This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back
(By Ken Ilgunas)
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| Author | Ken Ilgunas |
A few years ago, Ken Ilgunas walked 1,700 miles for his book Trespassing Across America. As he hiked over the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast of Texas, he was struck by one simple fact: private property is everywhere. Almost anywhere you walk in the United States, you will spot "No Trespassing" and "Private Property" signs on trees and fence posts. In America, there are over a billion acres of grassland pasture, cropland, and forest, and miles and miles of coastlines, that are mostly closed off to the public.
This Land Is Our Land calls for a change. It's time for America, Ilgunas argues, to reevaluate its relationship with private property. To make his case, Ilgunas takes the reader back to the nineteenth century, when Americans were allowed to journey undisturbed across the country. After a series of laws and Supreme Court rulings, the public's right to hunt, fish, and travel over private land was gradually revoked. Today, America finds itself as an outlier in the West as a number of European countries have created sophisticated legal systems that protect landowners and give ordinary citizens generous roaming rights to their countries' green spaces. In Sweden, they call it "allemansr&aauml;tten." In Finland, it's "jokamiehenoikeus." In Britain, it is simply the "right to roam."
Inspired by the United States's history of roaming, and taking guidance from present-day Europe, Ilgunas vividly imagines an American right to roam, with all its potential snags and all its potential benefits. Ilgunas presents evidence that such a system could be successfully implemented and he calls for a future in which folks everywhere will have the right to walk safely, explore freely, and roam boldly--from California to the New York island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters.”
