This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back

A PLUME BOOK

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

Cadence Cook

KEN ILGUNAS is an author, journalist, and backcountry ranger in Alaska. He has hitchhiked ten thousand miles across North America, paddled one thousand miles across Ontario in a birchbark canoe, and walked 1,700 miles across the Great Plains, following the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. Ilgunas has a BA from SUNY Buffalo in history and English, and an MA in liberal studies from Duke University. The author of travel memoirs Walden on Wheels and Trespassing Across America, he is from Wheatfield, New York.

ALSO BY KEN ILGUNAS

Walden on Wheels

Trespassing Across America

PLUME

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2018 by Ken Ilgunas

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

WGP/TRO-© Copyright 1956, 1958, 1970, 1972, and 1995 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY, administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.

Used by Permission.

Plume is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

has been applied for.

ISBN 9780735217843 (paperback)

ISBN 9780735217850 (ebook)

Version_1

For my best friends, Josh and David

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me

A sign was painted said: Private Property,

But on the back side it didn’t say nothing—

This land was made for you and me.

—Original verse from This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie

Contents

About the Author

Also by Ken Ilgunas

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1.  The Right to Roam

2.  The Closing of America

3.   A Brief History of Trespassing

4.  An Abbreviated Journey Across Europe

5.  The Land Americans Once Roamed

6.  Why We Need the Right to Roam

7.  The Arguments Against Roaming

8.  The Right to Roam—How Do We Get There?

9.  This Land Is Our Land

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Notes

Index

Introduction

It is not in the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors.

—E. O. Wilson, The Creation¹

In his poem Mending Wall, New England poet Robert Frost and his neighbor repair a stone wall that separates their properties. It’s their annual tradition. Each spring, they rough up their hands lifting and setting the fallen stones, playfully casting spells on the wobbling wall to Stay where you are until our backs are turned!

There’s irony in repairing an unneighborly wall because the two neighbors are indeed neighborly as they work across from one another. To Frost, the wall makes no sense because it only divides him from his good neighbor, as well as Frost’s harmless apple trees from his neighbor’s harmless pines. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, Frost muses. The neighbor, as well, isn’t quite sure why they have the wall. When Frost asks him why they rebuild it every year, the neighbor can only recite the saying of his father: Good fences make good neighbours. Even Frost, with his doubts and musings, feels strangely compelled to take part in—even initiate—the yearly tradition.

The way I read it, Frost’s poem isn’t just about walls, divisions, or neighbors. At its core, the poem grapples with the trouble of unquestioned tradition and the gravitational pull of precedent. Mending Wall urges us to rethink our traditions, specifically our tradition of closing off lands to our fellow countrymen and women. So let’s think about the poem, not from the perspective of two neighbors in the year 1914 in New England, but from the perspective of 324 million people in twenty-first-century America, a country arguably more divided now than it’s been since the Civil War. Let’s think about our own unquestioned devotion to fences, to No Trespassing signs, and to an unbending understanding of private property. Let’s think about why we, as a matter of course, forbid our fellow citizens from our lands.

This book calls for the right to roam across America. It calls for opening up private land for public hiking, camping, and other harmless forms of recreation. Skeptics, and more than a few landowners, may reasonably argue that bringing into question something as sacrosanct and entrenched in American culture as private property would be, in our present world, a rather ridiculous notion. Considering how there are no ongoing movements calling for the right to roam, no proposed bills, and no politicians lobbying to open up private land, one might argue that what I’m proposing is fantastical, unreasonable, and just plain foolhardy, especially when our country is plagued by problems more serious than our nature deficit disorders and recreational access issues. One could charge that I’m tilting at windmills, that I’m advocating for something unattainable, that I’m calling for changing an institution that many Americans in fact cherish.

To these charges, I’d have to answer, Maybe so. But I would also argue that our problems with physical and mental health, of dwindling green spaces, of environmental injustice, and of inequality in land ownership are all serious and will only get worse in the decades to come. If things keep going the way they are, then by the end of the twenty-first century few of us will have access to our last havens of natural space and to the vanishing pleasures of solitude, peace, adventure, and the hundred other benefits that spring from a relationship with the natural world. That’s hardly a bold prediction, because today, early in the first half of the twenty-first century, few of us have easy access to these places and the feelings they stir.

Should you be turned off by what may be a radical, or even heretical, idea, let’s remind ourselves that there is no harm in thinking for the future, even the deep future. If it makes it easier to read, then consider this book a book for the twenty-second century—a book that calls for something unlikely right now but plants a seed that may one day grow branches under which future generations may walk. (Beware: Many more hiking metaphors to come.) At the very least, I hope this book encourages us to think about an institution that is so ever present that we seldom give it a thought and that we accept without scruple. I speak of property, specifically our American brand of absolute and exclusionary private property.

Now that I’ve performed the delicate footwork of (hopefully) assuring the reader that this book has not in fact been written with a thoughtless zeal, a reckless radicalness (or a certifiable insanity), I hope you’ll join me as I take a bold step forward, through the gaps in our fallen walls and unmended fences, into the great American countryside, where I believe we’d be a better nation if we did away with the faulty notion that good fences make good neighbours. I believe the opposite to be true.

Ken Ilgunas, 2017

CHAPTER 1

The Right to Roam

My first years were spent living just as my forefathers had lived—roaming the green, rolling hills.²

—Chief Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 1933

As a travel writer, I have the bad habit of writing about myself. I plant forests of I’s over pages and leave behind trails of thoughts and feelings that I think will change the world but that only succeed in embarrassing me. A historical and political book of this nature warrants a more formal and less personal style. While this book, outside of this chapter, may come across as impersonal, I do wish to say up front that it has in fact been written with passion and feeling. For me, the seemingly boring subjects of property law, land-use planning, and public-access legislation are, well, personal.

Let me start by telling you about where I grew up. On the western edge of New York State, between the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, is Wheatfield. Sprawling over twenty-eight square miles of mostly flat land and bordered on one end by the mighty Niagara River, Wheatfield was not too long ago a countryside of forests and cornfields.

Before white settlers moved into the area in the mid-1800s, the land was a relatively untouched forest inhabited by Native American tribes. Wheatfield’s soil is well suited for growing wheat, so when the settlers arrived, wheat became a local staple. Then came the Erie Canal. Then industry grew, both in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. And in the second half of the twentieth century, the middle class fled the cities to live out the suburban American Dream. In less than two hundred years, the character of the land shifted from wild to farm to suburb.

If you drive through Wheatfield today, you might not be all that impressed. The town’s schools, churches, pizzerias, ballparks, retirement homes, and shopping centers are scattered incoherently. You’d see that it’s just yet another poorly planned American town, aggressively developed without aesthetic vision or forethought. Its natural beauties—of which there are plenty—are obscured by the fast roads, endless subdivisions, and RV dealership monstrosities. It is, shall we say, a town without charm. Since there is no Main Street, town center, or civic landmark, it’s a stretch to even call it a town, with all the connotations of cohesion that being a town implies.

Yet it is a place that remains happy and peaceful in my dreams, for it was—for a time at least—a boyhood paradise. My family was among the first to move into a subdivision in Wheatfield called Country Meadows. During our first couple of years in Country Meadows, my brother and I would play in a thin stand of woods between our backyard and a cornfield. In the adjoining lot, still wild and vacant, we skated on a pond in the winter and collected tadpoles from it in the summer.

A bunch of new families had just moved to Wheatfield, which back in the late 1980s was mostly farms and fields. We were all strangers. We were all trespassers. There weren’t any grouchy old landowners. There weren’t any exclusionary signs, rules, or customs. It was a suburb without fences. It was a countryside without guns. And it was suddenly populated by a bunch of excited working-class families who’d just bought their first homes.

My boyhood friends and I roamed over the muddied construction lots, passed through woods, and extended our little football fields and baseball diamonds onto our neighbors’ newly planted lawns. We played in the neighborhood’s half-constructed homes, some of us laying siege to our friends inside those plywood castles with an artillery of mud clumps. We stole scrap lumber and built forts in the woods behind my home. My family let our golden retriever out, night or day, to sniff and chase and wander where he wished, unleashed. Later, as teenagers, we walked between homes to play football on a huge stretch of grass behind our subdivision. We never thought to ask who owned that grass.

I remember the storms of cawing blackbirds that would descend to feed on our back lawn. I remember the stink of the freshly manured cornfield. I remember the humid summer nights, the smell of raw pumpkin pulp, the lawns bronzed with blankets of fall foliage. I remember the snow tunnels and snowball wars. In all of my years in Country Meadows, I can remember only one sharp word from a homeowner for trespassing. For the most part, I remember a land without fences. Without signs. Without prohibitions.

But don’t let me paint too idyllic a picture. My adolescence wasn’t all skinned knees and wilderness adventures. And I was no Huck Finn. I spent plenty of time inside, too, playing more than my share of video games and watching more than my share of TV. These were the 1990s, after all. There were Saturday morning cartoons, Sega games, air-conditioning, and many other things that tempted us to remain indoors. But it was also a time before the Internet, before the ubiquity of home computers, before helicopter parents, and before kids owned their own phones. My friends and I, more often than not, left the comforts of home to roam the neighborhood unsupervised to play until dark.

Our rural-suburban dream wouldn’t last forever, though. As my brother and I grew up, Wheatfield’s rural landscape was swiftly changing character. Nearby fields became smothered in asphalt. Forests were hacked down to make way for yet more subdivisions. Between 1990 and 2010, over three thousand housing units were added, and the town’s population increased 39 percent, from eleven thousand to eighteen thousand people.³ It was one of the fastest-growing towns in all of New York State.

My neighborhood expanded like the rest of Wheatfield, and this is just a small sample of what has been happening in America since World War II. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, between 1982 and 2007 forty-one million acres of American forest and farmland were bulldozed,⁴ largely because of urban growth, reducing our country’s forest and farmland by about the size of Wisconsin.

These days in Country Meadows there are no green spaces for kids to explore anymore. There’s no more collecting tadpoles. There are no more woods for building forts, no more ponds for ice-skating. Walk the roads and you’ll see new No Trespassing signs around the remaining woods. The dogs are all safely locked behind electric fences. There are no sidewalks or public trails. The subdivision itself is quiet, gets little traffic, and is good for a stroll. But walkers and cyclists are essentially locked inside a couple of adjacent subdivisions by a surrounding network of noisy and dangerous roads. If you happen to see someone walking or cycling outside of the development on one of these busy streets, you assume that they’re either destitute or crazy.

I begin this book in Wheatfield not because the place is unusual. I begin it in Wheatfield because Wheatfield is so ordinary. Many Americans, whether in cities, suburbs, or even rural areas, lack green places and safe places to walk. Most of our cities and towns have been developed with drivers in mind, not pedestrians. Every year, vehicles kill thousands of Americans out walking. The organization Smart Growth America reported that from 2003 to 2012 more than 47,000 pedestrians were killed (sixteen times the number of Americans killed by tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes combined), and an estimated 676,000 were injured walking along roads.⁵

Our lack of safe and peaceful walking places may contribute to our status as one of the more sedentary countries in the world. In 2010, the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise reported that Americans walked an average of 5,117 steps a day, almost half of what the health community recommends⁶ and far fewer than the averages of the other countries the researchers studied, including Australia (9,695), Switzerland (9,650), and Japan (7,168).⁷ According to a 2012 study by The Lancet, 41 percent of Americans qualify as sedentary for not getting the recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week.⁸ In 2015, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that, among Americans over twenty years old, 71 percent are overweight and 38 percent are obese.⁹

Today, from my family’s front door, there is essentially no practical or scenic place to walk to—no store, no community center, no church, no forest grove, no flowery meadow—so the only walkers are the recreation walkers, and we are far too few. Many of my friends, family, and neighbors have suffered as a result. People I love and care about have weight problems and diseases like type 2 diabetes. The people of my neighborhood are generally civically disengaged and socially isolated. In Country Meadows, I remember one block party from my youth, when one especially sociable family hosted a giant get-together on their lawn, with drinks for the adults and games for the kids. But that was an exception to the rule. Most neighbors don’t talk or even wave hello when passing each other by. My family has lived in this neighborhood since 1989, yet we don’t know the names of our neighbors just two houses down.

Don’t get me wrong: Country Meadows is a good neighborhood. In Country Meadows, there is no crime or gang violence. You don’t have to lock your doors when you leave the house. Kids don’t even smash pumpkins anymore. But just because it’s free of hardship and suffering doesn’t mean that we can’t call for something better—a Country Meadows, perhaps, where everyone has more access to nature, a greater sense of freedom, and better health.

Since graduating from college, I’ve called a number of other places home. I moved to the rolling red-clay hills of the North Carolina Piedmont, where on the roads around me I estimate that three out of every five property owners have posted No Trespassing signs. Barred from these woodlands, walkers are forced to stay on winding, shoulderless roads. We walkers have to keep an eye out for reckless drivers, and we can anticipate a belligerent honk or two. In York County, Nebraska, I lived in between corn and soybean fields, where virtually every foot of green space was devoted to industrial agriculture.

One solution to our walking problems is to design better communities with safe walking in mind. Our country’s leading walking organization, America Walks, is working toward this goal. And books like Jeff Speck’s Walkable City and Suburban Nation discuss how we can design our cities and suburbs better. A pleasant walk to the post office, though, only gets you so far.

A more radical solution—which is the subject of this book—is the right to roam. The right to roam is an American tradition dating back to our nation’s origins, when ordinary folks had the right to walk through privately owned woods and fields, and along the coasts. While this may seem like a vestige of our past, gone forever like the flocks of passenger pigeons whose migrations once darkened our skies, there is reason for hope. In several European countries this freedom has been reborn and is thriving, suggesting that it can be reborn here.

I’ve fallen in love with the right to roam. Maybe it started when I was a boy, when I got to roam my half-built suburb as I wished. Or maybe it was later in life when I took offense at all the No Trespassing signs. Or maybe it was in northern Alaska, where I lived and worked and could walk wherever I wanted. With a map in one hand and a compass in the other, I walked up and over mountain passes of the Brooks Range and along the cobbled banks of the Koyukuk River, where hikers keep an eye out for moose and grizzlies lurking in the spruce forests. I drank freely from streams and rivers, I collected wild blueberries and cranberries, and I got to experience the exhilarating sense of solitude—and the bolstered sense of self-reliance—that comes from a walk alone through wilderness.

After the complete freedom of Alaska, it wasn’t easy coming back to an off-limits landscape. America, to me, suddenly felt like it had too many fences, signs, and rules. So I spent my twenties seeking out our world’s remaining roamable places. For a summer, I canoed across the waterways of Ontario, Canada. I hiked over the Scottish Highlands and down historic English paths. I would go back to Alaska each summer to work as a backcountry park ranger, roaming over the valleys and mountains of the roadless and pathless Gates of the Arctic National Park.

Most notably, in 2012, I embarked on a hiking journey over the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was planned to stretch 1,700 miles over the Great Plains, from Alberta in Canada to the Gulf Coast of