested in the other sides position and therefore decided to not reason or bargain. Would a person who initiated disagreement with others be branded an irrational and be ostracized from society? Or would the respondent be labelled the difficult entity and ostracized?

It's not.