Private Property – A new land use ethic urged!

Part three

Mr. Vang’s sentencing is scheduled for November eighth, less than two weeks away. I read Brian McCombi’s article, Open Wounds, on September 2, 2005. McCombie presented, I thought, a rather broad and impartial view into the role that race played in this tragic incident. Now that the trial is behind us, it seems clear to me that a much more important causal factor in this incident has to do with how many American’s view private property rights in this country. We got our most important clue on this fact when reading Wisconsin’s assistant state attorney’s opening remarks at the trial, when he explains and justifies the hunters’ response to the trespassing as being “natural” under these circumstances. Many readers will not have any trouble with this remark. I do!

Such a statement, at worse, has the effect of implicitly giving institutional sanction to how the hunter group responded. At best, this statement suggested that the group’s behavior was totally without fault. Our right to private property is a fundamental principle in our Constitution and my intent is not in any way to impugn this sacred right, but to ask us to re-think and change our private land use ethic. After all, life on planet earth is changing. There are more people and greater diversity and we increasingly interact with each other in smaller and smaller spaces.

I believe it is time we begin a discussion of a new land use ethic for the twenty-first century by identifying how we can mitigate the most negative aspects of private property rights. For example it’s clear that private property tends to further separate, divide and establish barriers. It limits our freedom of movement and choices. At the same time there is an increasing need, both locally and globally, for more porous and fluid boundaries that will lesson potential conflicts and help more equitably to govern access to increasingly limited community resources.

What would this new land use ethic look like? We need to begin by emphasizing greater stewardship and responsibility on both sides, the land owner and hunters. After all, our environment is for all the people. Clearly the public’s demand for greater access to this increasingly imperiled resource will need to be more creatively and equitably managed in the future. I know that this is not a politically correct statement to make – but without being more straight-forward tensions will only continue to grow.

It is in this spirit and context that I would like to propose for discussion that farmers and other land owners consider opening up their land for hunting and certain recreational uses by voluntarily adopting or sponsoring one or more urban dwellers who wish to hunt and fish.

Most of all, a new land use ethic emphasizes that all land is on loan to us from our Creator and thus its care and use is a shared sacred responsibility and privilege than a sacred right. Such an ethic would help ensure that both sides would treat each other with greater respect and dignity. Rather than relating in an uneven power basis, the emphasis would be upon their mutual love of the land and its fruits. Such a paradigm shift that respects this axiom will serve as a sound basis for future land use planning and management for the twenty-first century.

In the same spirit that Americans have recently opened up their homes to evacuees from the Gulf Coast states, Wisconsin rural land owners could voluntarily participate in a self-created, managed and operated “hunt-share” program.

A related approach would be for such land owners to voluntarily set aside certain parcels of land during the hunting season. This also would be a voluntary, self-conceived, self-directed and self-managed program. To get this program started it would only take two or three land-owners to volunteer and the press to write about it. Informally of course, such a voluntary sharing of hunting land already exists. What is needed perhaps is a further expansion and formalization of this practice along with more equitable access to such land.

More importantly than any single idea however for better moderating access to private property is the need for greater dialogue and voluntary and creative experimentation of new ways to address these growing conflicts. To ignore, to further postpone or delay such a search for more peaceful and creative solutions is only risking another such tragedy.

Also before many more hunting seasons pass I respectfully suggest that the DNR’s section of the bureau of law enforcement carefully reexamine their use of Wisconsin citizens as “undercover agents” to report trespassers. It seems to me that this incident should give us pause and prompt the state to develop a DNR educational program that recognizes that our present land-use ethic is badly out-dated for the twenty-first century, and that to continue to ignore this will likely result in further confrontational, “I gottcha,” kind of situations.

God forbid that we ever have another such incident, but if we do, hopefully it will not be viewed by the State of Wisconsin’s law enforcement officials as “natural” for landowners in a future incident to respond as they did here. Surely no trespassing incident or taking of deer or other game should result in the death of six human beings, and condemn the seventh to life imprisonment.