I wrote this review back in January, 1997. Thought it made sense to resurrect it now that Pombo has just about gutted the Endangered Species Act.
This Land Is Our Land_
by Richard Pombo and Joseph Farah
St Martin's Press, New York 1996 ISBN 0-312-14747-3
This Land Is Our Land proclaims the absolute rights of private property. According to the authors, private property rights are the basis of all freedoms: "The founders understood that vital rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, actually descend from the understanding that people have an inherent and inalienable right to pursue and own property. For what are a person's ideas if not property?" Ownership confers absolutely no responsibilities. If a piece of property is yours, you can do anything you want with it. Local zoning ordinances, state laws, and Federal regulations should have no power over you. Any infringement upon those absolute rights of property is a "taking" and should be reimbursed by whatever level of government is being so greedy.
Nowhere in this book is there a mention of community, commons, or a Commonwealth. I used to say that the Contract Congress does not believe in a Commonwealth. They believe that the way to solve the tragedy of the commons is to sell it off, that the only property there should be is private property. I didn't realize how correct I was until I read
This Land Is Our Land. It gave me bad dreams.
I do wish this was a better book, a real argument rather than just a polemical rant. I wanted facts and figures, history and a program. All I got was anecdotes and opinion, name-calling and propaganda. There are justifiable criticisms of regulation and environmental organizations and programs but Pombo and Farah do not really make them. The closest they get is to quote Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair from Wild Forest Review: "The mainstream environmental movement was elitist, highly paid, detached from the people, indifferent to the working class, and a firm ally of big government.... The environmental movement is now accurately perceived as just another well-financed and cynical special interest group, its rancid infrastructure supported by Democratic Party operatives and millions in grants from corporate foundations."
For Representative Pombo (chair of the task force studying the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act) and Mr Farah, the main threat seems to be bureaucracy, out of control and unaccountable. They say, "Today, the government rarely sends soldiers armed with rifles to seize private property; it send bureaucrats armed with regulations and environmental impact statements" and quote Nancy Cline of Sonoma, CA on her wetlands problem with the Army Corps of Engineers, EPA, FBI et alia as saying, "This is not about protecting the environment. It's about agencies out of control and in need of adult supervision." However, they have no real program for bureaucratic accountability. There is only one recommendation Pombo and Farah propose to confront this problem: "Data claimed to be scientific must be derived from the use of generally recognized and accepted scientific methods and protocols. Blind peer review should be instituted to review all data and analyses. Qualified experts should be retained and should have no financial ties to Forest and Wildlife Service. The blind peer review should be published so that it is available to the public." However, they have no such data to support their own arguments. All they present are anecdotes, stories told by the aggrieved parties. That form of argument makes me more than a little wary. Personally, I believe that there are 17 sides to every story.
They seem to be confused about "environmentalists" as well, accusing them of believing that "humans are motivated by self-interest above all, they cannot be trusted to care for the planet - they must be coerced." But isn't "enlightened self-interest" the very mechanism of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of capitalism? Or is it just the "coercion" (or community responsibility) that they object to? Pombo and Farah see a powerful Eco-Federal Coalition: "Their philosophy is elitist, rooted in the belief that the average American if left to his or her own devices, would surely perform the most stupid and harmful actions possible to the environment." They believe, "Property rights in America are being sacrificed for a vision that we cannot see. It is not the vision of the average American, but that of an urban, upper-class elite who are completely convinced that their plan for your property is better than your plan." This is a propagandistic "just folks" appeal and a veiled call to class war. Not only are the "environmentalists" in league with the Federal government, they are also in league with Big Business as well, even though "On the issue of private property, the eco-federal coalition owes more to communism than to any other philosophy." For the authors, an "environmentalist" is both a communist and a capitalist but always an elitist acting in concert with Big Business and Big Government against all individual property owners. At the same time, only 5% of Americans belong to an environmental group of any kind. "Environmentalists," though a very small proportion of the public, are still this powerful Eco-Federal Coalition that is running roughshod over small (and large) property-holders. Yet, it is the real Americans in the property rights movement who will ultimately win even though they comprise a much smaller, much poorer proportion of the population.
Pombo and Farah say, "Only after years of dealing with government officials and professional environmental activists did I come to realize that they see the dirt, trees, and animals as their constituency." I guess they believe that we should not take "dirt, trees, and animals" into account in any of our decisions or allow the natural world any champions at all. There is no one who should speak for the Earth.
There are arguments to be made for free market environmentalism but they aren't in this book. There are telling criticisms of the environmental movement but they aren't in this book. There is a program to counter bad regulation and unaccountable bureaucracy but it isn't in this book. This Land Is Our Land is a disappointment. It is a sour reworking of the lyrics of Woody Guthrie's old song:
This land is our land
This land isn't your land
This land is my land
And I can do whatever I want.